Public relations consultant /blog

‘…too many companies dismiss some of these sites as “just being done by crackpots”. As far as a Google search is concerned, this does not matter…’ – Niall Cook, Hill & Knowlton

PR Week’s written in earnest about the dangers of the online equivalent of bad press riding high in search engine results. They’ve attached some rather useless jargon to efforts to deal with the phenomenon: Search Engine Reputation Management (SERM). This wouldn’t be so bad, if there was a hint of a solution, but this is a scare piece: ‘You can’t delete history online. Google is almost like a person’s medical report – it will always be there, you can’t erase it’. Nonsense.

And even Google’s been Googled, we’re told: a journalist used Google to find personal info on their CEO and (with the right search terms) it’s easy to find out how they did it. There is some rather dodgy advice (‘embedding of coded words into web pages, sending sites hurtling up Google results lists’) which is more likely to see a website removed from Google altogether. Oh dear.

We’re fretting over blogs again… and the analysis is naïve at best. That’s not to say bad news won’t be prominent in search results (remember Kensington Locks?) but that ‘you can’t erase it’ claim is untrue. Web pages are edited and deleted all the time. Many blogs are quickly abandoned and deleted.

But there is something much bigger going on. If the web appears biased against you, it probably is and the chances are you only have yourself to blame. The answer is to engage with those (ex-)customers who’ve gone to all the effort of publishing bad news stories about you and to engage with the wider internet by creating positive content of your own. The best way to do that is to start blogging yourself.
Contact Stephen Newton

Posted at : October 4th, 2005 - 9:12 am
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