I’ve been thinking a lot about online reputation management lately. It used to be that reputation management was all about how to make sure that when someone Google’d your name, good things came up in the top ten search results, and bad things didn’t.
About six months ago, I was interviewed by a reporter who asked me how you could “suppress negative search results on Google.” My answer then was: don’t think about things that way. The Google team earns $20 billion every year by finding and delivering relevant content. Don’t try to trick them, because it won’t work, and most attempts to do so are unethical anyway. Instead, you need to create new content that is more relevant than the content that you don’t like. Take Michael Vick, for example. He was caught killing puppies, which, in this country, is arguably considered more evil and outrageous than killing people. Any PR strategy that involved suppressing those negative news stories would have failed more miserably than BP’s attempts at suppressing the flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico by using trash to plug the hole. Instead of suppressing old stories, Michael Vick became the spokesman for the Humane Society. He created new stories that competed for attention with the old stories.Your focus should always be on creating interesting, relevant content, and positioning your content so that it’s easily discoverable. The technical side of reputation management is still important — you need to understand (as best you can) how Google and other search engines deliver results. But you need to understand the rules so that you can follow them, not so that you can break them. In my next post, I’ll cover how reputation management has changed in the last few years.
PS – I took the photo of the two dogs above (Lexie and Zeus) in Michigan last week. More photos from the trip here.
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Will Marlow is an online marketing and website consultant. You may want to hire him to help you manage your business’s online reputation. He’s also the co-founder of AlumniFidelity, which you should check out if you care about fundraising for schools and nonprofits. Email him at w.b.marlow@gmail.com.
Will, I just got around to reading this post. I work at an organization that has to deal with some negative PR, so I look forward to reading what you have to say next. Do you have any other posts about reputation management?
Let me check my archives — is there any particular aspect of reputation management that you’re most interested in? For example, are you thinking about Google search results, or negative social chatter, or traditional negative PR and news hits?
Specifically Google search results, but also negative social chatter.
I love this advice! We should constantly be re-inventing ourselves. I know my first months of blogging weren’t much to show for, they brought me poor traffic on Google and other social media. But I kept working at it and making myself relevant in new ways.We are always changing regardless if we want to or not, might as well embrace it and take the bull by the horns!
Thanks, Steven — good points!