How You can use the Search Engines to Fight Bad Press

Hope everyone had a great Gobble Gobble. It’s been getting more fun for us recently. For a while, I was the youngest at our holiday gatherings. Now our extended family has two kids running around and a third that will be next Thanksgiving.

It occurred to me over the long weekend that when discussing OJ and Kramer last week, I wrote about combatting bad press, but I didn’t discuss concrete examples of how to go about doing it.

One of the first things I would do heaven forbid my company or I were in that situation would be to set up a new search engine marketing campaign with all the major search engines so that when someone searched for any related items that described the company, the incident, and myself, an ad would appear. Remember, it’s important to confront the problem head-on. Don’t stick your head in the sand.

Since the ad should be tailored to the incident itself, let’s say a report came out that I was secretly funding the wholesale slaughtering of blind sloth orphans so that I could dine on them for dessert. Whenever someone searched for “Justin Seibert”, “Direct Online Marketing”, “sloth eating”, or any other related terms – especially including the names of prominent tv shows or news articles that reported on the incident – I might put up the following ad:

Sloth Eating
What’s the real truth?
Find out here.
www.SlothEating.com

I purposefully chose to leave out the names of the organization and person so as not to display it for people that hadn’t heard about the story yet and are looking for other information about sloth eating like their dietary habits. I probably, however, would use the names when people searched directly on them.

Also, I set up a new Web site. You could also just use a page on an existing site, but now’s not the time to skimp on $9 Web domain name purchase and $6 per month hosting.

When the person clicked on the ad, he or she would go to my new Web site, which would have a personal message from me either (depending upon the circumstances) apologizing for this tragic mistake or saying that we have been slandered and would just like the real truth to come out. Throw in some lines about press persecution or how you’ve set up a fund to aid the ravaged sloth community and you’re done.

You still should go on the offensive arranging interviews and using other types of advertising media, but paid search marketing should definitely be part of your strategy.

I got bored over the weekend and came up with a lot of great topics this week. Please keep coming back to visit or use our Free RSS feed of the Direct Online Marketing blog. As always, thanks for reading.