Marketing in the Age of Google: Your Online Strategy IS Your Business Strategy, Revised and Updated

ONLINE REPUTATION MANAGEMENT

If you’ve been around for any length of time, it’s likely that someone out there doesn’t like you. If you’re absent from search, it could be your detractor’s site that shows up when potential customers search for you. Generally, there’s not much you can do about this. Search engines such as Google merely index the Web and don’t evaluate the contents for lack of criticism or even truthfulness.

But if your brand has positive mentions throughout the Web via social media sites, press, and other avenues, those mentions could rank highly and push negative mentions of your brand lower in the search results, decreasing chances that searchers even see them.

For instance, Seattle patent lawyer Adam Philipp has been able to ensure the entire first page of search results for his name are positive by completing social network profiles that rank well and taking advantage of YouTube video (not that I’m implying any negative results for his name exist, of course). See Figure 9.2.

Figure 9.2 Social Media Sites in Search Results

Source: Google Search

As you can see, the first (and fairly easy) step is just to make sure that you have a presence on relevant social networks so that your profile from those locations is available to show up in relevant search results.

Lessons from the TSA

We can see this in action with an incident involving the U.S. Transportation Security ...