If you’re an advocacy group that is looking to get attention for your cause on the web, then Universal Search gives you a great opening that you can take advantage of, if you’re fast enough! Universal Search is still new enough (having been launched in early June of this year) that most people are unaware of it, and the fact that it’s still in roll-out mode increases the chance that you’re ahead of the game.

Let’s examine how PETA is taking advantage of Universal Search: Their cause is well known, they are an animal rights organization that targets companies that they believe don’t treat animals as they should. An example of a company that’s raised their ire over recent years would be KFC, with PETA disapproving their treatment of chickens. PETA has done a good job of targeting the organic results, with 2 of the top 10 results being sites that they own. With Universal Search, other media results will eventually start to display for KFC, which may push the PETA organic results off the first page. This is why PETA has already begun work on those other media that may display on the first page. If you go to the video search and search on KFC, you’ll see that 3 of the top 4 videos are anti-KFC, with the 2nd and 4th being PETA videos.

This is a serious reputation management issue for KFC, but it’s exactly what PETA wants. By being proactive, they’re ensuring that their message is going to remain visible for KFC searchers.

What about an issue, rather than a company? Well, it’s the same concept. If you look at the example of “Global Warming”, you can see two sets of advocacy groups, those who accept that global warming exists, and those that deny it. Looking at the SERP for Global Warming, you can see that Universal Search has already made it here. Obviously those who accept Gobal Warming are currently ‘winning’ the image search results.

If you perform a video search, you’ll notice that the second video that displays in the SERP is from a denial advocacy group. As those videos are more closely incorporate within the SERPs, you may see that video moving up the rankings until that advocacy group has as loud a voice as those in the image search.

Clearly, the introduction of Universal Search has opened up a great opportunity for advocacy groups to get their message out, and unless the targets of their ire respond in like, by pro-actively creating multiple levels of optimized content, they will find that they have to fight it reactively or their voice in the SERPs may be drowned out and lost.

Filed under: Non-Profits, Reputation Management on Monday, July 30th, 2007 by Simon Heseltine |
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.