At my previous employer, I worked with a gentleman who had been employed by the NRA. He was full of interesting stories, but we’ll return to that at the end of this post.

Earlier this year, I was working on a Search Audit for one of our clients. As is usually done, I took a look at the search results for their brand.

Not bad… not bad indeed. They had plenty of content across multiple sites that had enabled them to lock up the top 20 listings on Google. This particular client also used their 3 letter acronym for branding purposes, which required me to do another search.

So, what did those results tell me? They were a lot different from the branded results. While they did have two top spots and another top 10 listing, the rest were for other completely unrelated sites such as Russian towns, Central American peninsulas, medical conditions, other organizations, and so forth.

Another client of ours is named for a very common word and as you may imagine, they want to naturally rank for that. The word isn’t related to their business, so they don’t have like competition for that word. But, they do have competition from rappers, movies, cultural phenomenons, etc. who also want to / naturally rank for it.

Where am I heading with this? Well, on Friday night, I was reading the latest news through my RSS feed reader and came across an article which discussed how PEPCO had shut off power to 15 million people.

Wow, I thought. I had no idea that PEPCO (Potomac Electric Power Company) had so many customers - after all, they’re only in DC and some counties in Maryland. 15 million people seemed like a heck of a lot more than it should have been. So, rather than just skimming words, I went back to the article and read it completely. I then found out that the article referred to the Pakistan Electric Power Company (PEPCO) who had shut power off to the biggest Pakistani city - Karachi.

This got me thinking. The blackout was reported by major media all around the world. A search on Google news for PEPCO had these negative articles displaying first. Luckily for the DC-based PEPCO, the titles of the displayed articles clearly stated that it was a Pakistani issue, not a Potomac one. But, all it takes is a major, ambiguously titled article for PEPCO to have a potential Reputation Management issue that has nothing to do with them - but at a glance, may appear to.

You may think that my 3 letter acronym company from the second paragraph should be safe from this issue - as the other listings that rank for their name are all in different fields. That’s most likely true, but what if one of the other firms that shares the acronym has financial issues and the news is reported just using the acronym? That could be a problem.

So, what is the solution? Well, you can’t really respond to something that’s about a different organization, except to maybe ask whomever is ranking with the negative listing(s) to please clarify the specific entity they’re writing about.

Suddenly, this can become your problem. Therefore, quickly get great content assets out on the web to take up shelf space - forcing the negative listings away from the immediate view (first below the fold, then off the first page).

For the other client I mentioned, the one ranking for the common word should be less of an issue as it’ll be difficult for a story to break for that singular word.

Ok, so now we’re at the end of this post. Let’s return to my former co-worker who, if you’ll remember, previously worked for the NRA. Hands up if you thought he was a gun advocate… nope. He worked for the National Restaurant Association.

See how easy it is to grab hold of the wrong end of the reputation stick.

Filed under: Reputation Management, SEO on Monday, March 10th, 2008 by Simon Heseltine |
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