Is Make a Wish bankrupt?  Is that really true?  Yahoo suggests it, and those suggestions are based on actual search volumes, so there must be a groundswell of people who believe it to be true…

Unless, of course, a popular site such as The Onion put out a parody story about a kid who wished for as many wishes as he could have, which bankrupted the Make a Wish Foundation…

As if non-profits don’t have enough to concern themselves with - with various watchdog organizations, news organizations looking for that Pulitzer winning expose, etc.  Now, they have to look to fictional issues. 

Search engines don’t necessarily know what’s real and what isn’t, although contextually they should be able to know what is relevant to the query.  But for Make a Wish, that bankruptcy story doesn’t rank, yet it still gets billing both above and below the fold as part of the suggestions tool.

This brand confusion is the reason that the United Nations asked the producers of Doctor Who to rename the branch of the armed forces that the doctor sometimes interacts with from “United Nations Intelligence Taskforce” to something else.  This name had been used throughout the 1970’s & 80’s with no problems.  But now, in this internet age, they recognized that it could impact their reputation where articles on the United Nations fighting off alien menaces began ranking for their name.  From 2006, UNIT became known as the “UNified Intelligence Taskforce.”

So, fiction becomes another potential source of reputation management issues for non-profits.  Being proactive, like the UN, and removing the issue before it becomes one can allay any potential hit that your organization would take.  But, when something like the Onion, or a Saturday Night Live sketch takes aim at you, you’ve got to make sure that you already own your shelf space and are ready to respond in whatever fashion you need to. (Maybe a PPC response from Make a Wish on Yahoo will assuage any concerns that a searcher may have when they see that suggestion.)

Of course, if your organization has made it big enough to be parodied in a national forum, or be shown on a hit multi-national TV show to be earth’s last defence against alien invasion, then maybe it’s not too bad a problem.

Filed under: Non-Profits, Reputation Management on Monday, May 12th, 2008 by Simon Heseltine |
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