Search Marketing and Crisis Management
A colleague and I spoke at Humber College this week and, in an effort to gear our search marketing presentation towards a PR-focused demographic, we wanted to touch on the impact of search marketing in online reputation management. In recent memory, there are two great examples of high profile brands that incorporated search marketing into their crisis management plans.
Online Reputation Management – BP Paid Search
After the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in April of 2010, BP made the controversial decision to launch a paid search campaign. The result? BP’s messaging was included in the search results for queries relating to “oil spill”.
The controversy surrounded BP’s decision to dedicate money to a marketing plan when there was a massive clean-up effort underway in the gulf. On the other hand, from a brand perspective, this was a brilliant and effective way to make sure branded messaging was appearing to add balance to the negative (though generally factually correct) news results.
Online Reputation Management – Tassimo Organic Search
The contribution that search campaigns can make to crisis management online isn’t limited to paid search.
In early February, upon news of a massive recall of Tassimo coffee makers due to a malfunction that resulted in the burning of eighteen Canadians, many consumers turned to search engines to learn more. Because Tassimo’s website was optimized for organic search, a Google query for ‘Tassimo’ returned all branded or retailer-related content ‘above the fold’.
The benefit of this, beyond the obvious advantage of dominating the organic search results for a branded query, is that the total amount of SERP real estate taken up by Tassimo.com, Tassimodirect.com, etc. had the added effect of pushing the malfunction-related results further down the results page (and onto page 2).
Without a robust organic search presence, the Toronto Star article detailing the malfunction would likely have appeared towards the top of the search results for a “Tassimo” query. At the very least, this listing would have appeared ‘above the fold’.
Conclusion
Search marketing plays a key role in online reputation management. In particular, engaging in paid and organic search can have a significant impact on the results of a crisis management campaign and should be considered by any brand when making business contingency plans for dealing with a public relations crisis.
To learn more about how search marketing can contribute to your online reputation management, visit us at www.outridersearch.ca
