Some subscribe to the idea that all press is good press or; “there is no such thing as bad press” (of course, some also say, “no news is good news” but that is out of context here).  I never fully understood this belief system, as I cannot think of a situation when it is good for people to speak poorly about you. Sure, you want people to talk, but negative press can put  companies out of business, as quickly as they got in business.

Perhaps it is a generational thing?

I recently turned 32 years old (old man, I know). The web has been around for the larger part of my existence (and all of my adult life). There is an element of permanence that is inherent in the web. This notion is something that moves me to operate in a certain manner, without thinking about it (even though sometimes I fail to proofread my blog posts).

The Web Does Not Forgive

Perhaps there was a time when the media was more merciful. When I think about it, the fact that newspapers are easily discarded, may have contributed to the belief that there is no such thing as bad press. In a world where newspapers play a decreasingly important role, this is no longer the case.

The permanence of the web makes it so, all news is eternal. Furthermore, all news can now be new to various individuals at any given time.

Forgive, but Never Forget

The web is a permanent repository of information. With this fact in mind, reputation management has become more crucial than ever. For every piece of bad press, you (or your brand) require an equal or greater piece of content. Whether it is an explanation of how the mishap occurred, or a promise that it will never happen again-when someone happens upon this negative event, there must be something adjacent that, at the very least, explains what happened.

I recently wrote an article for iMediaconnection which outlines a number of campaigns that I found offensive (I have gotten a lot of feedback that from people saying that some of the cases I presented or simply dumb and boring, not offensive. I will let you be the judge of that).

The article however is, in my opinion, just the beginning of the story. The real story will come a year from now and years after that; when the brands in question have had a chance to make reparations-positive actions greater than the ones that I shot them down for. At that time, I will write another article,

“Brands That Did Wrong, but Made Good”

Let’s face it; search engines can easily make a commodity of a brand. Even when a brand team has done a great job of positioning a product in it’s category, the points of differentiation and emotional connections built for the brand are dissolved due to factors such as discount retailers, aftermarket resellers and endless parity. Smart search marketing can help with this dilemma; however there is still a gaping chasm between the search education of many brand marketers; and the opportunities available to effectively define your brand through search engines.

The above is the number one result on the SERP (search engine results page) for the term, “whirlpool”. If you are a brand manager at Whirlpool, you are probably giving your SEO team a high five for helping secure the number one spot for your brand name (well, it is becoming easier to rank first for your own brand name as the search space matures-the high five may have happened a few years ago).  While it is essential to rank number one for your brand name; it is by no means a win. In fact, the above listing probably does not come close to the actual brands positioning statement outlined by Whirlpool; and I am sure it is not how Whirlpool executives want consumers to connect with the brand.

Why is it that many brand managers do not see search copy as an important touchpoint?

Can you imagine if Whirlpool’s positioning statement read like the search result above;

“Whirlpool makes major appliances for your whole home. Current appliance owners can download appliance literature, contact customer…”

I can only imagine what type of advertising campaigns that would lead to

In stark contrast to the brand message that Whirlpool is conveying in the search result we see above (it is obvious that Whirlpool did not intentionally create the search copy to communicate their core brand message; but in a 15-second-of-fame-world–you are how you are found), they have created this following commercial;

Is it just me, or does this  TV spot communicate something wholly different than the search result above? TV does a better job of conjuring human emotion, but does that mean a brand marketer should simply ignore how they are communicating via text?

The question I have for all of you is, when is it most important for a brand to be effective in its communications?

• When a consumer is actively seeking a brand (search)
• When a consumer is focused on something entirely different (TV Spot)

This may seem like a leading question, and for those of us in digital marketing, the answer may seem obvious; but if the answer is so obvious, why are we still seeing the type of disconnect exemplified in the case above?

Weigh in; I would love to hear your thoughts.

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I just got done reading an article in Ad Age entitled “Google Pricing System Plagues Players Like P&G”. One of the main tenets of the article is, due to the fact that Google’s pricing model was not set up for advertisers to achieve economies of scale, large CPG’s cannot achieve the same type of competitive advantage when buying media from Google and other search engines.

This article also speaks of the branding effect of search engines. Impressions on search engines are still not considered valuable to many marketers, but the ones that do consider impressions valuable (I am included in this camp from time to time) sometimes find themselves in a bit of a pickle. If you are buying search merely for impressions, your click through rate will probably be low and your quality score will be negatively affected. It becomes imperative to write compelling copy, bid on relevant terms and bring users to a relevant landing page; all of which result in a higher click through rate and potentially less impressions.

So far I have demonstrated how Google is making us better marketers by:

• Forcing us to be more strategic
  • We can no longer rely on scale economics alone to get the message across to a large number of people
• Ensuring we write more effective copy
  • Witty taglines don’t always cut it on Google
• Making us be relevant to consumers
  • Need I say more?

Google Is Also Forcing All Of Us To Create Media

Pretend for a moment you are a toothbrush manufacturer. You may say to yourself, “I am not a media producer, and why should I be?” Sure, as a toothbrush manufacturer you have created witty commercials, but you paid your fancy Madison Avenue ad agency millions of dollars to do so, and you cannot afford to do it often.

In the slides below you can see how Oral B decided to fulfill the need for content and it seems to be beneficial. Not only is Oral B able to provide more than one reason to go to their site, their content helps to gain visibility on search engines.

Branded content is all the rage these days, but Google and other engines are forcing brands to create both text based and multimedia content if they want to be discovered, and as a result, marketers are adding more value to their consumers than ever before.

| View | Upload your own

A day or so later I received a very personal email with a sincere apology and an offer. This company creates custom search engines and offered to make me one (I thought that was kind of cool). I turned around and acknowledged their integrity and would like to share their official apology:

Three days ago we experienced a critical technical problem with our hosting company. One of the mail servers kept running a script which resulted with some people receiving a huge amount of emails form Joongel.

We are extremely sorry for all the inconvenience caused. We didn’t mean to cause any harm to anybody.

We have found out what was the problem and fixed it. Our hosting company caused
us a lot of damage and we will make sure this will never happen again.

Please accept our sincere apology.

Dror Ceder
Co-founder

In case you have not guessed it, the company is Joongel.

Now, I want to be clear. This is not an invite for people to go out and annoy people and apologize in hopes of getting a loving blog post, but in this case I think Joongel is doing a good job of cleaning up their mess and I appreciate it, therefore I am helping them out.

I will be putting up a badge so you can try out the official A Mediacirc.US search bar. I would love some feedback (I am sure Joongel would love it too)