SEM: You Say Tomato, I Say Disaster – Crisis Management and Search
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Written By Noah Mallin | June 11, 2008 | Share This
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Who would have thought that the least healthy thing on McDonald’s menus might end up being the tomatoes? Certainly not Mickey D’s, which ended up on the griddle during this week’s tomato scare.
Check out the peak in search volume on Google Trends for “Tomato Scare” (my new favorite fake band name btw) and “Tomatoes” between June 8th and June 10th:
At yesterday’s Conversational Marketing Summit tomato fear (if not loathing) was Topic A as panel moderator and Federated Media CEO John Battelle plugged “Tomato Scare” into Google’s search field. The result? Lots of news stories, many specifically mentioning McDonald’s. What was missing were results that reflected the message of the affected retailers. Take a look at the peak in news references on Google Trends for the June 8-10th period for our two tomato terms:
SearchViews specifically explored the role of contextual ads in a crisis last year when Peter Hershberg, Managing Partner of Reprise Media blogged about a New York City KFC/Taco Bell. This cursed local outlet was swarmed by an army of marauding rats and not much later, by an avalanche of bad press that affected Yum Brands.
“…when responding to negative criticism, start with the publisher pages. Consider the number of major media sites like NYTimes.com and Huffington that use AdSense to monetize their pages. By including contextual ads in a damage control campaign, marketers can feature their side of the story alongside an article that’s likely to be critical of the company. More importantly, this can be done at the same speed at which the story is likely to travel.”
Companies are starting to understand the core importance of integrating their paid and organic search marketing and aligning this with their offline advertising and public relations initiatives. Unfortunately all too often, as in the case of McDonald’s, they don’t envision how this extends to responding to a crisis where the speed and convenience of the Internet translates into a surge of interested users.
Topics: Advertising: Contextual, Advertising: Online, Blogging, Conferences & Events, Google, Reprise Media, SEM: Paid Search, Search: How-To, Social Media |
[…] We reported a while back on McDonald’s (and others) missing the marketing boat on the Great Tomato Scare of ’08. Turns out the savvy marketers at Hunt’s ketchup were paying attention and responded with some fine opoortunistic search advertising (see below): […]