Online Reputation Management: United Misses the Flight on SEO and Paid Search
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Written By Noah Mallin | September 11, 2008 | Share This
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Yesterday I blogged about some of the big themes around the recent United Airlines stock selloff and the old bankruptcy news article that sparked it, all while working in a charming Western-themed metaphor. Today, I want to touch on just the reputation management aspect of the story through paid search and SEO which I think remains unexplored – until now.
Just to recap briefly, early in the week the Florida Sun Sentinel’s website belched a 2002 story about United Airlines declaring bankruptcy onto its most viewed page when some sort of lonely bankruptcy buff clicked on it at a low-traffic time. The Googlebot scraped the story and in part because of the Sun Sentinel’s bad SEO sent it along to Google News as fresh where it proceeded to wend its way to Wall Street via Bloomberg where it tanked United’s stock 75% before trading was halted.
While blame has been sprinkled around by me and others on such deserving targets as Bloomberg, Google, the Sun Sentinel, and people who have nothing better to do at 3 AM on a Saturday than to look up old stories about airline bankruptcies I haven’t seen anyone touch on what United could have done differently.
“Like what?” you may be asking your computer screen. In which case I feel bad for you because it’s just a screen dummy, but I’ll tell you the answer anyway. United Airlines sent out spokespeople and issued statements and did all the things you are supposed to do traditionally to meet a crisis head on but they didn’t address the source and platform for the false story to spread - the Internet.
You can be sure that a lot of confused investors turned to search engines like Google, Live and Yahoo! to determine the accuracy of the initial reports and the denials that followed. What they would have seen was a hodge-podge of stories with United’s response very much lost in the shuffle.
Had United thrown up a quick custom landing page to host their statement and ran some paid search ads against keywords like “United bankruptcy” and “UAL bankrupt” they could have had a presence right at the top of results. Even without people having to click through a simple ad that read “United Airlines bankruptcy story false – see the truth” with a company URL underneath would have sent an effective counter-message. More importantly this could all be up and running in a matter of minutes if they already have an existing search campaign. Even starting from scratch they could have been up and running in a few hours.
About that statement – I used to work for Business Wire and I know that when it comes to PR old habits die hard but in this day and age it simply isn’t enough to respond to a crisis with a headline like this one: “United Airlines Issues Statement.” On what? While members of the media (though this is doubtful) and investors glued to UAL’s Yahoo news page might take the time to dig into the release, search engines are helped by an optimized headline. From this one they know that it’s a statement from United Airlines. Period. Even though the false bankruptcy story is mentioned inside the release many other news sources have it in their headline and continue to swamp the press release in relevant searches.
This is magnified by the news section of United’s website. The release itself is buried amongst all of the other information there, its headline made even more indistinguishable by its surroundings. Throwing up a special optimized section to highlight their response and statement would have been a great way to get their side of the story out to the searchbots and people alike. It’s not enough to optimize your main page for search – SEO needs to follow through every page of a website and every page of content within it.
United missed an opportunity to gain more control over this story early by not bringing the most sophisticated techniques to their online crisis response. Optimizing their news page, their press release and running a quick paid search campaign should be the norm, not the exception to the rule when bad news rears its head.
Topics: Advertising: Online, Google, Legal Issues, Publishing, SEM: Paid Search, SEO, Search: How-To, Search: News |
Interesting twist. Now, all companies with bad finances need to hire a SEO expert so that they can push their propaganda. While United did not learn a lesson here, you can be sure that a lot of the “money managment” firms which do not produce any real product, will be quick to make sure that their press releases trump out any other news. Obviously noone is to blame but the mentality of “follow the herd” in the markets - which is quite well established.
[…] negative examples of badly managed brand reputation online I referenced earlier, you can check out this post, this post, and of course this post, with some good tips on this […]