Vice president for digital media at Fleishman-Hillard, Scott Rhodie, says another strategy is to act pre-emptively.
“I would also suggest that the company looks to blog more or create content to enable them to ensure their content is higher in the rankings than the negative feedback,” Rhodie says.
At his previous role in London at Microsoft’s online media business MSN, Gain says the organisation would set up ‘dark sites’ that could be activated should a crisis occur.
“The worst case scenario for us was a child being contacted by somebody that shouldn’t have,” Gain says.
“So we had pages ready that could be turned on at a moment’s notice and be customised very quickly for the issue. All organisations should have that ready to go so they can transform their homepage into that quickly, because trying to find a web developer and get something turned around in a crisis is going to tough.”
If negative material has been published, there is little a company can directly do about it. Google will not remove links to negative material remove from its search listings. A company spokesperson recommended that the offended party should first control the webmaster of the site hosting the content and ask to have it removed. Once the material has been taken down, and that site has been reindexed by Google, the offending material should no longer appear within its index.
This is easier in theory than in practice however. Often offending content is hosted in foreign jurisdictions, or the owners of the sites may be difficult to contact. Requesting a takedown or calling in legal assistance may also antagonise the offending publishers, leading to more articles or more people linking to the offending content, which will then increase its ranking in Google’s index. And online material has a habit of quickly spreading from one site to another, as numerous Australian footballers have discovered.
In the US, online publishers are protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which holds that content which is contributed to user-generated content sites like Twitter or the personal reputation site Honestly.com is not the speech of the site, but instead is the speech of the person using the site. This can again make it difficult to have content removed when the site publishing it cannot legally be compelled to do so.
While in 2010 Nestle brought in the lawyers to force Greenpeace to remove a video accusing it of using palm oil from deforested areas of Indonesia, Gain believes it should always be the last recourse.
“You’ve seen time and time again, when organisations use legal power to have things removed that they don’t like, then it always blows up in their face,” Gain says.
“If what was being written online was incorrect, and misleading, and you had attempted to engage with the person that created it, then you’ve got an avenue to engage in legal activity. If what they have up there is correct and you just don’t like it, going on a legal course is not the way to do it.”
Faced with little recourse, people are increasingly turning to dedicated services such as US companies Reputation Hawk, and ReputationDefender, that later of which promote services including defending you against attacks, rumours and distortions online.
Its MyEdge Pro product claims to suppress negative content online and actively combat false, misleading or irrelevant Google results for businesses and business owners through tools including optimising online information and its appearance in search engines and using PR techniques to de-emphasise existing web content.
Smith says he does not believe in burying results.
“It’s too hard to do for a reasonable amount of money,” he says.
“If companies have a strong social media presence then the most relevant and trustworthy information will rise to the top. With negative articles that do outrank your own articles, you need to strengthen your search engine optimisation strategy.”
James was the editor and publisher of SmartCompany and LeadingCompany for five years. He is now the Australian Financial Review‘s companies & markets editor, and a former BRW editor.
