Handling Bad Press - Part 1

One of my clients recently had some bad press associated with their company name.  As a Corporate Career Transition company, and one of the largest in the U.S., this was quite damaging, as any sensible prospect would check out the reputation of such a company before forking over $6K for career marketing services.

In cases where a business holds extreme value in having clean Search Engine results on its name, there are only so many things that can be done.  This is the 1st part of 3 ways to mitigate bad press on search engines.

#1 Press Release - The 1st way to handle bad press is to issue your own good press.  This is fairly easy to do.  Here are some steps to follow.

1. Keep it Real - Your press release needs to give a real message that people are interested in.  Ideally it should in someway address the bad press the same audience may see.  Content is King, even in a press release.
2. Drive ‘em in the Right Direction - Make sure your press release links back to your own site or a special landing site.  This will increase the chances of leads, especially important for those who might go back to the search engines and find the bad press.
3. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Since this is going on the web and is to be found on search engines, preferably higher than the bad press, the release must be optimized for search engines.  For this, call your SEO expert and make sure they have press release experience.
4. Release to the Best - Release your press to press release companies.  You can look at the prices and determine what it worth to you, although some are free. If a lot of money is a stake, you will want to consider a specialist agency that can handle the release for you. At the time of righting this entry, these services would get a well SEO press release up high on engines.

• www.free-news-release.com
• http://www.pr9.net
• http://www.send2press.com     
• http://www.theopenpress.com
• http://www.findarticles.com

You need to know that Press Releases are only a short term solution.  They will fill up the results on page one of a search engines' results page for a while (and there is no guarantee that the bad press will be crowded off the 1st page, or even off the top 4 results), but not for very long.  You should use this time to come up with a longer term strategy.  2 more ways (and perhaps more) will be discussed later in parts 2 & 3 of "Handling Bad Press".

 

Comments

[Shirley Burling]

As long as you can handle the bad press then it is possibe to use it to your advantage. In fact I think bad press can be easier to remember!

I use glyphius to enance all of my press releses so that they get picked up by everybody.