Have You Searched Your Brand Recently? (And Did You Do Anything About What You Found?)

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Yesterday I noticed this little blurb on The Atlantic’s Politics blog:

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Now, if I were an average person hoping to learn a little bit more about Rick Santorum (let’s just assume that I wasn’t aware of his fraught political past), my next step might just be to do a little research on the good old Internet. So I’m off to Google...doo do doo... Where I type in “Santorum” ‘cause, hey, I like to know who’s running for president—or even thinking about it.

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Holy moly! Egad! Dear Lord! I won’t bother to quote from the very first hit on Google—I’m assuming if you made it this far, you’re capable of reading it yourself—but, um, yeah, that’s 1) gross, to say the least, 2) so not what I was expecting to find when I googled the name of a potential presidential candidate, and 3), assuming you’re wired like me, so compelling that I now have to click through and find out why, on the page that’s supposed to be leading me to presidential discovery, at least four are the kind of results I’d expect from a very different kind of search. 

Of course, clicking through will pretty quickly help me understand that the “santorum” is the brainchild of sex columnist Dan Savage and his readers, who were none too pleased by the then-senator’s anti-gay stance, which linked homosexuality to incest, polygamy, and zoophilia (aka sex with animals).  And, boy, oh boy, were they successful.  I would imagine that to anyone under a certain age, Santorum slips in right alongside Carl and trombone for words that can pretty quickly take one down a particular associative path.

So the real question is, how the heck did Santorum—and his people—ever let this happen?!  I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m delighted that they did, but isn’t this Online Crisis Management 101?  Wouldn’t someone have had the common sense to organize some grassroots efforts to knock those less-than-ideal links off the first page of Google?   Because—and I realize I’ve neglected to mention this additional little nugget—this all blew up in 2004.  2004!  They have had five (5!) years to do something about it.  And at least some of those years, Santorum has to have been contemplating a run for the presidency.  I can only say, oy…

Fortunately, the egregiousness of the Santorum case offers some lessons—especially about online marketing, social media, etc.—for the rest of us:

Listen.  Okay, I don’t even know why I have to say this, but we see it all the time:  People are incredibly motivated to talk about themselves, blog about their interests, look for followers, make “friends,” but they’re not all that concerned about what other people are saying.  There is nothing more important in public relations, in social media, in any sort of brand preservation and creation than knowing what people are saying about you, your issues, your product, even your competitors.  You need to be out there listening so that when the crisis arises—and it will, at some point—you're prepared to nip it in the bud, head it off at the pass, and put out fires before they get out of control.

Build Relationships.   Dan Savage engages with his readers and listeners, he’s funny, he’s honest, and his fans feel like he’s a real guy who connects with them and their lives.  He doesn’t just talk at them.  So when Dan decided to have a little fun at the hate-mongering Santorum’s expense by launching a friendly competition to see who could come up with the filthiest faux definition for “santorum,” they laughed.  They got involved.  They delivered.  And the gay community, the people who listen to his show and read his columns, teens and twenty-somethings (and apparently lots of post-twenty-somethings) who like things that are funny, dirty, and a little insider-ish were happy to spread the word.

Know Your Audience.  It’s clear that Dan Savage did.  But it’s not so clear that Rick Santorum did.  At the time, Santorum was a senator.  Of a big state.  With a relatively moderate voting history.  Sure, they had voted him into office on his conservative platform, but statistically, it was safe to assume that only a minority of voters shared his extreme views.  Democratic and Republican Senators frequently fall into more moderate, compromising lines once they are elected to office not because they lose their convictions, but because they recognize the challenges of representing a multifarious constituency in a complex and diverse country.  Rick Santorum is perfectly within his rights to pursue an extreme path, but he couldn’t expect Pennsylvanians to follow.  Which might explain why there wasn’t a strong voice countering Savage and his audience through websites, blogs, and discussions that outweighed or, at the very least, balanced out the “santorum” voices.

Own Your Name.  It takes work, it takes involvement, it takes pr, it takes content creation… you get the picture.  You need to be out there driving the discussion, making the news, owning the keywords that relate to you and, above all, owning your own name.  Sure, the occasional piece of negative publicity or a critical website, article or post might creep into those top ten search results, but if you’re consistently shaping, generating, and driving the conversation, it’s only going to carry so much weight.  Check out other lightning rods for criticism like Hillary Clinton or Rush Limbaugh.  You know people are saying lots of nasty things about them, and yet somehow they still manage to control the top spots in search.

When All Else Fails, Triage.  So you let things get away from you.  While busy managing one crisis, you didn’t see another brewing.  Your team was too busy developing strategy to think about the external face of your brand.  You simply weren’t listening.  It’s time to take the horse by the reins and get things under control.  First things first…  Look at your own website.  How frequently are you updating it?  Are you giving people a reason to go there?  Are you building your relationships with your supporters so that they’ll drive traffic to your site?  Are you creating fresh, readable, informative content that people will make people return to your site regularly to see what’s going?  If not, it’s time make that a priority.  Next, think about enlisting the help of your enthusiasts, supporters and target audience.  By tapping into this community, you build your audience and shift the conversation.  Finally, if you need more help, hire an SEO firm, get a better publicist, enlist the help of marketing strategists who know this stuff.  Do you really think other people aren’t fighting off criticism too?   And for goodness’ sake, don’t let five years pass before you get started!