The news release in question came from a company called PressReleasePros.com, which is pitching a way of using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) "to bury negative blog postings" about a client's company. So if your company has been the object of ridicule by a blogger, or perhaps deserved criticism, the brain trust at PressReleasePros.com is presumably going to show you how to prevent people from finding those blog entries.
Sometimes you get bad press and negative posts. Sometimes it is because your company messed up and deserved it; sometimes it’s because someone has an ax to grind. In either case it is possible to improve the results, and putting out press releases on one of the established wire services is PART of the solution.
The first rule of social media is to make friends before you need them. That is why I encourage employee blogging. The collective power of your employee’s blogs will give you a cushion when bad news breaks.
You should also encourage your subcontractors to blog and link to their blogs from your corporate site. That will create a constellation within blogosphere that revolves around your company.
When bad news breaks you should begin by addressing the basics of corporate reputation repair: acknowledge the problem and address the public's legitimate concern, and take corrective action. Without the basics, nothing else will work.
Having addressed the basic issue, putting out favorable press releases on wire services will give your search results a bump. Don’t instruct your employee bloggers to link to those press releases (that will just make their blogs boring and no one will read them) but make sure your employees know about them.
Employees should be encouraged to use social tagging sites such as del.icio.us to tag positive news stories (stories running in actual news publications rather than press releases on wire services) in order to give them a bump. The purpose of this is not merely to increase the visibility of such stories to search engines, but also to give a bump in page views for the reporter and publication concerned. Publications will be more likely to write about your company if they know they can attract additional reader traffic.
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