Your Google is dirty... better wash it!

Google Washing? Kind of sounds dirty. Well, actually it is, but not in the way you think.

With the web’s presence being all-encompassing in the world of media relations and brand management, Google has become the spy scope for companies to check out the conversations going on about their brand. It can be kind of scary to type a Google search about your company and see a big dirty mark come up in the search returns. “I HATE BRAND X” (Wal-Mart knows what I’m talking about…) This is where Google washing enters. Wikipedia’s “Google bomb” entry has described Google washing as: “the use of media manipulation to change the perception of a term, or push out competition from search engine results pages.”

Branding (like was just discussed with rather heated passion by the fabulous Libby and Erin) is still a very important staple of companies. Branding also matters a lot to public relations professionals. Public relations is not just about typing up press releases and feverishly pitching them to the media world. A large part of our job is brand management. What are people saying about the brand? How can we spark good conversation about the brand? How can we even get people to BEGIN talking about the brand? And Google is a big part of this.

When a company Googles their brand, the last thing they want to see is a negative hit in the “Golden Triangle” of the search. While your first hit may be your own website, if the next few are “I hate Brand X” sites or blog posts, you may be in some trouble. Normally, this would be a public relations job. We would say, “OK, Let’s get going and start building good press, good conversations, and bring the brand back up in the good graces of Google searchers everywhere,” because that’s our job, and (hopefully) we are good at it. However, a new service is offering a shortcut option for many companies, and some are biting the bait. This new service is called “Online Reputation Management.”

Basically what some of these services do is pile on new materials to bury the old and “dirty” search terms, therefore cleansing your Google search of all the negativity. Sort of like fung shui for Google, I suppose. The problem is this: you didn’t get RID of this negative buzz, you just buried it and are now hoping it will not resurface. Personally, I feel that’s a lazy way of dealing with negative brand associations. Andy Beal, a marketing consultant quoted in a Business Week article, puts it perfectly: “They're not necessarily interested in trying to fix the problem. They just want to make sure that other people can't find it.”
Web 2.0 has become all about conversations. If brands don’t engage in conversations there isn’t much they can do to improve their image. Companies might find that some of the negative buzz they address may spark new ideas to make the brand more exciting than it was before. But if they let reputation management services do their thing, they may just be burying those ideas along with the negative buzz.