Social Media & SEO: You've got it whether you want it or not

By Rich Devine | 0 Comments | Posted in | Permalink

When we talk about media strategy with clients, it’s helpful for us to categorize media into three buckets: Bought Media (Display, Email, Paid Search, etc.), Owned Media (Web-sites, landing pages, etc.), and Earned Media (SEO, Social Media)

The first media types, Bought and Owned are generally controllable – Earned Media, while manageable, is NOT controllable. Whether your business has a deliberate strategy for Earned Media or not – your business may still have a presence.

Perfect Example: Dominos Pizza.

Remember last April when an unfortunate viral video was distributed through YouTube and elsewhere that exposed some subpar food preparation practices? Dominos employees Kristy and Michael filmed themselves doing some rather non-appetizing things to the food prior to serving it to customers. The Consumerist has a nice write up of the incident.

It’s an excellent example of the viral impact of social media, whether intended or not, and how social media relates to SEO.  Shortly after Kristy and Michael uploaded their video to YouTube, it was being spread around the web at one of the faster rates recorded for viral content.  On its first day, over 1 million people viewed the video – even before news stations started running the story.

The larger-scale effects of the video were seen shortly after the story was reported on the nightly news and in newspapers across the country.  The video had such a negative impact on Dominos that a search for their company name at the time returned one result for official Dominos site, followed by a long list of pages of bad press – including the actual video content related to Kristy & Michael’s food-prep adventures. 

 

Prior to the incident, Dominos did not have a concerted earned media strategy. This was evidenced by their lack of saturation in search engine results pages (SERPS).  Having a high SERP saturation not only allows corporations to control the messaging for their brand, but it also helps engage your brand with customers who have expressed some degree of intent or interest. 

To their credit, Dominos’ reactive handling of the event was well-executed.  They started out by posting a reply to the original video right on YouTube.  Instead of burying their response in a press release that hardly anybody would see, or buying a full page ad in the New York Times, Dominos took their response to where the discussion started and was still taking place.  They also created a Twitter account and hired someone to monitor Twitter and answer questions from anybody who would ask.

These were all the right things to do, but the fallout could have been managed with less negative exposure had Dominos established an earned media presence prior to the video incident.  If they had an already established presence, a search for “Dominos” would have shown fewer negative news pages and more of their Twitter account, Facebook page, YouTube videos, and other pages.  They could have achieved a much quicker response addressing the issue using SEO results as well.

Conclusion:
The example above illustrates the importance of using earned media for reputation management. And while PR crises may be rare -- earned media channels like SEO and Social Media are still critical for establishing your brand, engaging with customers, and driving business performance.

Understand that social media has converged benefit as an important SEO driver as well.  A good social media offering can benefit your SEO position by increasing exposure in search results, building relevant inbound links (Dominos has 16,300 links to the rebuttal video for the allegations), helping control brand perception, and increasing universal search presence.

Earned media isn’t necessarily the most appropriate channel for broadcasting or advertising – but it does provide a highly effective and efficient way to listen and engage with customers and audiences. Social and SEO should be an essential, ongoing part of an Earned Media campaign -- rather than an afterthought or a reaction to a crisis.  

Authors:

Rich Devine (richd@zaaz.com)

Ryan Jones (ryanj@zaaz.com)
Justin Schoen (justins@zaaz.com)