How can I get rid of bad press?

Bad press, articles and blog posts that are not helping our brand or comments that will damage our reputation online and offline are the main concerns of every newcomer to Social Media. Have it ever happened to you or have you ever seen this happening to somebody you know? How can we tackle these situations? In my professional life I was dealing with bad press in several cases. The good news is that whatever happened, even if we do nothing in time it will go away. Most of the times we cannot afford to wait until it goes away so here is how we can speed up this process and turn it into an opportunity.

From a pure technical point you have to choices, either ask the person who published the article to take it down (if he wants and you agree with the price) or you can sweep that article under the carpet. In the last situation you need to create and promote other articles so that Google or other search engines will list the neutral or good articles first and the one you  are concerned about will stay under the radar and will appear after the 3rd page of search results.

In most of the cases the first option is not available so we need to use the second one. Here are 5 steps we have to do in this case:

1. Determine the words for which the bad press article was indexed and appear in search results in the first 3 pages.

2. Identify content that rank worse than the bad press article but it’s ranking can be improved with some simple SEO

3. Create content that is optimized for those words

4. Post the newly created content on highly influential sites

5. Digg, StumbleUpon or tweet the articles above

For example if a prominent blogger writes about your site that is not updated (which may be true) and your business is a scam (which for sure is not true) here is what I suggest to do:

1. Comment on the blog post, apologizing for what happened, thanking the blogger for the free site review, asking him about tips how she/he thinks you can improve your site and offer a free sample of your services or products for the blogger so she/he can be fully informed about your business.

2. Take this opportunity and improve your site based on the feedback obtained. Post the improvements to your blog.

3. Determine the words for which her/his blog post rank in search. For sure your business name will be one of those.

4. Look in the search results which articles rank lower than that article. Go to your account in social bookmarking sites and bookmark those articles. Also promote those articles on Twitter and Facebook and ask your friends to re-tweet them. Link your site with those articles. In this way some of those articles may rank better than the bad press blog post.

5. Create your own articles. You should create at least one of the following: a video about your business, a presentation on your business, articles about your business and interviews with some clients telling about their experience with your product or service.

6. Post the articles, videos and presentations with prominent sites. For example put your vide on YouTube and Vimeo and tag it with the keywords identified at point 2. Do the same with your presentation when you post it to SlideShare and Google presentations. Optimize the articles you write for the words you want to rank higher.

7. Create a Google profile of you and one for your business, create profiles on social networks (the more the better)

8. Bookmark your articles, videos, presentations and interviews in social bookmarking sites. Ask your friends to do the same. The more the better.

9. See who you know and who can be your ally. Offer to give interviews to prominent bloggers and newsites in your niche.

By this time you already have contained the crisis and things look a lot better.

Have you ever had a bad comment or bad press? I would love to hear about your experiences. What do you think is missing from my list above?

Photo credits: striatic