Cameron Olthuis

Chris, from 97th Floor did some nice research on the Google results for Fortune 100 companies. He found that 29 of these 100 companies have at least one negative result that shows up on the first page of Google when you search the brand name.

That’s a pretty pathetic statistic if you are one of these companies. There’s really no excuse for any of these guys not to have a perfect 10 on their results. Like Chris, I’m surprised more companies aren’t doing something to fix this.

I spoke at OMMA last week on a panel about social media sites affecting search results. One of the points I really tried to get across was that brands need to be doing more reputation management to control their search results. My point was that social media sites have a lot of authority in the SERPs so all that user generated content has a better chance on making it’s way to the top.

I used Comcast for an example because the night before when I googled their name two negative results showed up, both from social media. Coincedently those results are now gone from the first page, maybe someone from Comcast was in the audience.

** BTW - Serph is out of beta so you now you can catch your Google top 10 before it’s a problem.

Update: Last.fm’s chart looks good…

Last year I wrote a couple of posts on how getting on TechCrunch isn’t a viable marketing plan. While a TechCrunch write up can certainly be a great kick-start to your marketing campaign, by no means is that traffic spike alone going to make your company a success.

A good comparison would be getting on the homepage of Digg. They will both result in a huge spike in traffic, attention from key people, a few sign ups, and a bunch of links from other bloggers but the problem is that after a few days you’re back where you started. Ok, so maybe you have a little more traction but it won’t be enough so you need to keep moving forward. Unless you have a solid PR strategy and this will be an ongoing campaign you need to have a more well rounded marketing strategy, one that results in a graph that is up and to the right, not spikes.

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