TJ Walker breaks down the 2011 UC Davis pepper-spray incident, where the university spent $175,000 on PR firms trying to bury the viral video in search results and failed. He argues that creating good content beats fighting the algorithm, and asks viewers about their experiences with reputation management services.
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Crisis communications. How do you go from a bad situation to making it even worse?
Speaking the show about effective speaking in public to the media, at work and in life. Speaking with TJ Walker.
So here's the situation. The University of California Davis had an incident. This is back in 2011, November. A police officer pepper sprayed a student who was sitting in the quad. And there as a part of a Protestant. This became a video. It went viral. I certainly remember it. You may have remembered it as well. Here's the problem. That video became the first thing that popped up in Google search results if you typed in University of California Davis or UC Davis, and it became a real image problem for them. And the university officials there, as any university would do, was concerned about this black mark, this pock on their reputation. They wanted to try to improve it. Very sympathetic to that. I can understand that. But here's what they did. They paid two different public relations firms to try to change the search engine results. There is a whole black magic and art to what shows up in Google and trying to get certain positive stories about yourself, positive videos to show up higher in search engine results. So the university, again, it's a public university. So at some level, this is all public money, taxpayer money, spent nearly $200,000, $175,000 to two separate public relations firms. And this was done through the Chancellor, Linda Cataci, I believe is her name. This is reported as reported by the Sacramento Bee. One of the firms, Nevins and Associates based in Maryland, did all sorts of things and another firm was paid a contract of $15,000 per month for six months. All this happened and guess what? No change, no results. And this video was still the number one thing that popped up. Now, unfortunately, there's yet another crisis. There is the crisis and the negative media tension of having essentially tried to cover up this video. And. And according to some, the misuse or waste of $175,000. Some members of the California legislature are calling for the resignation of the Chancellor. So this is a bad situation that just got a whole lot worse. What are we to make of this?
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So again, I'm sympathetic to any university, any organization that is defined by one bad incident years ago, and that's the only thing people find, or that's the first thing people find when they search them on Google. The problem of course, is how do you really change those results? This university paid almost A couple hundred thousand dollars did not seem to change it. Here's the bigger issue. It's tough to fool Google. It's tough to trick Google. The number one way I have found to help yourself with what shows up when people Google you is to constantly create new content to create good content that people want to watch. If you keep doing that, for the most part, you'll push down the old negative stuff. Now this is a harder, trickier situation. I don't want to sound glib, like I had the easy answer because this video went viral and that does show up in a positive way in Google's algorithm when people search for you. But if you're part of a huge public institution, you have public money and an incident happened of such magnitude, it's very difficult to sleep that under the rug. You can only imagine if the Internet had been around in 1970, early 70s when the Kent State incident occurred and a student protester was shot and killed. If Kent State had tried to sweep that under the rug, it just wouldn't work. Now, nobody was killed at UC Davis, but it was still an ugly, ugly incident. And again, I don't want to seem too hard on the officials. I'm not calling for the Chancellor to resign over this. It is the job of the Chancellor to try to protect the reputation of a college. Maybe this was done in a ham fisted way, maybe it wasn't subtle enough, but it was a legitimate, earnest attempt. Here's my question to you. I would like to hear from you. Do you have experience with these so called online reputation doctors who can essentially bury bad content with good content? Do you think they work? I'm not going to give you a blanket condemnation of them because I know it's certainly possible. If you are, let's say you're a restaurant and you have one really bad review and it shows up. Number one, it certainly is possible to create other content, good content, have people say nice things about you, create perhaps wonderful recipes and videos of your chef, promote those and Google will say people want to see this. So when someone googles the name of your restaurant, they're more likely to see videos of your chef doing things that are positive about the restaurant experience. So it is certainly possible to use online reputation doctors to help bury negative stuff. But it's not for everyone. To me the ideal scenario is if you are a somewhat smaller organization or preferably an individual and you are not the subject of something that went viral and millions and millions and millions of people saw it and pointed to it and liked it and passed it on. If it's just a couple of negative stories or a negative review or I guess a police report, just by creating a lot more good content, you can push it down in a situation like this, much, much trickier. To me, it seems, on the face of it, not a good idea to try to overtly manipulate it, in part just because it's really difficult, because of the millions of views for a video like this, in part because of the very real risk that just has happened here. You're going to receive so much criticism from lawmakers, the public, the media, taxpayers for using tax dollars this way. So that's why I think, and again, easy to say in retrospect that this was not a wise use of dollars. If this had worked, none of us would be talking about it and it would have been seen as a huge success. So that's part of the problem that these reputation doctors, these online reputation doctors have online is when they are successful, you tend not to think about it and tend not to talk about it unless you were the client involved. So I'd like to hear from you. Have any of you used these online reputation doctors? Do you think they're worth it? In what situations are they most effective? Please send me an email tjediatrainingworldwide.com or tweet your response on Twitter jwalker. Or you can also post comments, whether on SoundCloud, if you're listening there, on itunes, on Facebook, on Vimeo, dailymotion, any place where you are watching or listening this program, I'd love to hear from you. Thanks again for spending time with me today and I hope every single day. Some of you I know do enjoy the program, but you, for example, may be on my newsletter list. And in the newsletter I simply give you the titles of all seven shows in the last week and you can pick and choose the one show you want. If that's the way you like to do it, that's perfectly fine. I'm not going to be offended if you don't listen seven days a week. If you're not yet on the newsletter list, all you have to do is go to mediatrainingworldwide.com and you can sign up for the weekly newsletter there, which does give you a summary and the title of each new show every week. Thanks again. See you. I hope Tomorrow.
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