Multinational Corporates

Client is a multinational technology consulting company specializing in long-cycle integrated business solutions. Client maintains thousands of employees in countries in both hemispheres.

PROBLEM

In 2007, following disputes over wages and benefits, current and former employees began to attack the company with highly inflammatory blog and forum postings. This went to the extent of a lawsuit filed on behalf of some of the employees, an action that further engendered unwanted news coverage as well as a continuing cycle of negative press events.

The issue became more deeply entrenched in the following months as employees set up dedicated “attack sites” where they continued regular postings. Since many of the blog postings were linked to the attack sites, and since the attack sites used the client’s corporate name in the web text, these attack sites rose to top Google rankings for searches on the company name and related keywords. The damage to the company’s reputation deepened and began to affect business in the variety of countries in which the client operated. We identified as many as 25 keywords that brought up negative postings—a significant problem.

SOLUTION

We had a critical task at hand where it had to simultaneously manage top 20 search engine rankings for 25 separate keywords—in effect, an optimization campaign for 500 web pages. For this reason, the required remedy had to include not only an extensive content writing campaign, but the identification of 500 web pages, each of which would have to be placed in the top positions in order to suppress the rankings of the offensive content.

We began a rigorous, systematic campaign that included:

• Consulting with our legal counsel and the client’s legal counsel to consider litigation or other legal actions
• Analysis of the problem with focus on its global reach
• Identifying all negative postings: the who, what and where
• Identifying all keywords that brought these negative postings to the top 20 rank positions in the major search engines, particularly Google
• Prioritizing the keywords in terms of “damage potential.” The metric used was the percentage per keyword of the total traffic associated with all the keywords. In other words, we first targeted those words that represented the most traffic
• Posting of new content on the client site and on sites managed by We. This was followed by an associated optimization campaign to increase the ranks of these new pages
• Posting, on a continuous basis, new content in blogs and article directories.
• Posting content on a continuous basis to discussion forums and social networking sites
• Creation of link building campaigns for those same blogs to position them in high search engine ranks

RESULTS

We began to achieve top search engine rankings for many of the keywords within the first month of the campaign. Within six months, We achieved positive positioning for 18 of the 25 keywords identified.

On the seventh month of the campaign, We met a goal of “90% dominance of the major search engine results for the identified keywords.” After termination of the project We continued to document progress. The graph below shows the increase over the 6 months of positive listings (those created or managed by We), and the corresponding decrease of “offensive” listings—those attacking the client site.

This project demonstrates We’ ability to manage a highly complex campaign involving multiple high-profile offensive postings and a sizable list of target sites.