Fighting Corporate Spin - The Future of Political Campaigns

I’ve been reading about a company that gather’s feedback from people that want to complain.

We’ve all seen complaint focussed websites. Someone has bought something or used some service and gotten the short end of the stick and then the company behind the product or service does the wrong thing time and time again until a complete saga worthy of a James Clavell novel develops. The whole thing gets a lot of internet publicity maybe even circulated around on emails until millions of people read it and finally the complaining victim gets the attention they deserve and the company fixes the problem.

Its kind of like the American Service Dream come true story.

Well, this story does still exist and occur but its fairy tail dimensions may be attracting some internet savvy web designers hoping to capitalize on the energy that thousands of complaining American can bring to the table. Let’s face it when a company upsets you, you need an outlet to vent sometimes as much as you need the problem fixed.

So websites are popping up that cater to these ‘content writing / generating machines’ called complainers. Throw in some advertising and a heavy load of SEO marketing experience and made for complaint websites can rocket to the top of Search Engine Rankings like Google’s.

Well that’s great in the fairy tail land where everyone has innocent motives. But what happens when a company decides that they don’t want to verify the complaints or what happens when they allow people to write up blatantly false complaints and let the sensational comment blast to the top of Google talking bad about a company or a person or old boyfriend or girlfriend or something.

A recent web release about Rip-Off Report describes these kinds of issues. They talk about a website called RipOffReport.com and its owner and talk about just these types of tactics even categorizing some activities that might be associated with extortion. So they offer up a service to combat this, not by litigating or trying to fight the thing out in the courts for months at a time. That would be something for a companies lawyers. No they work to help counter the talk on the web. Fighting the web rankings fire with their own internet savy to push the complaints further down the Google rankings to get it off the top 10 and on a good day bury it to the point where no one will ever click the ‘Next page’ button enough to find it.

With the elections coming up for mid-terms and for the next Presidential season in 2 years, politicians and political campaigns are going to have to employ similar tactics to win in the Search Engine Political fight.

In the old days, over zealous grass roots campaigners might go around and uproot political signs replacing them with their own favorite politico sign. (not necessarily legal, but happens all over and in business too) This is kind of a similar thing, but perfectly legal. Put your message to counter the claims and do it in a way that is more effective from a Search Engine Marketing perspective and your message will reach people and your oponents will not.


Technorati Tags: Rip-off report, rippoffreport.com, Political search engine marketing techniques, SEO Political Strategies