Crushing and suppressing Google-is this the right approach?

According to today’s Times a new breed of reputation management companies are being used to ‘suppress and crush’ Google when negative comments about companies and individuals appear.

The fact that anyone can post both negative and positive comments, and that these now rank higher than press reports or corporate blurb means the standard corporate defence systems are more or less useless.  The recent super injunctions would appear not to be worth the paper they are written on and companies, and individuals are left in the uncomfortable position of their misdemeanours staring not only them in the face but also in the face of millions of Google users.

So is it right that these facts should be suppressed and crushed?

A client called me recently to help with an online crisis where an embarrassing email had gone public. Twitter and Facebook social campaigns were red hot and the company was being bombarded with unpleasant emails.  The company’s name was swiftly moving up the Google rankings for the wrong reasons.

Together we agreed to be totally open about what had happened and why.  We published the guidelines on the use of company email which all employees have as part of their contract and the various security measures employed to safeguard client confidentiality.  We talked to the individual concerned and told him what we would be doing and got his buy-in and responded to all the emails accordingly.

The company was very open about what measures it had taken to prevent this happening again and published these on line. There was a brief blip about the incident on Google, but this has now moved right down the rankings to page 8, not because it has been suppressed but because the normal order of other more relevant items have replaced it, which included the action that the company was taking with the full co-operation of all individuals.

The individual has moved from being defensive to now being totally supportive of the organisation and the email attack stopped and even generated some rather embarrassed apologies. Most importantly the Facebook page has been removed voluntarily.

The fact is if you have had a critical report,  been found with your pants down or have committed some sort of fraud then eventually the truth will out. A good journalist knows how to dig deep – way beyond the first pages of Google.  Nothing enrages them or indeed the public more than the idea that a piece of information has been deliberately hidden.

The best public relations campaign is not to suppress the information and crush the content provider, but be open and honest and apologise if necessary.  Your public will respect, admire and, most importantly, trust you far more for being statesmanlike than for acting like a tyrannical dictator.