Please take a quick moment and Google the name of your company and several of your clients.  If your company website has been around for a while you should be top of the list, and at first glance this may seem like all that should matter.  Possible clients can easily find your website on Google.

But now grab the scroll bar and view some of the other listings that Google has chosen to indiscriminately represent your otherwise tightly controlled brand.  Hopefully you only find positive listings, but unfortunately many find that a story about an argument with a past client or a lawsuit (they happened to win) is listed on the first page of Google under their company’s website.  Regardless of the merit of these negative listings about their company, Google has chosen to display them.  This is because Google and other search engines do not determine the credibility of a source based upon whether it is right or wrong.  Google determines the credibility of a source by analyzing it’s SEO or search engine optimization.

These negative listings do not only affect a company’s reputation, but can have a negative impact on the percentage of searchers that click on a company’s search listing and the percentage of searchers that end up becoming customers.  In Slingshot SEO’s presentation on January 13th to PRSA’s Indiana Chapter about how to manage social media risk on search engines, we will be discussing the most effective method for using social media to clean up a company’s reputation on search engines.  You will learn how to force these negative search listings to the 2nd page of search results and beyond.  We also look forward to interesting presentations from Ice Miller and Raidious about how to manage other forms of social media related risk.