Beanstalk's SEO News Blog

Just about anyone who has worked in a large office has seen the company they work for make rash decisions about how firing an employee will affect their company. Although it doesn't happen very often sometimes these decisions have a way of just blowing up in the companies faces and creating a PR disaster. Today I read about Ivell Marketing & Logistics who recently fired someone because of the contents of her Facebook account.

Ivell Marketing & Logistics recently fired Kimberley Swann, 16 from their firm for posting on her facebook about her job being boring. Now right away any of you that do Social Media Optimization, or Reputation Management would think this is something to be handled with tact with perhaps a written warning or some other kind of reprimand. As we all know that one whiff of a news headline relating around Social Networking, Social Media, or Facebook will be picked up by the blogosphere which can create a PR nightmare for companies (especially marketing firms). And lets all be honest most office admins find their jobs boring, especially if your a 16 year old female teenager.

The real problem with getting blogger all fired up is the fact that a lot of a larger bloggers have very strong sites which tend to rank fairly easy especially for company names like Ivell Marketing & Logistics which is a three word phrase. In fact if you Google the Ivell Marketing & Logistics company name you will find 5 instances of them firing Kimberley Swann in the top 10. The sad thing for Ivell Marketing & Logistics is this is still a relative fresh news story so as it gets picked up on a larger number of blog, where some of these blogs will credit their sources with a link they are in some real trouble.

With this kind of negative media and blog exposure its very unlikely that Ivell Marketing & Logistics would ever be able to push all these negative blog posts out of the top 10 on the search engines. With two or three negative pages in the top 10 it is possible to push them to the bottom of the first page or off completely, but once posts of this nature start to build organic links then it no longer becomes possible. Bad PR stories unfortunately can be some of the best link bait.

Labels: facebook, Ivell Marketing and Logistics, Public Relations, Reputation Management

Where it comes to succeeding on the web SEO is only part of the picture, and not always the most important thing depending on your industry. Running a successful online business requires good client relations, good vendor relations, and possibly finding as many income funnels as possible. Unless your Ryanair, or your CEOs name is Howard Millar.

Recently Ryanairs website started to suffer some performance issues because aggregation websites (ie airline fare comparison sites) were hammering their website scraping (aggregating) their content to generate their own websites with cheap flight comparisons. Now 99 out of 100 business owners would be pleased that these websites helped them increase their internet branding, corporate presence, and increasing their sales (100 websites offering the same product will generate more business then just a corporate website).

However Howard Millar is that one in a hundred who thinks not, so he started out with a lawsuit against one such aggregator, and then he came up with a brilliant idea (well it must have been brilliant to Howard Millar just not to the rest of the world) to cancel every Ryanair ticket that had been booked through one of these websites. Now although this may have seemed wise to Howard Millar, it does not with me. Can you imagine having booked a family trip through one of these websites, received your confirmation, only to have to cancel your trip as your ticket you thought you had purchased won't be honored.

Essentially what Howard has done is 1) Generate bad press for Ryanair 2) Pissed off a lot of potential clients 3) Lost a lot of potential revenue 4) Loss of recurring revenue from clients that may have flown with Ryanair through these websites then came back for repeat business (it is not like Airlines are declaring bankruptcy on a daily basis and require frequently fliers...) and 5) Increased the revenue of their competitors that do allow the aggregators to pillage their websites.

Now what would have been a better approach to dealing with this without losing revenue? The first would have been to put together RSS flight feed information to help aggregators build their sites without having to download as much information thus bogging down the server less (or even having a seperate server to host these RSS feeds to reduce load even more). The second is definitely less technical and that would be to upgrade their web servers, hardware is relatively cheap if you're generating additional revenue from it (let alone from 100s of websites).

Then with all the additional revenue Howard Millar could have invested it in SEO to pull visitors away from these sites by targeting the terms there ranking well for :)

Labels: branding, Howard Millar, Reputation Management, Ryanair