Take That Blog Down! — What Now?

Last Friday I was busily knocking things off my to-do list when I got an urgent email from a client. There was a blog post with very erroneous info about the client climbing rapidly up the results page in Google News. This was a poorly reported re-hash of news of an attack that happened over two weeks ago. The mistakes very glaring, and no links were provided to any other coverage. No one else had picked up, but because of the Google ranking something had to be done — NOW!

Every professional communications person has been in this situation before, or something like it. My day-to-day contact is a very experienced guy, and he knew how online works. Threatening is not the right initial approach by a long shot. But he was getting squeezed from above to make this bogus item disappear, and needed my help. Prospects could be seeing this blog post, which reached number one in Google News when searching on the company name. So what to do?

This week I shared this situation with some PR groups I belong to on LinkedIn. The feedback was really good, and I’d like to share it before telling how this situation unfolded. The two LinkedIn communities are the Capitol Communicators group and the Public Relations and Communications Professionals.

All the feedback was really good stuff, but a couple stood out. Steven Spenser took the time to lay out a process, which I really appreciated. And Denise Graveline shared some great insight — make sure your Google profile is fully filled in. Why? Because then you can post a comment to any Google search result. (I’m currently exploring this — looks like it works for Web results, not News — but still very useful).

Based on a blend of all responses, here’s a proposed checklist:

• First off, counsel client not to over-react – that just provides fodder for more posts, more re-freshes, more traffic
• Use the comment function — make a good faith effort to correct the inaccuracies
• In coordination with commenting, reach out if contact information is available and state case plainly
• ONLY if corrections are ignored, contact ignored and comment not approved should you look to involve your legal resources, and only if the reporting can be shown to have a negative effect
• Use Google Toolbar to check backlinks
• As mentioned above, use the comment feature available to Google profiles to state case
• If necessary, contact core media list directly with accurate information

I hope the above is helpful to others – it definitely was for me. One more point shared by many in the groups — use this as a teachable moment if possible to prep for next time.

So what happened last Friday? I posted a comment stating the facts and suggesting a link to late December CNet coverage that accurately described the attack. My comment wasn’t approved right away, and unbeknownst to me my client sent an email to the administrator listed in the WhoIs listing. I don’t know which contributed more, but by Monday the link had been taken down.

So problem was solved — until next time. What would you have done? Do you have a similar story, and thoughts on how to address? Drop a comment or email.