Simon’s battle with recruitment agency tells us a lot about neglect of online reputation
Simon Wharton of PushON has declared war on BD Recruitment.
A litany of sins committed against Simon when he clearly directed the agency on his wishes has provoked his wrath. There are only so many unsolicited and irrelevant CVs any man can take.
Within a short time his irate blog post was only a few positions below BD’s site on Google.
The lessons are straightforward: managing reputation online is a constant 24/7 occupation. It is one where just one voice can have a detrimental impact.
I placed a piece for Simon in What’s New In Marketing, an online magazine that was run by the Chartered Institute of Marketing, on organic search marketing some time ago.
One of the respondents was an electronics company that had read the piece and was clearly interested in Simon’s ideas.
When Simon brought up the URL there was a whole page of disastrous economic news following it. The company had had a bad year but had recovered – their online reputation had clearly not and they were totally unaware of it.
I believe many businesses neglect their online reputation, not realising the round the clock damage their brand is suffering.
What is perhaps most surprising about this first story is that I came across it through Twitter today, a full year after the blog post about BD Recruitment. And do you know BD Recruitment has not stopped bothering Simon and his angry post is still a few places below their website on Google.
Tags: Online PR, reputation
April 2nd, 2009 at 10:00 pm
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April 3rd, 2009 at 10:13 am
The only thing strange about this blog post is that a company has not even noticed the criticism a few search engine places below its own site for over a year
However this is I suspect quite common rather than strange
Rob
May 13th, 2009 at 10:40 am
Rob Artisan
Thought you might be interested to know that BD Recruitment was aware of all the virulent posts made by Simon on his Pushon Blog dating back to February 2008.
But as you must also be aware, being in the field of on-line marketing, there is no quick fix of ‘getting rid’ of negative postings – unless of course they’re actually libellous, and even then near as dammit impossible.
The Pushon Blog has a PR of 3, which you’ll appreciate is pretty good for a Blog, nearly as good as yours with a PR of 4, therefore it is reasonably easy to get a good SERP ranking in Google for an article when crafted for optimisation, be that article positive or negative.
But, you will find that for the last month now, the Pushon Blog is not on the first page of Google SERP.
So BD Recruitment do care about their on-line presence, they just don’t shout at everyone who says a bad thing about them, they’re too busy trying to find people jobs during this pretty nasty economic climate.
May 13th, 2009 at 9:14 pm
Over to you Simon….
September 3rd, 2010 at 5:24 pm
Funny that, looking today 3/9/2010 at the SERPs for ‘BD Recruitment’ – a long time after the comment was made on the 13/5/09 by David Baum that “…[for] the last month now, the Pushon Blog is not on the first page of Google SERP.” – that the blog by PushON is ranking 3rd…