[ On Wiener Dogs, Rats & Search ]

Dachshunds are a smart, compact breed of dog designed to seek out and dispatch their even smaller and smarter adversaries: rats. This February Yum Brands had a rat problem worthy of a whole herd of wiener dogs, in the form of television footage showing rodents run amok in a New York KFC/Taco Bell. When the video found its way online, anyone could search for it. And they did.

We normally think of our favorite search engine as a faithful tool, a trusty hound sniffing out the answers we need from the Net. But like any excitable breed, search might just turn around and bite you.

Which is the real public relations lesson from the Yum Brands rat incident. As Kate Macarthur points out in Advertising Age, while the firm did make its share of typical PR mistakes – a slow response, treatment of the story as purely local, inadequate statements on the brands’ websites – the mechanics of search morphed the crisis into a fiasco. When people searched for “rats” they got Taco Bell; when they searched for “KFC” they found links to exterminators.



To avoid being in the doghouse, here’s what to remember:
• The more people visit a site, the higher it climbs in the rankings. To give your firm’s message equal billing, you need viewers to visit the sites you point them to...because they’ll already be checking out your site of disaster. A media crisis is a marketing crisis, so be sure your crisis communication plan addresses all forms of communication. It’s vital to get your message right and your click rate up.
• Be mindful of the need to advertise against negative search terms. Unhappy combinations of search terms – like a company’s name and “rodents” – can bring up damning sponsored links. You can fend off such results by buying up the relevant terms. Yum Brands seems to have taken this advice – now such a search yields zero sponsored links, instead of a who’s who of exterminators. (Over-reliance on computer-generated advertising is also unwise, even downright ghoulish. Adrants notes that when Anna Nicole’s son died, IntelliTXT ads offered new Smiths for sale at Target.)
• On the Net, mistakes are global...and they linger. At time of writing, one of the top 10 results for a Google search of “Taco Bell” involves union boycotts, and the sponsored links reference E. coli and law firms specializing in food and drug cases. Steady PR and search monitoring are always needed to offset such messages.

On the Net, the complications from poor crisis management can breed like rats...and it takes dogged persistence to sort them all out.

Unless of course,the dog dies from eating tainted pet food.

Which is why, as Ad Age and Yahoo! News report, organic pet food producers are experiencing a bonanza in the wake of pet deaths from tainted brand-name products. After all, the whole point of search is that it lets people find you. So paid-search ads drove concerned consumers to natural and organic pet food providers, whose sales have skyrocketed. Menu Foods’ debacle is a godsend to these companies, who recognize an opportunity to reach a vast, suddenly interested audience.

Thus, while organizations need to anticipate and protect themselves against potential crises, they also need to be nimble and alert to new opportunities. Disasters may linger on the Web, but golden opportunities don’t. When a competitor stumbles, ask what marketing communications tools might be used to capitalize on the moment...including, of course, search optimization strategies.

When well trained, search can be man’s best friend. Don’t let a crisis be your organization’s obedience school.