Marion Barry is a Train Wreck – 10 Lessons In Search Engine Reputation Management

All politics aside, Marion Barry’s online reputation is a train wreck. Not only is the man a polarizing politician with a littany of bad press and unfavorable web content, but he just had another “brush with the law” this weekend when he was arrested for stalking by the D.C. park police.

Regardless of how you feel about Marion Barry and his political career, you have to acknowledge that Barry offers up an excellent opportunity to look into the issue of search engine reputation management. Here’s what I see:

Wikipedia rules. The number one result for the keywords “Marion Barry” on Google, Yahoo, and Bing is Barry’s Wikipedia entry. Surprisingly informative (and dare I say balanced), Marion’s Wikipedia entry already contains a blurb about his recent arrest.

Official, trusted domains carry a lot of weight. Barry’s official profile on the District of Columbia’s government website is the 2nd result on Google and Bing, and the third result on Yahoo. This page isn’t frequently updated nor is it particularly optimized, yet it ranks highly because it sits on an official and trustworthy domain. I would guess that more frequent content updates along with a little bit of effort to search-engine-optimize Barry’s official profile would go a long ways towards moving this to the first search result.

Think about images. Google shows four images of Barry just above the fold of their results page. Unfortunately, one of these images is a grainy black and white picture of Barry in a hotel room. I won’t discuss the details of that image, but it ultimately led him to a felony conviction. Some search engine reputation management effort on Barry’s part (with attention paid to images) might have been able to push this less than favorable picture off the first page.

Video needs consideration too. While only Google offered up video results for our search, it’s smart to consider the impact that some videos could have on search results. One of the videos – an old In Living Color comedy skit depicting Barry in a less than favorable manner – isn’t really optmized for the search term “Marion Barry.” The other video result is harmless enough (it depicts Marion dancing awkwardly), but it’s not search engine optimized either. Had someone on Mr. Barry’s staff uploaded some favorable videos of him onto YouTube, MetaCafe, DailyMotion, etc., these types of poorly-optimized video results likely wouldn’t rank so highly.

Stay on top of the news. The press is amazingly fast. From the time Barry was arrested on July 4th to this morning, hundreds of news stories have been written. Truth be told, there’s absolutely no way to overcome this. Still, it’s important to recognize that getting “your side of the story” out as quickly as possible is important.

Are you publishing your own good content? Marion Barry is more than “the former mayor of DC with a felony conviction.” He’s a noted member of the civil rights movement. He’s a kidney transplant survivor. He’s the star of an upcoming HBO documentary. Barry even has a master’s degree in organic chemistry. As bad as he looks in the press, it’s obvious there are some great stories about Marion Barry that aren’t being told.

Do you have a linking strategy to help people find the good stuff? Barry has two great web presences that he completely controls – his own site MarionBarry.org and his profile on the D.C. government website. With a smart linking strategy he could use these two sites to increase the search engine rank of “friendly” results, pushing the less than favorable results off the front page.

Social media profiles. Marion Barry has a Facebook page, but you wouldn’t know it based on his personal and D.C. government websites. In addition to Facebook, Barry should have a profile on LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, Digg, and Naymz (at a minimum). All of these sites should be strategically linked to each other and to Barry’s personal website for maximum effect.

LESSONS WE CAN LEARN FROM MARION BARRY

• Lesson 1: If you’re looking to manage the reputation of a company or an individual, you’ll want to game plan a presence on Wikipedia.
• Lesson 2: Leverage any access you have to trustworthy and/or official domains.
• Lesson 3: Optimize and frequently update whatever favorable content you have access to.
• Lesson 4: Don’t forget to optimize for Google image search.
• Lesson 5: Get some good video uploaded to YouTube, MetaCafe, Daily Motion, etc. and make sure to optimize it for your keywords.
• Lesson 6: When bad news hits, don’t hesitate to respond in hopes it will go away. Frame the conversation by generating your own press for the search engines to find and (hopefully) share.
• Lesson 7: Publish your own favorable content early and often.
• Lesson 8: Use profile pages on social networks – this is exactly what they’re meant for.
• Lesson 9: Link smartly between sites and profiles you control to maximize the chances that positive results will fill the first page.
• Lesson 10: Try not to get into trouble in the first place. It goes without saying, but no amount of search engine trickery could help keep Barry’s arrest for stalking off the front page.

Later this week I’ll discuss the pro’s and con’s of creating a Wikipedia entry for the purposes of search engine reputation management.

Comments? Suggestions for Mr. Barry to manage his search engine reputation?