What were they thinking!?

Wednesday, January 28th, 2009 | Internet Marketing | 3 Comments

To be in business today you have to realize that public opinion is vital to your success. You have to be aware that what you present to the public gets passed around, commented on, analyzed, and if you’re presenting something the public doesn’t agree with, it’s going to come back and bite you in a big way.

Two prime examples recently have been the Chrysler full-page ad debauchery (in conjunction with the automaker fat-cats taking their private jet to ask Capital Hill for billions in bailout money), and not quite so much in the spotlight–Gatehouse Media, Inc. sued the New York Times Co. for linking to their news stories.

If you haven’t somehow seen it already, Chrysler spent hundreds of thousands to take out a full-page ads in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and USA Today to thank the American public for their support.  This created a maelstrom of negative feedback. Blogs lit up all over with nasty comments on it.  My personal favorite was, “I’ll put my kids on a mule before I’ll put them in a Chysler.”  Basically, this “thank-you” came across as a slap in the face to Americans who are already angry about footing the bill for automakers. Patrick Di Chiro at Idea Driven Marketing summed it up best, “They have so misjudged the mood of the country and bungled the essential PR challenge of building support for their cause, that it’s now clear that they cannot be helped. No matter the rightness of their case.”

What were they thinking!

In the second case, when Gatehouse Media, Inc. sued the New York Times Co. for taking snippets of news, it created a hub-bub in a different crowd. As an SEO company, we stress to our clients constantly the value of link building. You can optimize your site all day long, but if you don’t have quality links coming into your site, you really aren’t going to get noticed by the public or the search engines. This major flub by Gatehouse Media, defies the logic of this simple truth. How could you not appreciate a huge company like the New York Times Co. taking the time to link to your site? They have since come to an agreement that the New York Times Co. has agreed to remove all GateHouse feeds that contain headlines and ledes from Boston.com. I’m betting in the future that the New York Times Co. will likely pass up any opportunity to link to Boston.com and other sites will be leary to do so as well. So while this may not have been as big of a deal in the news as Chrysler’s muck-up was, I think in the long run this is going to have a very negative effect on Boston.com’s value.

What were they thinking!

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Tags: Chrysler, Gatehouse Media, link building, New York Times, PR, public opinion