A Major Financial Institution, a Rogue Broker, and a Class Action Lawsuit by Investors – A Love Story
The Situation: Black Friday on Wall Street
With hundreds of millions of dollars blown, investment banking scandals exploited, and a huge reputation tarnished, a leading national investment banking firm found itself stuck between a rock and a very hard place, facing major jeopardy.
Over the past 10 years, the firm has weathered investor litigations, fines, and criminal charges against past associates that were once associated with the firm. Now presently in good standing with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, the firm is trying to make amends and correct its good name. However, historic mishaps with disgruntled customers, past employees, and litigation filings have replaced and buried the company’s homepage for the number one Google search results. There is so much negative news that when you type in several variations and associations of the company’s name, 4 out of 10 listings contained disheartening news.
To make matters worse, the firm’s partners have lost millions in potential IPOs and investment banking revenues. Therefore, these partners know that their retail business was affected, but had no concrete numbers to determine the degree of which their business has been damaged by negative online blogs, press, and associated articles.
According to Forrester Research, by the end of 2008, Internet retail sales are projected to reach $204 billion. Moreover, a recent study by ComScore CEO, Magid Abraham, sited in the Harvard Business review, conveyed a strong correlation between the off-line impact of Internet advertising and its ability to influence a consumer’s decisions as much as 50%.
The Approach: Opening Bell
Just as positive content can increase the probability that you will be found on the Internet, the negative content travels just as fast, if not faster. The weapon of choice to combat this problem is Anti-Search Engine Optimization. Anti-Search Engine Optimization is an optimization practice that targets a specific company, name, person, or product that has negative articles associated with it and works to bury the dirt. Anti-SEO does not remove negative articles, it primarily filters in positive or neutral content that the search engines will place in priority to the negative articles. The trick is to essentially push the negative news down the search rankings, thus making them harder to find.
The Anti-SEO process begins with identifying the origin of the negative articles. In this case, Adreka discovered that given the 67 negative items in the search engines found, only 9 articles were the root cause of the dissemination on the search engines. Thus, Adreka was able to further identify other causes of the negative SEO content that pertained to keyword selections, content freshness, and the linking structure.
Adreka determined that the best approach was to drown out the negative data items and to upload a new site redesign, blogging campaign, and several custom created mini-sites containing the company’s name in the web address, title tags, and content.
The Result: Bullish Success
The six month campaign overshadowed ALL negative data on the top 3 search engines: Google, Yahoo, and MSN. The resulting SEO campaign also increased their relevant site traffic by 250%.
The Bottom Line: A Good Day in the Market!
The investment banking business has increased. The Anti-SEO is making it easier for their sales force to close more business with fewer objections. The lesson learned today is that Adreka was able to give this particular investment banking firm another lifetime in the marketplace due to the advertising agency’s ability to hide negative data with Anti-Search Engine Optimization.
For More information Please contact John Cataldi
John Cataldi | Media ROI Evangelist | Adreka
o 678-804-7144
m 404.849.0065
f 770.271.3766
JCataldi@Adreka.com || www.Adreka.com