How NOT to manage a crisis: ‘when all else fails, try bribing search engines!’

Posted by: Paul Matthews

There are many recommendations Bullet PR would make regarding online reputation management, especially during a time of crisis. These would not include however, a recommendation to bribe search engines to exclude negative content!

But apparently, according to this report, this is exactly one of the recommendations made by a PR company to Sanlu, the third largest dairy company in China, with regards to negative content appearing on Baidu, the largest Chinese language search engine and the 4th ranked web site in the world.

It?s hard to imagine a public relations consultancy in a western democracy making such a criminal, unethical, and ludicrously na?ve recommendation, but even in China, the Internet and social media in particular have now reached a scale where such advice is bound to fail and quite possibly backfire.

For further information on the unfolding milk scandal in China, have a read of this New York Times article.