Forgetting is Forgiving

Forgetting is forgiving….
With time, we tend to forget past offenses. Whether they are personal or business, the old saying goes, “time heals all wounds”. Perhaps this is due to the fact that over time we forget….we forget the hurt, we forget the magnitude, we forget the impact. So forgetting it appears is part of the process of forgiving. But has the process of forgetting changed with the Internet. Now everything is preserved in some library of perpetual memory.

This was the subject of an article that appeared in the July 25th issue of the New York Times Magazine. The article dealt with the issue from a personal standpoint. But what about the perpetual memory of business issues. I wondered if Ford Explorer was still being haunted by the tire tread separation issue that caused roll-overs. Or Exxon with the Valdez tanker. And how can companies address the issue of the never-forgiving internet.

I looked at two comparative issues, the Toyota recall of 2010 vs. the Ford Explorer of 2000. And second, the BP vs. Exxon spills. I googled the four companies and looked at the first two pages of citations…how many of us go past the second page anyway. BP had about 50% of the citations dealing with the spill and all of the sponsored links. Exxon still had a few citations (lawyers never forget) and history records the incident as well. Toyota as a search word drew more about the current and incoming models and much about hybrids. And FORD Explorer was a page three item as a historical footnote.
So what do we glean from this?

First, time does help us to forget, but the memory of the incidents will now never fully go away…they will go to page three and beyond. Second, good news can fill the first pages of search; so you can manage the crisis by expanding coverage of your own good news (Toyota and its Hybrids) and use good PR2.0 techniques to assure pick-up. Third, good SEO (see my friends at www.treefrogseo.com) can move your good news to the first few pages and push the memories into the background. Fourth, consider owning the sponsor links as they always show up on page one.

Bad news today is never forgotten with the internet. You need strategies to manage the memories and help the bad news fade into the background and past page two of a google search.

7:55 pm | by Jeffrey Heilbrunn

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