In 2005, one of my friends…a top-notch, non-blogging, under-the-radar, badass SEO…got a call from his buddy.  His buddy was the CEO of a very large technology company.  A company worth tens of billions and a company that still has many old employees planning to retire off their late-90’s stock grants.  And he had a serious Reputation Management problem.

So, the “CEO to SEO” conversation went something like this:

CEO:  We are getting hammered by some pissed off bloggers.
SEO (in the midst of his best front nine ever):  So?
CEO:  Well, it’s starting to affect sales.
SEO (now angling on the Beverage Cart girl):  And?
CEO:  Our PR Agency and an internal impact assessment put the economic impact of these guys around $30 million bucks.
SEO (now smelling cash, like any good SEO):  Jesus!  Need some help with that?
CEO:  I don’t want to tell you that you have a blank check to go fix this, but you have a blank check to go fix this.

So, the SEO did.  Using every dirty Karl Rovian technique he could, he took care of it in 6 weeks.  And he billed about $75,000.

A few months ago, we were all eating lunch…so I guess that makes it a CEO to SEO to SEO lunch, if you’re scoring at home…and the CEO explained to us how that was the best $75,000 he ever spent. 

It turns out that decision makers in the technology world love “The Google”.  If a technology product ranks #1 on Google, an inordinate amount of instantaneous trust is conferred upon the owner of that product.  Google is the Mariano Rivera of many technology sales cycles (something I now deal with on a day-to-day basis at Tippit).

The scummy underbelly of this Google-assigned trust is that you better not have anything disparaging on the first page of the Google SERPs.  It’s a rather unfair predicament.  You need to be #1 to sell, but if 2-10 in the results have the word “sucks” next to your name or product, you take a direct hit to the nads.  That direct hit might just be a longer sales cycle.  Or that direct hit might lose you a deal.

The $75,000 spent by a large technology company to remove the cockblocking listings helped lead to a blowout revenue number in the subsequent quarter.  About $100 million dollars in instant market cap when the numbers were released.  An attributable chunk of that increase originating with the Butterfly Effect of an SEO cleaning up a crime scene like “The Wolf” in Pulp Fiction.

As I often say, Google is doing all your PR work for you as an SEO.  Everyone…particularly Corporate America…is obsessed with their vanity rankings.  It’s the Achilles-Heel-turned-ATM-Machine for SEO’s who have access to those people.  You see large information gatherers like Factiva selling Reputation Alert services.  There are about 20 likeminded comprehensive alert services launching every day.  But, at the end of that day, all they do is tell you there is a problem.

So, who is going to fix all these problems in 2007?  Why you…the Jizzbang Opportunist SEO…are!  Those of you with the darker hats are probably going to create the items that need fixing.  Those of us with an array of Social Media Assets now have another very profitable way to leverage them (I’d like to take this opportunity to give a shout out to the guy at Google who turned the domain trust factor up so high on all these Web 2.0 companies).  The very smart SEO’s will take two lunches a day…the first with the trashiest PR Agency they can find, the other with the trashiest lawyers they can find…and they’ll swap client lists.  Many of us will be back on-call by political candidates as they ready for 2008.

I can’t freaking wait.  It’s the first time in a long time I wish I had more time to allocate to client work.

Happy New Year to everyone!  And to the legion of smokin’ hot chicks I imagine read my blog religiously, don’t forget to kiss an SEO at midnight.

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