Ted Leonsis Reputation Management Lesson #4,588: Ad Inventory Management
Let’s say you have a big brand or a big name and you’ve pissed some people off. An entire industry of people who make very good livings off of the very technology you claim to have mastered. Well, you might want to dot those i’s and cross those t’s when spelling “stupid”.
One of the top ranking Google results for [ted leonsis] is an Answers.com page. The first piece of content being served on the Answers.com page is an Adsense block that Graywolf and myself currently own. If you click on those ads, you go to some pretty unflattering pages. Have your people call their people to buy up that ad inventory, Ted. There’s lots of good traffic leading to prominent ad inventory if somebody were to spend some time looking for it.
And open an Adwords account before Michael or I go to a Premium placement.
Hmmm, maybe “stupid” is telling the whole world what PPC keywords you’re buying. When Ted Leonsis sends an email to the millions of AOL members, asking them to click on your ad links, I don’t think you’ll be feeling so cavalier. Not trying to be disrespectful, but you might want to re-think your strategy. Incidentally, I think your SEO contest is misguided. I’m participating albeit reluctantly. Ted is one of the good guys. There are plenty of arrogant jerks working at Internet companies. He’s not one of them.
Man. I don’t even know where to begin with responding to that. Let’s try a list:
1) Likelihood Ted sends an email to millions of AOL members to click on my Google Ads? About eleventy billion to 1.
2) Assuming pigs are flying and Jesus is back for a second stint, if Ted’s minions of AOL users click on my ads, I’ll be out $5/day. I guess my biggest problem at that point is trying to file a clickfraud report to my Adwords rep whilst participating in the Rapture.
3) I have said repeatedly that I have no ill will against Ted. I know several AOL insiders, maintain professional relationships with a few early AOL execs, and know him to be a good guy. But he ran his mouth off a little too much. We all do from time to time. It just gets magnified a little bit more when you are Ted Leonsis and you do it in a prominent media channel.
4) This is all in fun. If I had it out for Ted, I’d rank some really mean shit and run a Washington Post column. This is nothing more than a fun case study in reputation management and somebody gets a check at the end of the day.
Regarding 1), I should have included a smiley. A little hyperbole, intended to be sarcastic. Reading your post criticizing Leonsis for allegedly being stupid about SEO, seemed like you were being stupid about PPC. That’s all. I worked at AOL for six years. Don’t know Ted personally, but the impression I got was that he knew his stuff and was (and is) respected and respectable. I don’t get what all the fuss is about. I’d like to see more high level executives take a bit more risk and blog.
Tag:
I hear that. I guess if we can assume no malicious intent by myself, Graywolf, Todd, John, or anyone else talking about this a lot, it’s really more of a case of us saying, “Hey, it’s cool to blog. It’s cool that a big exec gets that SEO and reputation are important activities. But it just doesn’t stop there. It’s a highly specialized ongoing effort where one really smart competitor (or a lot of really smart competitors) can leave you net negative.”
I gotta go work on buying an opposing hockey team now! Have a good weekend, man.