Use Search To Manage Crisis Situations
This is an interesting Hitwise post from Heather Hopkins on how sponsored search listings might be used to manage issues. She uses the recent battery recalls as evidence for the problem and potential solution.
Essentially, of all the people who searched “Dell battery recall” in the U.K. in the August/September timeframe only about 42% ended up at Dell sites. The other roughly 58 percent ended up at theregister.com, bbc.com, etc. Interesting.
Heather suggests that sponsored links might have allowed Dell to send even more searchers to the correct Dell sites. I think she’s right and sponsored links are something we should think about more often when managing corporate issues and crisis situations.
Sponsored links could be especially important in the early days of an issue when “official sites” are still making their way up the organic search rankings.
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