Social media is the ultimate bright light that kills any hope of keeping something hidden in a closet. And the speed of that light is – well, the speed of light.
Witness the PepsiMax suicide ads printed in a niche lifestyle mag in Germany.
Some folk found the ads offensive and in no time flat they’d been scanned and posted to the Web. One of the people who saw the ads was blogger and social media maven Chris Abraham, who is very active on Twitter and also happens to blog for AdAge.
Right there is the plus and the minus of content getting attention online: You have no control over who sees it, and how influential they might be.
Chris tweeted about a post by Matt Creamer.
Pepsi has responded to Chris and agreed that he could post the email. He has done so in his post on AdAge today and he makes the comment that perhaps we’re all being cleverly manipulated into participating in an orchestrated viral campaign for PepsiMax.
I hope that’s not the case. I’m not a believer in the idea that any publicity is good publicity.
The point is that even when you flight something in a small market in another country, if it resonates with people – good or bad – that content will come to light.
And it will get seen in the search engines. What appears on page one in Google when people search for your name affects your brand and your reputation, so companies and PR folk must pay attention to those search result pages.
There are already 550,000 results for ‘Pepsi suicide ads’ in Google. A blog post about the ads is already at #11 when you search Pepsi Max. Five of the ten results on page two for Pepsi Max are about these ads. Give it a few more days, with the links being created to these sites, and they’re going to end up on page one.
But what it does show is that when content resonates, good or bad, it get legs. And it gets seen.
PR lesson: Listen to your audience. Figure out what kind of content is needed and wanted. Create excellent, interesting, valuable content that your audience will love – and share.
