(703) 596-1353
(703) 596-1353
In March 2012, MangoCo undertook an online reputation management project for a well-known, public figure in the music industry. This client manages a band that is a household name and runs one of the largest talent management companies in the world. He is also highly diversified into many other industries, and as such, is reputation of the utmost importance.
Problem
This client’s issue was that when a user searched his name, the first and second Autocomplete values that appeared were ‘jail’ and ‘felon.’ Our client had some petty crimes that dated back to when he was a juvenile that were still heavily influencing Autocomplete. References to the crimes in the public record (on government websites) coupled with a disgruntled former employee spreading the word pushed negative terms into Autocomplete despite all of the client’s successes and achievements.
Our client needed Autocomplete cleaned up, as his talent management company was rapidly expanding into the Country and Christian music genres. These negative Autocomplete suggestions (‘jail’ and ‘felon’) were hurting his company and personal brand, particularly in these markets where they were looking to grow. His management company initially hired Reputation.com to fix the Autocomplete issues but ended their contract after several months due to a lack of improvement and results with very little communication from their project manager.
Our Approach and Results
MangoCo immediately began cleaning up the destructive Autocomplete values. We gathered data using a number of different sources and developed a plan to push 18 different values into Autocomplete. Our goal was to protect the client by safeguarding against a user searching for our client’s name and seeing ‘jail’ or ‘felon.’ Our Autocomplete manipulation strategy also included further efforts to ensure that if a user searched our client’s name plus the letter ‘j’ or ‘f’ after, neither ‘jail’ nor ‘felon’ would display.
Three months after MangoCo took the reigns, Google Autocomplete no longer displayed any negative values for our client. The client is thrilled that negative issues stemming from events that occurred over 35 years ago are no longer visible on Autocomplete.