CEO’s Name Search Engine Reputation Management
If you own your own business, what sort of results do you get when running your CEOs’ names in the search engines? When you run your CEOs’ names through search engine such as Google, are the top results generally positive or generally negative? Unfortunately, sometimes a CEOs personal decisions, not to mention their business decisions, can create a backlash against that one person. Since your CEOs are almost always linked to your company, though, negative search results for your CEOs mean negative search results for your company.
Many companies worry about interfering with the way that CEO names appear in search engine results. After all, they reason that names are personal, and it is true that some CEOs get touchy when someone suggests that their names are not getting positive search engine results. However, you should be monitoring CEO names to ensure that they produce positive search engine results for number of reasons:
- CEO names are a business brand as much as your company name, or your product name or service name. While a name is a private entity, for public individuals such as CEOs, names are very public. They are personal brands, but they also become links with a company brand. A CEO is often linked in the same sentence with your company. Therefore, CEO who is a philanthropist and is involved in charity work in the community will bring positive comments about your company, while a CEO associated with scandal will bring negative comments about your company.
- CEO names get linked to your company in specific ways. For example, if your CEO, John Smith, does something that causes egative publicity while with your company, your company will forever be affected by the scandal. Let’s assume that John Smith moves onto a lucrative new career after overcoming the scandal. Years from now, long after the scandal has been dealt with, the scandal will continue to be linked with your company temporally, if in no other way. That is, newspapers will continue to write “John Smith, while CEO of Your Company, was involved in a spending scandal that almost ended his career…” Pretty soon, your company name and the scandal caused by one CEO will be linked in potential customers’ minds. Plus, the new referrals to the scandal will mean that the scandal will continue to be associated with your company name and your former CEO for years to come.
- Once you or company name is linked to a CEO’s name which in turn is linked to something negative, that association will stay on the Internet forever. Simply firing your CEO or having him or her switch jobs will not help. Archived web pages will still maintain that association for Internet users. Therefore, you need to take proactive steps to ensure that the underlying problem of a bad reputation is dealt with upfront. You don’t want to be paying for CEO’s mistakes years from now.