Financial Services Reputation Defense Case Study

An AP article came out that wrongly accused a financial services firm of laundering drug money. The article hit the wire and was repeated over 600 times online. They reached out to Chris Abraham to do a reputation defense for them. Luckily, they contacted us immediately after the article was published so we were able to completely protect the first 5 pages from any sticky web or blog mention at all.

Challenge: AP article incorrectly implying the company was involved in drug money laundering. The article was picked up and reprinted by 600 newspapers and many many news sites. The client and its CEO had very little to no web presence prior to the articles viral spread. This resulted in the first 60 pages of search results returning only this negative story.

Objective: To regain control of the client’s online reputation and to clear it of this negative and false information.

Strategy: To achieve this objective, Chris and his team needed to promote the presence of the client in the online realm with a goal of positive and neutral results dominating the first 3 pages of search results.

Tactics: We launched a large and multi-pronged Online Reputation Management (ORM) campaign. This meant that multiple domains, blogs and Social Network profiles were created for both the company and the CEO. These sites were then populated with many positive and neutral articles which were then cross-linked and submitted to all of the search engines.

Results: In a matter of 6 weeks Chris and the Gerris team had regained the control of the identity and image of the client. The negative article no longer dominated the first 3 pages - only a tiny percentage of users read beyond the first 3 pages of results - instead the positive and neutral stories that had been spread around the web by the team dominated the search results.