Isn’t the World Wide Web so intergalactically wonderful?

Air, fire, earth and….web. How could we live without it? I shudder at the thought. It is the stuff of nightmares. Global warming? Hey, that’s like a bad day at the office compared to a web-less world.

And then in the midst of our cyber infatuation, the Google hits the fan. We wake up from our fantasy in the middle of the dark, dark night with a PR nightmare. All of the lightning fast finds any fact in a second, deliciousness of the web, turns to a kind of poison.

Okay, so what do I mean? Well, you have a wonderfully smart client with a great brain and a superb business model and all of the charm in the world….and, here’s where the Google in the fan strikes, a skeleton in the closet materializes. One you may not have known about at the outset. A mistake in the past. Anything from a once well-shrouded bankruptcy to a rather embarrassing scandal comes out in the wash.

In a nanno second, Google finds it and your story about the great brain, the superb business model and the global charm gets tainted by the past. Here’s where the web is a killer. There is no past. Everything is a click away from now.

So what to do? You know that the more exposure you gain for your client, for the good stuff that deserves to make news, the more you dredge up the gunk of history. Of yesterday.

What to do?

Well, there is no easy answer. You can’t hide. You can’t run. You can’t wait until it blows over because the web, thankfully, isn’t going away. What you have to do is attack back. Keep telling the story of now. Keep overwhelming the negative with the positive. Keep reminding critics that the old has an obligation to give way to the new. Stay on the offense.

The web doesn’t really kill. Only fear of it does.

Mark Stevens
CEO

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