According to ABC News, BP has purchased several phrases on search engines such as Google and Yahoo so that online users get directed to the company’s official website first.
Put simply BP is manipulating what you find on the web by buying key words such as “oil spill”. It is a strategy that online analysts say is costing BP in the region of $10,000 a day.
So if you know plug in “oil spill” into Google the first link is to BP’s website.
This kind of information manipulation does not come cheap. Scott Slatin, an analyst who runs search engine marketing company Rivington in New York, estimates BP is paying $10,000 per day to maintain the various search terms.
But what is $10,000 when you are going to pay billions in fines or spending $37 million a day on the clean up?
What BP is doing is good old-fashioned manipulation of the news. For in PR terms, the damage done to BP’s reputation from negative publicity could be more damaging than the fines and costs of the slick itself.
ABC believes that this is the first time a company facing a global PR disaster has tried to manipulate Google in this way, raising huge questions of online manipulation that will ultimately undermine BP’s and even Google’s credibility.
BP is getting into dangerous territory here – one of the main legacies of the Exxon Valdez is the overwhelming evidence that Exxon cared more about its image than cleaning up the beaches.
It seems that BP is exactly the same
– from priceofoil.org