SEO Hell Yeah! | Search Engine Optimization, Online Marketing & Beyond

So tonight I had some friends over and we busted out the ole’ wireless guitar for some Guitar Hero 3 action.  After the game loaded up, we heard an extremely funky noise come from the DVD drive.  It sounded, literally, like something just scratched the bottom of the game disc violently.  After this sudden audio interruption, my system locked up with a weird green-tinted checkerboard display on the screen.  After a couple of restarts, it was toast.

Having been in the gaming space for so long, I knew this was going to happen.  In fact, due to this wide-spread hardware failure, Microsoft is in the dog house $1 billion due to this unfortunate hardware malfunction.  But imagine if I were to not know what this was… and when those dreaded red rings of death did indeed pop up, if I were to Google it, the search yields 167k results varying from using towels to “fix” the problem to an official support page from Microsoft.

So how does this pertain at all to search marketing… and more specifically, online reputation management of the Xbox 360’s brand?  This is one of the few cases where user opinion has been so negative that any form of online reputation simply couldn’t counteract the negativity & vast amount of opinions about the issue.  Sometimes you just can’t manage the reputation of a product of service due to an overwhelming response.  In this case, Microsoft had to opt out of any sort of Online Reputation, set up a service that costs them around $1 billion and handle it this way.

They should have known they were setting themselves up with this drastic “fix-up cost” when they decided to try to manufacture at a cheaper cost.  And unfortunately, no amount of Online Reputation work can wipe that away…