I was supposed to write a recap of our experiences at Pubcon Las Vegas last week, but it’s Halloween and I don’t feel like it. So I’m going to write about scary stuff. As an internet marketer, I’ve experienced some pretty scary situations. Let’s go through the top 5.
1. Once, when traveling on a budget to SMX San Jose, I decided to stay at a “discount” hotel across town. I was given the key to my room and went to go drop off my luggage. When I opened the door, a large man was already in the bed. He looked up, and I closed the door. I’m pretty sure he was reaching for his gun. I went back to the clerk who said, “Whoops, must have given you the wrong room. Happens all the time.” I only gave the hotel three stars on Yelp. I’ll bet that hurt their reputation!
2. Once, while I was working for a different company, we had a disgruntled client show up at the office and take my boss’s Rolex with a threat because he wanted money back. We called the police. The Rolex was never recovered. Come to think of it, that job had many scary moments. The scariest moments happened to the clients after all the good folks left for other jobs.
3. When doing reputation management, I’ve seen my share of scary stuff. Probably the scariest was working for American Airlines during 9/11, but that’s not the fun kind of scary. The fun kind of scary is more like when your client gets accused of having children with Vietnamese prostitutes in a lawsuit. And then the story gets picked up by a major publication. Then they ask you what to do about it and all you want to do is laugh. But you can’t, so you try to think of the “anti-prostitute defense.” That doesn’t really exist.
4. I had a major client (also a Fortune 100 brand) completely drop out of the search engine index less than one month after I started working with them. Talk about scary….Come to find out, an overzealous IT person thought Google was coming to the site too often so they blocked the Googlebot. I live in Texas, so I voted for the death penalty. Sadly, the employee didn’t even receive a slap on the wrist, and the site recovered two weeks later.
5. We’ve had several sites lately come to us from other places where they incurred penalties. Penguins, Pandas, and Hummingbirds haunt my dreams. Manual penalties make me close my eyes. And I pee in my pants in dread every time Matt Cutts speaks publicly. Who knows what he’s going to say.
Happy Halloween from the WrightIMC crew! Here’s to hoping your rankings are as good as candy.
