By Alan Coleman on 9 Sep 2013
You’ve all been told by now that you need some kind of content marketing strategy… the quality-timely-regular-content message has been hammered home by everyone from Google to LinkedIn. A few marketing managers remain unconvinced, especially on this side of the Atlantic.
To save you a lecture on Penguin 2.0 infographics and purchase funnels, I’m going to wheel out a story (or ‘#debacle’ in PR speak) that might just paint a picture for you sceptics. Even though the dust has settled on this particular PR war, I feel it’s worth re-living what was quite an educational and entertaining lesson in defending brand reputation. Once upon a time, there was a California-based electric car manufacturer called Tesla. They submitted one of their cars to be featured on the most popular car show in the world, seemingly unaware that Jeremy Clarkson has more hatred for electric cars than vegetarians. Tesla’s hopes of positive coverage died when the show’s punchline turned out to be Clarkson and crew pushing the Roadster off the Top Gear track. They attest that this was actually scripted, but lost a libel case against the BBC. Wounded from the experience, they vowed never to be caught out by negative media exposure again. Enter, the New York Times. When one of their writers gave an ‘unflattering’ review of their latest saloon, claiming the car was taken away on a flatbed truck when battery had run flat, Tesla decided that this time they were going to fight back. CEO Elon Musk tweeted that the review was “fake” and that he had vehicle logs to prove it. There was an audible gasp; the eminent New York Times accused of skewing the facts?
Tesla revealed their data with a flourish, with Musk himself writing two detailed blog posts stuffed with graphs and annotated maps that apparently contradicted the article’s claims. The Times had its feathers ruffled enough to make an official statement claiming the review was “completely factual”, then have the writer of the review John Broder, and its public editor respond to Musk’s data with blow-by-blow explanations. The tête-à-tête was also reported by other news outlets, including The Atlantic Wire, Forbes and CNN. CNN even retraced the journey that the New York Times did, completing it successfully. If I use Google Trends to measure search volume and brand awareness as Brendan wrote about recently, we can see the surge in searches for ‘tesla’. The peak in search volume is around Musk’s second damning blog post (15 February), and is double the volume on the date of the original New York Times review (8 February).
I’d kill to see the analytics for their blog in that period, but we can estimate they’re pretty high as the blog post got 318 comments, compared to 31 comments on one of the ‘Inside Tesla’ posts a few months before. While a happier ending would have been a positive review in the first place, I admire Tesla for using their CEO and blog to harness the bad publicity as a way of reaching new readers of their own content. The last official word from Musk on the matter was a tweet accepting the New York Times public editor's opinion that "Mr. Broder left himself open to valid criticism by taking what seem to be casual and imprecise notes along the journey, unaware that his every move was being monitored."
A few years ago, Tesla wouldn’t have had so many platforms and options to defend a bad review of their products, besides a traditional PR campaign and a full-page newspaper ad. These are methods which audiences view with jaded suspicion, to put it politely. But a tweet from the CEO of a car manufacturer, citing data that challenges claims in a piece from a highly-respected newspaper – now that’s interesting. That’s eyebrow-raising. And the element that raises it above a PR squabble is the authority of those involved. Authority is an essential ingredient to the content marketing recipe: in fact it’s the very plate you serve it on. Authority is Google’s secret weapon in the fight against generic, keyword-stuffed content.
Google wants us to prove our authority: it provides authorship tags and its latest in-depth articles tag for this purpose. Use them right, and you’ll be rewarded with SEO. Google has other ways to measure the value of content. They can’t measure it on hits alone, as readers can be lured into clicking under false claims. This is where social signals come in. The amount many shares, likes, and +1s a piece of content gets is an indicator of quality. Musk’s final post on the PR spat got 6,300 +1s on Google Plus. Google Plus is the Podge to SEO’s Rodge. According to recent research by Moz.com, shares and +1s of content on Google Plus will see you smiled on by the internet giant. Shortly after Moz’s report, Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, publicly disagreed with this conclusion. (Though he contradicted suggestions that Google had made before – see the full story and comments here).
The advice from Cutts was this:
Rather than chasing +1s of content, your time is much better spent making great content.
It may not be +1s themselves that give favourable ranking. However, we know that great content is shared. Sharing links on Google Plus creates organic link building; and link building that isn’t possible on Facebook and Twitter because of privacy settings and data restrictions. The lesson I learnt from the Tesla #debacle was this: don’t wait to use content marketing until your brand gets bad press. Build your online authority now. Produce great content, use Google’s bells and whistles to showcase it, and you’ll have a great tool at your disposal when you really need it. And if your PR people don’t agree, give us a call!
