Great article in Adage about how Reprise Media helped Adage writer Matt Creamer dominate the Google search engine results page (SERPS) for his name. The article is a terrific example of how a company or individual can use social media to control the first page of the SERPS for their name.

When I first started optimizing web sites I thought the goal was to get the top position on Google. Then I read a fantastic article on Blue Hat SEO about dominating the SERPS. Eli wrote that your goals should be to dominate the SERPS and own all ten positions, not just the top one. That article totally changed how I approach search engine optimization.

This is the same approach that Reprise Media used with Matt Creamer. Creamer is a long time writer for publications like Adage. Creamer wanted to regain control of how his brand was being projected online and this is the same problem that that many brands face today.

The problem he had was that when he did a Google search for his name, he did not appear on the first page of results. From the article:

To see how wrong I was, I surfed over to Google one day in July, entered my name, and in less than a quarter of second I had my answer.

Happy as I was to find links to others’ blog posts on my work, a few other high-performing results were less cheering. One result sent readers to GayNZ.com, a website for gay men living in New Zealand, where there’s a Matt Creamer in a high-profile position at an AIDS organization. (I’m neither gay nor a Kiwi.) More worrying was a Delaware blog about a Matt Creamer whose appointment to a county government post sparked controversy.

To how do you regain control of your online reputation and remove the negative results? The answer is social media. As Matt Creamer put it:

I wanted optimization, and, for my sins, Reprise gave me Twitter. And Facebook. They gave me MySpace and something called Squidoo. And, best of all, they gave me my own blog.

Reprise created 13 interlinked social media profiles for Matt Creamer as well as a brand-new blog called MattCreamer.com.
The idea was that all this social media content would push Matt Creamer to top of the search rankings, while pushing the” impostors out”. And it worked as the screen shot below shows.

Look at some of the web sites that take up the first page on Google for the search Matt Creamer:

• Mattcreamer.com (blog)
• Rollyo.com (social media site)
• Squidoo (social media site)
• Search Views (Reprise Media blog)
• CrunchGear (blog)

If you go to the second page on Google you see more social media sites like Rollyo(again), LinkedIn, and Wigetbox appear in the results. The former number one listing on Google for Matt Creamer is now number 18. That means in about 3 months Creamer was able to capture the top 17 positions on Google for his name!

This was all done legitimately, nothing black-hat. It was a very well executed reputation management plan using a combination of search engine optimization and social media optimization.

Reprise did not focus on one social media site. Nor did they create a series of social media profiles in a vacuum. Instead they created a mini-network of sites that are interlinked, each one helping the other as well as keeping visitors to these sites up to date on the latest news about Matt Creamer.

This is almost a prefect case study on how to successfully use SEO and SMO to manage your reputation online.
One is to use blog technology as a way to quickly get content into the search engine results. Two is to create multiple social media profiles across different social media sites. Third is to make sure that everything is all linked together.

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