It’s no secret that I’m a gigantic MasterChef fan. I won’t invade this blog with my culinary musings because I have a whole other platform to do that with (see the content dilemma post below), but I thought it was rather interesting how the Google Zeitgeist has started showing results for a ‘masterchef’ search in Australia. Google makes page suggestions in a website you search for based on their own algorithms for what is popular. Julie was the winner, Chris was the favourite, Poh did exceptionally well, but only one contestant makes it into Google’s page suggestions list. Is it a coincidence that she’s pretty and blonde? Google is a remarkably reliable gauage of popular culture. My money is on Justine to go on to the biggest and bestest things.

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send and read short text updates (otherwise known as tweets) about what they’re thinking or doing. Its been around for a while (a couple of years is a long while in Internetland) and all the ‘cool’ companies are doing it.

Is it a fad? Is it going to last? Will we look back in a few years time and laugh about how in 2008 everyone just HAD to have a company Twitter and realise in hindsight how pointless it all was? I’m guessing yes (at least partly), but smarter people than me can help you make a more enlightened decision; read Jeremiah Owyang’s rundown on Twitter if you’re after a succinct overview.

There’s no doubt that engaging with your customers is the best way to build profitable relationships, but if you’re after a help centre, check out Get Satisfaction instead, because Twitter really isn’t designed as a company-wide customer service tool.

On the other hand, if you have intelligent, web-savvy employees, putting their Twitter feeds on the company website is a great idea, it gives customers and clients a unique insight into the day-to-day lives of the people who help them. I think more CEOs should do it and I’m fascinated by Barack Obama’s Twitter feed, although he uses it more as an events alert system than an insight into his thought process.

There’s no right or wrong answer to the question of company twittering, but like anything, if you do it half-arsed, or don’t do it right, you’ll look stupid. If you reckon it’s worth a shot, have a go, but keep in mind the whole world will be watching. Know what you want to achieve first and check out plenty of other company Tweets to see who is doing it well and who isn’t.

Here are the basic guidelines for getting your site to rank well in Google. Consider it SEO 101 — the most important things you need to know. Once you’ve mastered SEO 101 you’ll be well on your way.

1. Read Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and if you don’t understand something, ask a question in the Google Webmaster Help Forum.
2. Make your website the best site there is on whatever it is you’re talking about. If you want to be #1 in Google you need to deserve to be #1. Think of information you could put on your site that would make other people want to tell their friends about without you having to ask them and put that information on your site. For example, write a blog which discusses industry news, allow people to upload photos to your site, start a forum where people can talk about your service or product, or put together a collection of amusing YouTube videos which are related to your industry. Think about it this way, if your site has the same information as every other site, why should you rank above them?
3. Use Google’s Keyword Tool to get an overview of what words and phrases people are using to find your products or services.
4. Choose the two keywords you think will work best for you and then edit the homepage of your site so it is clear to Google that your website is closely related to those words by doing the following:
   1. Change the page title so that the important keywords are in it.
   2. Write a meta description that uses the keywords and, more importantly, is a sales pitch for your business. Google uses the meta description you write as a summary of your site in its results.
   3. Make sure the main heading on the page is in a <h1> tag and make sure it has the keywords in it.
   4. Use the keywords in the text on the page.
   5. If there is no text on the page, add some, but make it visible to anyone who sees the site.
5. Make sure every other page has relevant keywords in the title, meta description, headings and content.
6. Make sure you have a text link to each page in the site.
7. Find online directories which list businesses in your geographical area and directories which list businesses in your industry and submit your site to them.
8. Ask business partners and friends which have websites that are similar to yours to link to you and offer to link back to them in return.
9. Create a Google Webmaster Tools account so you can let Google communicate with you and see what Google thinks of your site.
10. Write down a list of website URLs that are competing with you and then search for them in Yahoo’s site explorer tool and check the ‘inlinks’ to see who is linking to them. Write a personal note to those people and ask them to link to you. If you think your visitors would be interested in the sites, offer to link to them as well.
11. Don’t try and ‘out-smart’ Google. Any trick you can think of has been done before and you’ll end up getting your site black-listed.

There are plenty of other things you can do, but if you cover these SEO 101 basics your site is pretty much guaranted to rank well.

Yesterday there was a massive outage with Optus that affected pretty much all of Queensland. Phone lines were down, flights were delayed, shops couldn’t use their EFTPOS machines, businesses had no Internet, loved ones couldn’t get in touch, hospitals had no phones, people couldn’t dial ‘000′. In short, it was a bigger PR disaster than having a senior executive tell people he wouldn’t recommend your company’s shares to his mother. Optus’s strap line is ‘Yes’; yesterday it was ‘no’.

I wrote a blog post about it yesterday. I wasn’t doing it to have a whinge, in fact I really didn’t care that much, I’m Australian, I know shit happens, but I did want to see how long it took for coverage of the incident to reach search engine results and I was keen to see what Optus’s reaction was.

The ABC published an article on their website and within 15 minutes of the article going live it was appearing on the first page of Google’s results when I searched for ‘Optus down’. My own blog post was there within half an hour. The ABC and I beat all the other news outlets to the story and both our pages are still there in Google (and I’m willing to bet that this post will hang around for a while to). Optus is yet to mention anything about the outage on their website, in fact they haven’t even issued a media release about it.

The public’s reaction has been furious. Onine news articles were flooded with angry comments, forums were ablaze; hell, people even started venting their fury in my blog. It didn’t look good for Optus, but if they’d had their wits about them, there was plenty they could have done to off-set the negative effects.

What should they have done?

Traditionally speaking, they should have at least issued some media statements about the situation quick f’ing smart — the golden rule of crisis management is to control the situation; if the public are getting their information from you you can control the message. I learnt from the ABC that journalists were trying to get in touch with the company for official comment from 8.30am, but it was 8.30pm last night before they published a story with comment from Optus spokeswoman Maha Krifhnapillai. As a customer I wasn’t happy about their silence - they’re a communications company for goodness sake. That’s by-the-by though, this blog isn’t about tradition.

What Optus will be living with now, and for years to come, will be the search engine results legacy of their PR disaster. Posts like this one will survive for years when people search for ‘Optus sucks’ (so far there are 64,900 others, and counting), and posts like the one I wrote yesterday will hang around when people search for ‘Optus down’, not to mention the 78,000 results that appear when you search for ‘Optus outage’.

If I were Optus I’d be taking control of the search engine results. I’d be publishing pages on the official Optus website that are tailored to appear at the top of Google when people search for ‘Optus outage’, ‘Optus sucks’ and ‘Optus down’; I’d be explaining that their up-time is actually bloody good, I’m sure they have some excellent figures to back it up.

Unfortunately, if you look to Google for information on their company, you’re going to get a very different story. In fact, when it comes to digital strategy and online marketing, Optus sucks.