A while back Britney Spears walked into a barber shop and shaved her head. The photographers where right there and of course the pictures would soon end up online. What a crazy chick right? She must be really screwed in that bald head! Before that she had accidentally flashed a private part to the paparazzi and exposed, (excuse the ludeness) a shaved part of her anatomy due to a lack of underwear and some good upskirt photography. What an idiot!

Well not so fast, maybe she just got a little advice on SEO and PR (public relations, not page rank) and realized that she could bury the pictures of her shaved private part with the new pictures of her shaved head. Searches for ‘Bald Britney ‘ images and ‘Shaved Britney ‘ images would then produce the pictures of her at the barber shop not the club. Now I may be assonated for revealing this to the world about the pop star, but it demonstrates a good point, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) has a role to play in public relations. This doesn’t clear Britney from being completely nuts, but it shows that unwanted press can and is buried through strategic planning. Companies that receive bad publicity often wisely release their own versions of events along with other materials that flood the search engines burying the bad news. This isn’t really misinformation, but more like over whelming the information outlet. Politicians have been accused of this for years; they call it wagging the dog, or in Bush’s case it’s gay marriage instead of a haircut. It’s the same thing as in SEO, if there is something people are paying attention to that you don’t want them to (like the war in Iraq in the Bush example) simply point at something else and start yelling “Hey! Look over there!”. When done correctly, by a genius like Britney, only an isolated Michigan SEO blogger notices… when someone that isn’t quite as sharp like, say President Bush does it though it can be less effective. Regardless, there is a lesson here for all companies and people that want to manage their brand online, everyone is going to get slammed on the net, so make sure the slams don’t get top page ranks on the search engines. Throw a hay stack on that needle.