My first proper job was as a reporter for a start-up indie newspaper in the north western suburbs of Sydney. The editor was an awesome guy called Peter Gladwell; he hired me because he had a fire in his eyes and I think he saw a bit of that in me too. He wanted to bring credible, interesting, ballsy journalism back to suburban newspapers and I wanted to write credibe, interesting, ballsy suburban journalism. The paper was called the Northwest Edge and it was brilliant. I think it lasted five issues.

When Fairfax and News Corp got wind of what this little start-up was doing they slashed their advertising rates and undercut the market. A little indie newspaper stood no chance against two giant media corporations and that was that. I looked Peter up on LinkedIn and he now appears to be Chief of Staff at Fairfax, which is kind of ironic. I’m sure he’s getting his own back, one stolen paperclip at a time.

The Northwest Edge is a David and Goliath story. There are lots of them in the media, and sadly, Goliath usually wins. What happens though, when Goliath fights Goliath? Google is the biggest giant standing in the current media landscape and they’ve put numerous companies out of business by not just undercutting the market, but literally giving away products and services other companies were charging a mint for. Imagine if you’d invested millions of dollars into any of the following services in the last decade with the hope of making money from them:

• Maps
• Email
• A Blog Service
• A Website Where People Can Share Videos
• Website Traffic Analytics
• Satellite Imagery

You’ve now either been bought by Google, or you’ve been put out of business (or you will be soon).

Google has avoided producing ‘content’ of it’s own so far, with the exception of mapping data, but before long their share price will level off and investors will start demanding further diversification. The Google search brand is so well established that it won’t be tarnished or have its power diluted by adding more complimentary services. There is absolutely no reason why Google cannot feasibly, tomorrow, muscle in on the real estate, jobs and classifieds markets. There is no reason why they can’t produce their own accommodation search engine. What exactly will RealEstate.com, Seek, CarSales.com.au and Stayz do if when a major player like Google comes along and makes their product free. When was the last time anyone used WhereIs? (A site that just launched a popup ad in my browser, little fuckers). Does anyone really think that MySpace and Facebook are going to remain dominant for more than a few more years?

(Almost) everything online will soon be free. If I was shareholder in of any of those fore-mentioned companies, I’d be cashing out now.

Have you ever wished you could find out everything people were saying about your company in blogs, forums, online media and on third-party websites? Better still, have you ever wished you could be notified via email when new information or comments about your company are published anywhere on the world wide web?

Media Monitors offer a paid service which is great if you like being sent newspaper clippings to stick in scrapbooks (scrapbooking is very popular these days). But did you realise that Google offer a very similar thing for free? It’s called Google alerts. It won’t send you dead trees, but it will email you any time the keywords of your choice appear on the web. It’s dead simple, and dirt cheap. Use it. Now.

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.

• Seth Godin — He often gets referred to as a marketing guru, and it could just be the haircut, but Seth comes up with a nuggety bit of original marketing gold pretty much every single day. It’s worth reading because it’s always fresh and it is guaranteed to shift your perspective.
• Creative is not a Department — Marketing and branding observations with a freshly Australian perspective.
• Marketing Vox — News, news and more online marketing news. If you like to digest a digest, Marketing Vox is the place.
• Shoe String Branding — A useful, insightful blog on marketing for independent professionals
• Google Webmaster Blog - If you’re not getting found in Google you’ve got a serious problem. This is their dialogue with the world and I’d consider it essential reading for any webmaster or mistress.
• Duct Tape Marketing — John Jantsch has been called the world’s most practical small business expert for consistently delivering real-world, proven small business marketing ideas and strategies. And he’s not afraid to tell you so either.
• Ypulse — Research and articles about reaching the Y Generation.
• Adspace Pioneers — Julian Cole’s perspective on social media; a refreshing blog from someone who ‘gets’ it.

What have I missed?