A start to the week that is all to familiar… Politics!!
It took two years of careful planning to get into the corporate world but once there I realised that often its not about whether you can do the job its about how well you cope with the politics.
For example we lost a recent pitch because I refused to identify a major block at the front of the website that would prevent this corporate company from getting listed – they sell online too!! I alluded to it in the pitch process but held back on vital information as the previous (and much larger) agency had told them everything they wanted to hear including lots of information about how social media linking will boost their natural SEO position to number 1 for everything.
They had swallowed this and delivered several parts of that pitch to us to see what we thought, I told it how it was, that much of what they quoted was unlikely to have a bearing although it may bring in people directly and raise brand awareness. This was not enough for them and the potential client clearly wanted me to tell them only what they wanted to hear, I said there are setup problems that would prevent any real penetration into Google unless they were sorted out nothing would make a difference.
They didn’t like this but made it obvious that the larger agency are the likely candidates due to their superior ability to use social media for link popularity (lol), so I didn’t tell them the problem because that information would be delivered directly to the other SEO agency.
The point of this is that it is clear that many corporate companies have panels to select SEO agencies but the panel members do not know enough to make the informed choice and clearly are leaning towards those agencies who tell them exactly what they want to hear rather than how it really is.
Now three months on from that very large pitch the websites are still absent from search and the problem is still there, of course in the real world of accountability we could go back in and say – ‘hey you guys are you ready for some expert help now’ but the politics of the corporate world will make that a move that fails and probably will cut us out from any further pitch inclusion, the reason for that is those people who made the decision cannot cope with revealing they messed up but in that world they can hide it and not be accountable.
Corporate politics means they will be able to pass blame or even hide the lack of performance, the agency who won the pitch will give them lots of ‘fluffy reports’ that will show embellished progress in social media and brand awareness but the natural search traffic will not alter.
Corporate politics has also shown me that even when you do really well and get traffic levels massively increased you are still at risk when your client contacts move on and the new guy wants to make a name, I have also seen inter company politics derail successful SEO contracts where the success is less valued than the one-upmanship.
As profits fall you would imagine that large retailers will start asking the right questions using panels that are properly informed, until then corporate politics will dictate predominate failure.
