The Power of Internet Real Estate

John Hawkins notes yet another incident of unabashedly ridiculous liberalism on an American campus. The notion that caught my eye, however, is tangential:

But, you know what's going to be really funny? Right Wing News is a pretty good sized website and I'm sure there will be more than a few links to this post. Fast forward a month or two and when people do a search for the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, you know like Republican Alumni who are thinking about donating or Republican parents who are wondering where to send their kids, this post should be fairly close to the top.

I don't suspect that the average citizen — Red state or Blue — knows this, but most Internet search engines attempt to sort their searches not according to some official list of approved sources (e.g., with msnbc.com, cnn.com, and abcnews.com at the top). They factor in the number of instances of the search term on a page, the number of other sites linking to the relevant page, and the general popularity of the Web site. In other words, a relatively unknown blogger can still help to define any organization's image for those who research on the Web.

That's not a small consideration. No longer is "good press" an adequate term to describe the imaging work that is necessary in that area. To put it in paper-world terms, imagine if every catalogue had to have every criticism of each product appended, and imagine if those bits of criticism were ranked according to the number of average folk who thought particular items worth considering.

Some marketers may not like it — particularly those charged with selling ultra-expensive educational experiences — but the only real solution to the problem of having owners of budget-priced Web sites define their products is to answer complaints promptly and thoroughly. When sympathetic Internet property owners, such as myself, start taking note and linking to a particular post, the organization should really take note.