A territory's reputation burns in two days

It took ten years to build a city's tourism. Two were enough to call it into question.

It's not a catchphrase. It's a technical description of how the online reputation of a place works, and it applies to any municipality, consortium, or accommodation facility. It also applies to yours, if something happens to you tomorrow.

A place's reputation doesn't live in the comments

When a negative event occurs, the instinctive reaction of those in charge is to defend themselves where the attack happened. They respond to comments, write a press release, ask for respect.

It's wasted energy, because a territory's reputation does not live there.

It lives in three precise places. The first is the search results page when someone types the city name. The second are the autocomplete suggestions that appear as they type. The third are reviews, which nobody actually reads but everyone looks at as a number.

None of these three places is the comments section of a post. And none of them can be corrected by responding to insults.

Why two days are enough

Search engines and aggregators give enormous weight to novelty. Content published today is worth, for ranking, much more than content published three years ago. It's a sensible choice, it serves to make you find fresh news instead of old ones.

But it has a brutal side effect. When fifty articles come out in forty-eight hours about the same negative event, those fifty articles occupy the present. And the present is all that searchers see. Ten years of positive communication remain there, indexed, correct, but buried under a mountain of more recent stuff.

Tourism works like this. Someone is evaluating where to go, types the name of the place, looks for eight seconds at what comes out, and decides. They don't read. They look at the general tone of the first screen and move on.

No one cancels a vacation because of a news event. They simply never book it, and you don't notice anything, because a missed booking leaves no trace. You don't receive a cancellation. You only get a month emptier than expected, and no explanation.

What doesn't work

The indignant press release doesn't work, because it adds another search result that contains the city name next to the word of the negative event. You are unintentionally reinforcing the association you want to break.

Asking for content removal almost never works, and when it does, it comes months later, i.e., after the season.

Responding to offensive comments doesn't work for the reason I explained in the first episode of this column. Every response is fuel for the algorithm.

What really works

Only one thing. Produce the present.

If the problem is that forty-eight hours of negative content occupy the first screen, the solution is to fill the following weeks with your own, indexable content about the city name. Not defensive press releases. Things that already exist and that no one ever talks about. The events calendar. The stories of the businesses. The places. The dates. The work of the people.

Boring stuff, apparently. But it's stuff that, within a few weeks, returns to occupy that space that is currently occupied by other things. Because even negative content ages, at exactly the same speed with which it rose to the top.

The difference between a territory that recovers in a month and one that carries the label for years is not the severity of the event. It's whether someone, in that month, kept publishing.

This is also the reason why a tourism consortium or an administration should have a constant editorial presence before something happens, not after. Those with a deep archive absorb the blow. Those without it are defined by the only moment the world noticed their existence.

It's not unfair. It's just how a machine works that rewards those who are there every day and forgets those who only speak when they're in trouble.

Segnale & Rumore is a column about how digital communication really works, between algorithms, platforms, and online reputation. It is written by Calogero Bono, who works with these machines every day.