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Fending off bad viral PR is a lot like surviving grade school. Say you’re in class and you or someone near you farts (it doesn’t matter who actually did the deed). The guy next to you shouts, “Hey everybody! Johnny farted!” and the classroom immediately starts laughing at you. There are two ways to combat this negative publicity. You can insist that you didn’t do it. “No guys! Honestly it wasn’t me! It wasn’t! Honest!” But no one will be listening to you because they’re all too busy laughing. They will believe whatever interests them most, and won’t hear you. Or, you could retaliate with a snappy comeback, “He who smelt it dealt it!”

Now everybody is laughing at your accuser.

When I saw pictures of what was obviously not a smart car in an accident with two trucks, I knew I could either reply to every post and tweet I could find with, “That’s so obviously not a smart car, stupid!” (don’t ever do this), or I could turn the tables on whoever first released the photo as that of a “smart car.” It was important not to attack the intelligence or the cars of the people laughing at the picture and spreading it. Angering them would only cement their dislike for the car and would more likely than not spur them into further spreading the rumor out of spite. I needed to attack the viability of the source and get the people spreading the pictures laughing with me.

A quick trip to Snopes turned up no article about a smart car accident, so I trawled auto forums until I found post where users identified the wheel in the photo as not belonging to a smart car. Additionally I drew upon my own knowledge of Photoshopping pictures and composed a post debunking the fake smart car crash photo. I included smart car crash footage from YouTube to underscore the lack of evidence that the car could have been a smart while increasing the relevance of the post. And lastly, I found out what keywords people would be searching for this photo with, and I optimized the whole post to reflect keywords.

Before my blog was even a month old, before I had even finished its design, Google had my post listed as the number one result for “fake smart car crash”, “fake smart car accident”, “fake smart car photo”, and “fake smart car picture.” I had 1500 unique visitors over the span of a few weeks and 2700 by the end of the month. I posted the link to my article in reply to a few tweets and on one forum. From then on out, people would find my article via search and post links to it in any conversations that arose about the topic. That’s how social media works best. With today’s technology it’s easy to spread lies, but luckily, it’s just as easy to spread the truth.

A week after my post, the photo was posted on Snopes, and is now roundly debunked, not showing up at all in the Twitterverse.

Do I think love my smart car singlehandedly thwarted the viral photo? Not at all. Snopes and the natural cycle of viral birth and decay can take most of that credit. But I can proudly say that for a full week before Snopes debunked the photo, whenever people went looking for “fake smart car crash” or what have you, they at least found my post which discouraged the falsehoods surrounding the picture. If those 2700 people took what I wrote to heart, that’s 2700 people not believing a lie. I’d say that’s a win.

Part 2 of this entry will come when I put the finishing touches on the site. I’ll go into more depth about the nifty code I used, the inspiration behind the design, and it’s public reception when I officially launched it.

Related posts:

• My Fizzled Durham presentation: Everything I needed to know about Social Media I learned from Pikachu

A screenshot of Karen Luk's WordPress-based illustration gallery site.

We decided to use with WordPress as a backend solution, because Karen was already familiar with its controls, veteran blogger that she is. The artwork and comics pages would be handled by Alex Rabe’s NextGEN Gallery Plugin. The front page would need a custom template while the blog posts were renamed “announcements” and scooted off to the News section. And as always, I optimized the code for accessibility, both human and search engine. The design lent itself to clean, semantic markup.

I snapped the site together, and it was up and running in time for her to pass out business cards with its URL at the convention.

All in all, this was a fun little project, and it was great to have the chance to help out a fellow illustrator under the burden of a looming deadline. I frequently visit her site to see what she’s uploaded. Now go check out her work!

1. Akismet It comes with Wordpress and protects you from a lot of spam. An obvious choice, but I thought I would put it here in case anyone new to WP was wondering if they should activate it or not (answer: YES).
2. AskApache Password Protect Helps improve security and pairs nicely with WP Security Scan (which we shall get to below). Edit: I ran into problems with this plugin and permalinks, which ended up causing my entire admin area to generate 404 errors. Be warned!
3. Wordpress Automatic Upgrade Upgrading Wordpress is a bit of a pain, to put it mildly, but this plugin takes some of the oof out of Upgrade Day by automating most of your work for you.
4. Chunk Urls for WordPress You know when someone posts a long URL in the comments and it breaks your blogs nice design and plain looks ghastly? This stops that. At last. Thank goodness.
5. WordPress Database Backup WP-DBManager Just in case something breaks, it’s always good to keep a backup of your database on hand. With Wordpress, all your content, your entries, settings, etc, is kept in a database. Your site’s template or “theme” and administration files are about the only things that are kept on the server as live files. So backing up your files isn’t good enough to restore an entire site . But this handy plugin can be set to email you a copy of you database every night or every week, depending on your preference. Nice insurance against losing everything your wrote last week because you were twiddling with a new set of plugins. Note: I had trouble getting WP Database Backup to work, but WP-DBManager does backups and optimizes your database and lets you run database queries from the comfort of your administration area. Why settle for several slipshod plugins when you can use just one that works?
6. WP Security Scan After you’ve installed Wordpress, there are many things you can do to improve your blog’s security, but you might not know what they are. This little fellow is like having someone hold your hand through the securing process. It will tell you what files need changing and where to find them. Perfect for anyone new to Wordpress. There’s even a password tool!
7. WP Super Cache Wordpress likes to bog down, but caching can help reduce server load and speed page displays. WP Super Cache is pure gold in that case.
8. FeedBurner FeedSmith I partly considered this a “buzz” plugin, but seriously, Wordpress comes with so much lovely RSS support, you might as well make full use of it.
9. RSS Feed Signature Adding a little “this article by so-and-so, for more visit such-and-such.com” at the end of your RSS feed is not only a nice touch, but also helps exercise your copyrights by applying credit where it is due.
10. Lighter Menus This plugin only effects the admin end of things. It helps reduce the number of clicks it takes you to get to where you need to go simply by displaying all the administration submenus in easy to reach drop-down menus. No more clicking around in circles trying to find where the settings for some obscure plugin scampered off to!
11. Maintenance Mode I had to use this quite a bit when setting up this site. It provides a lovely privacy screen that only admins can see behind, politely telling everyone that your blog is down for maintenance and that you shall return at a set time. The page displayed is completely customizable, as well, and you can easily turn it on and off for quick touch ups and testing new plugins.
12. Redirection It lets you redirect pages Great if you like to move things around later, and if you know what you’re doing, it comes in handy for SEO tweaking (like redirecting index.html to index.php–a trick I learned about in this handy article regarding Wordpress search engine optimization).
13. Search Excerpt An older plugin that still works remarkably well. It highlights the terms users searched for in their search results. I found out about this and the following plugin from Yoast’s excellent article on improving Wordpress’s search results.
14. Search Suggest Are you sure you were searching for wrdpress? Would you like to try searching for Wordpress? That’s what this plugin does. Fantastic.
15. TinyMCE Advanced I know how to code my entries by hand. I technically don’t need more options on my toolbar when writing a post. I’m a big girl. But then again, why type all that in HTML view when there are buttons that will do the work for you? TinyMCE Advanced gives you many more option when writing a post.

Do you have any plugins that you recommend for a basic install?