I will try not to make cracks about Rick Santorum. Oops, sorry. Let me start over.

It seems that Rick Santorum may be the butt of a tactic called a Google Bomb. Oops! There I go again. Sorry!

This is too easy.

For those of you who have not followed this, former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum has what he calls a “Google problem.” This “problem” goes back more than 8 years, when Santorum made comments comparing homosexuality to pedophilia and bestiality. His comments raised the ire of blogger Dan Savage, who writes an internationally syndicated relationship, advice and sex column called Savage Love. There is a really good article recapping the entire sordid history in Mother Jones.

So, how did this all happen? The story is actually a case study in how to build a brand online, and in a kinky kind of way, it is really brilliant. It is a campaign that combines brilliant strategy with flawless execution.

Here’s the formula.

Step 1 – Engage your audience in the strategy. Savage asked his readers to “come up with a sex-related definition for the word santorum as a form of political protest for the express purpose of “memorializing the Santorum scandal […] by attaching his name to a sex act that would make his big, white teeth fall out of his big, empty head.” Savage went on to publish a number of reader suggestions, and asked his readers to vote on their favorite.

Step 2 – Find the tactics to execute your strategy, and execute them flawlessly. Savage then created and launched the website, Santorum.com, also known as Spreading Santorum. The website itself was not a field of dreams – “if you build it, they will come.” No, you have to make people want to come to your website. And Savage did just that by asking his readers and other bloggers to link their blogs and website to Santorum.com. More and more people followed the links and the site kept rising higher and higher in the search rankings.

It’s a brilliant execution of link building strategy, and as a result if you type “santorum” into your Google machine, the number one search result that appears is the definition of that “frothy mix” that is now forever associated with Santorum’s name. There are thousands of links all over the Internet all serving to keep Savage’s definition of the term “santorum” number one in the search rankings. This blog post is now one of them. Cool!

Santorum is in what we might call “search quick sand” – the more he squirms and talks about it, the deeper he sinks. It’s a similar situation that Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder has found himself in, when he called attention to a pretty obscure (but unflattering) article written about him in the Washington City Paper, by filing a lawsuit against the paper. Now, type “Dan Snyder City Paper” into Google, and see what happens. Bingo! That’s how links work in the world of search. When more people start searching, and more people start linking, the results rise to the top.

Santorum could execute a similar strategy of course. He could ask his followers and supporters to link to his official website to boost its ranking, which I have done in this post to help the senator out. There are also paid search strategies that could boost his rankings and help to push this news off the front page of Google (and Bing, and Yahoo, and more). This isn’t the first time, nor will it be the last time that this has happened. Back in 2007, former president George W. Bush was the target of a Google bomb. Back then, if you typed in the term “miserable failure,” the search results linked to Bush’s official biography. Google eventually killed the tactic when it announced changes to its search algorithm, but this went on for over 2 years before the search giant finally intervened.

From our perspective, “Santorum” is a great Internet brand now. It has two elements that all great brands have – an emotional connection to the brand, and a passionate community that promulgates the brand. Unfortunately, this is probably not the kind of emotional connection and passionate community that the former senator wants.

He’s got some work to do, lest he sink further in the quicksand.

It’s a lesson for other brands too. You have to define your brand, who you are, and what you stand for. If you don’t, someone else will.

Topics: Dan Savage, Dan Snyder, Dan Snyder lawsuit, George Bush, Google, Google Bomb, Huffington Post, Mother Jones, Rick Santorum, santorum, Savage Love, Washington City Paper