Search Results and Scandals

When the college admissions cheating scandal plunged actresses Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman’s lives into chaos, it generated reams of negative news coverage for them both. Their Lightbox Search Scores – a proprietary data point that measures the “digital health” of a company, brand or executive – reflect the lasting devastation to their public images. Huffman measures a bruising -20 while Loughlin coughs up a punishing -65.

The Lightbox Score shows you how the world perceives your organization, brand, firm, executive – or in this case, star power – when confronted with that first page of search results. Derived by factors including sentiment, website domain strength and the search engine optimization of results, it ranges from negative 100 (catastrophic, in other words) to positive 100 (great and almost unattainable). A score of 60 to 80 is good and above 80 is excellent.

Loughlin and Huffman’s scores are in the range where their careers could be permanently “canceled.” Comparing their results with a scandal-free actress of similar popularity and career path provides a realistic model for where they should be. Mariska Hargitay has played a lead role on Law & Order: SVU for 21 years, making her the longest-running character in a primetime live-action series. She boasts an impressive +80 Lightbox Score – buoyed by a perfect storm of positive-sentiment news articles, third-party and social media profiles, and an owned-media charity organization, all on her first page results.

Between the two actresses, Huffman comes out slightly ahead, because her positive-sentiment Wikipedia and IMDb entries still rank on Page One of search results. Her jail sentence has also run its course, meaning some neutral-sentiment articles about community service have started refreshing some of her top results.

We designed Lightbox specifically for B2B companies – from PR and marketing agencies to private equity firms to health systems and hospitals. But searching for scandal-plagued celebrities and VIPs on our platform illuminates perfectly the correlation between bad news coverage and a bad Lightbox Score. And because Lightbox was designed for communications professionals, not SEO or SEM experts, the platform converts nearly a dozen complex and technical data sources into clear and actionable intelligence. For more information, check out the Lightbox FAQ page.

By carefully aggregating data from such an array of advanced sources in the context of real search results, Lightbox saves users the time, effort and frustration of managing multiple disparate tools and platforms. For many users, it also saves money – all while offering information in a format they otherwise would never see. And vivid reports for clients or management can be produced with a click of a button.