Li Evans will speak at Search Engine Strategies: San Jose

If you’d like to catch her words of wisdom, here’s her schedule and topics:

Social Media: Managing Conversations and Reputations When the User Is In Control on Wednesday from 2:30-3:45
Extreme Makeover: Live Twitter & Blogging Clinic on Thursday from 12:45-2:00
Images & Search Engines: Getting the Full Picture on Thursday from 2:15-3:30

Back in the first post of 2008 on this blog, I predicted that 2008 would be the year of Reputation Management.  Given the trends we’d seen in customer referrals, it seemed like a pretty safe bet. 

Over the course of the year, we did indeed gain some buzz monitoring / reputation management contracts, which we successfully completed.  However, reputation management was not an over-riding discussion point throughout the year.  Just as Local Search wasn’t in 2006 or Mobile Search in 2007, it was just a part of the bigger picture of internet marketing.  Although, you could say that each was indeed a larger part of that picture by the end of each of those years.

SEO and potentially, PPC can be large parts of your reputation management solution, social media involvement can help your SEO and reputation management, and so on and so forth.  What you really need to look at for 2009 is that bigger picture.  Where does everything fit together?  Where are the holes in your internet marketing plan?  Where should you focus your budget, and how flexible can you make your spend?

In 2009, what I’d like you to do is not to focus on the shining promise of ‘the next new thing’ at the expense of everything that’s already working for you.  But instead, keep an eye out for the potential of that next new thing, and be prepared to test and see if it can / will work for you, either now or in the future, and how it plugs in with what you’re doing now.

Actually I don’t, heck I don’t even drink coffee (a fact which has caused a few heads to be shaken in disbelief around the office), but someone does hate Starbucks enough create an “I Hate Starbucks” site and get it ranked 8th for the term “Starbucks”. To be honest, it’s not a very engaging site, and owner has some links on there that I’d say are not too relevant (unless you believe that Mesothelioma has something to do with coffee, in which case I’m even more thrilled that I don’t touch the stuff), which strikes me as being a little shady, but maybe that’s the only way the owner can fund the hosting fees for the site.

So why was I taking a look at Starbucks in the first place? Well, I read in a UK newspaper an expose about the Starbucks corporate wide practice of leaving a tap running all day long for ‘hygiene reasons’. Worldwide this meant that 23 million liters (or over 6 million gallons) of water were being wasted every day. That’s a staggering amount of wastage, especially for a company that has sells a product that’s supposed to work towards getting clean water for children around the world (as a side-note, Flash? Really, a site comprised solely of Flash, and slow loading Flash at that? Ugh).

So what happened? Well, by the next morning Starbucks had issued a statement that they were looking into alternatives, but they had yet to remove the edict (individual stores in the UK took it upon themselves to do so).

The fact that this issue was raised in the top selling newspaper in the UK meant that Starbucks were very quickly made aware of this issue (in fact, I’ve no doubt that a reporter from the Sun was on the phone to Starbucks UK looking for the follow up story before that issue hit the stands. But what if this issue had been raised on a small site such as “I Hate Starbucks”? Would anyone from Starbucks have noticed? Maybe they would have, since it is ranking for their name, but even so, it’s doubtful that there would have been a statement sent out the next morning. But what if a forum or three picked up the story, or maybe someone from TreeHugger.com saw it, and wrote about it, spreading the word near and far? Would they know then? Would they know when to act? Where to respond? Who to talk to?

If you have to think about these issues, it means that you likely don’t have a robust Buzz Monitoring solution in place. That’s something we can help you with, whether it’s doing an initial, historical scan, or whether it’s continual monitoring, we can show you what’s being said about your company, your brands, your products, your industry, and your people. Not everything said about you will be in a major newspaper, and you’ll need to know about any issues, good or bad, before you know how and where to respond.

Today, I’m off to SMX East, and will be presenting on the topic of Reputation Management. So, I thought I’d put together a quick 6 step guide to managing your reputation.

1. Find out whether people are talking about your company, your product, your executives, etc.

Alerts and RSS feeds will give you an insight into what’s going on now.  But, you need to go back into the past in order to understand what’s been said before and to create a baseline.

2. Find out where they’re talking.

Don’t just assume that Google and Yahoo will give you every discussion on every site…they won’t.  There are many instances where a site or a forum discussion won’t be indexed, either intentionally (closed forums, noindex, blocked through robots.txt, etc), unintentionally, or because the search engines just don’t dig deep enough into the site.

3. Identify the influencers.

Which channels are the customers engaged on?  Which sites contain the greatest degree of conversations?   Which sites get the most eyeballs?

4. Determine the sentiment.

Are the discussions predominantly positive or negative?  Are there certain locations which sway one way or another?

5. Plan and implement your participation in the discussion.

Maybe you want to reward the positives, talk to the negatives to understand their concerns, and maybe move them to the neutral or positive column.  Or maybe, it’s just that you want to be part of the conversation, showing that you are listening.

6. Identify gaps in the conversation.

If you find that there’s an audience out there, but no central location for them, then, maybe there’s the potential for your company to create their own site for the audience to use.  And, if you can get them there, and they stay, it’s going to be so much easier for you to monitor the conversations.

Or alternatively, you could just send an email to Nan at serengeticommunications.com and let us figure it all out for you.

Last week, Facebook started allowing search engines in to crawl any public areas of the site. Now, groups and wall posts are starting to show up in the search results (i.e. “I Hate Comcast”). Is this a bad thing or a good thing?

I think it’s both. It’s a bad thing in that this content now goes out there to the search engines, so that anyone that searches on the specific phrases could now potentially see that. It’s possible that people were under the impression that ‘what happens on Facebook stays on Facebook,’ so users may be surprised to see this out there (In fact, I saw several open groups that had non-disclosure items in their rules. They can’t really be applied with the data now out in the non-Facebook world as well).

So, what’s the positive side? Well, it’s now so much more easier for a company to find out what’s being said about them on Facebook. All they have to do is set up an alert on – site:facebook.com mycompany – and away they go. So much easier than having to monitor different groups individually, or use the quirky search functionality in Facebook.

So, you’ve done some buzz monitoring, and you’ve found out that on a fairly well known forum in your field – which is visited by your customers and potential customers – someone has trashed your company / product / service offering / customer services / CEO / etc.

What do you do next?

There are a several approaches you can take:

1. The Ostrich approach. If you stick your head in the sand, it’ll obviously go away… right?  Wrong. Not responding shows that you’re either not listening, or that you consider the conversation beneath you.
2. The Bull in a China Shop approach. You blunder into the conversation without really listening, disparaging everything the user said as wrong.  You don’t become part of the conversation – trying to just shut down anything negative.
3. The Cuckoo approach. You sneak into the forum under false pretenses - i.e. pretending to be a satisfied customer – rather than disclosing that you’re representing the company itself.
4. The Worker Bee. For whatever reason (corporate policy, etc), the company doesn’t respond, but employees in their spare time do. It shows a willingness from some in the company, but as it’s not ‘official’ – there’s an element of the Ostrich in there.
5. The Labrador approach. Open, honest, and trustworthy. Your response states that it’s from the company. You reply in an honest manner, stating when you’re wrong and when the poster is wrong, and suggest ways to correct the issue if further steps need to be taken. Then, you actually follow through.
6. The Weasel approach. As per the Labrador approach, except there’s no follow through, any promises made of improvements, or changes to products or processes are empty and / or false.  This will eventually be seen as such, which will then undermine the validity of your future statements.

So, which animal do you want your company to be? Obviously, in an ideal world, we’d all say Labrador.  That’s the intent that most people have when they start out responding to issues. But, when emotions or corporate policy get involved, that Labrador starts to morph into one of the other creatures.  Most notably the Bull emerges when dealing with people either just trying to get a rise out of you (Trolls, or maybe even competitors disguised as Trolls) or people who have decided that they really don’t like your company – and nothing will change their mind.

If your company forbids any social network interaction, then they’re going to be the Ostrich.  There is also the potential for employees to be Worker Bees or, if the policy would make them fear for their jobs, Cuckoos.

So, in order to be that faithful Labrador, you need to make sure that you are honest, open and transparent (hmm, maybe I should have used a Paris Hilton analogy, since we can get HOT out of those 3).

Sure, you can still have a corporate policy that prevents you from saying certain things or responding to certain issues, but be honest and open about that too, and people will understand.

If you’d like to hear more on the topic of Reputation Management, there are still a few spots left for our 2nd Wednesday Webinar, which this week is on this very topic, so sign up for our Reputation Management Webinar here.

…You’re supposed to say “Wednesday”… you know… so I can say “Webinar!” and then… Oh forget it.

Throughout the month of August, Serengeti Communications will present a weekly, one-hour Webinar every Wednesday (say that five times fast). We’ll be covering various Web 2.0 and marketing strategies each week and helping your business get just a little bit better at using that new-fangled thing called the “Internet.” (All the cool kids say it’s going to be the next “sliced bread.”)

So, what are these Webinars going to cover? I’m glad you asked.

And, all this for only twenty-seven easy payments of nothing. But wait, there’s more…call right now and you can get your whole team to attend for nothing. That’s right just twenty-seven easy payments of nothing. That’s nothing for you, nothing for your co-worker, and the extra special low price of nothing for your great-uncle Ted.

So, invite your co-workers, your bosses, and obscure relatives to The Wednesday Webinar Series. Operators (i.e. Stacy) are standing by so Register Today.

Back in the early ’90’s in the UK there was a commercial for the soft drink – Tango. This commercial showed that when you drank a can of their soda, a little orange man would run up to you and slap you in the face – “You’ll know when you’ve been Tango’d”

As you may imagine, this spawned a spate of copycat incidents across schoolyards in the UK, with children suffering ear damage as their classmates would sneak up on them, slapping them, or Tango-ing them. Shortly after this, the commercial was banned. Tango later reshot the ad, replacing the slap with a kiss.

Today, I found out that another orange based company – Cheetos – has decided to go a couple of steps beyond the Tango campaign. With their Random Acts of Cheetos commercials they actually encourage people to commit vandalism. i.e. if someone deserves it, throw some cheetos in the laundry with their best whites… for the neat freak you know, coat their keyboard in crumbled cheetos… and so on.

Aside from the lawsuits, do they realize the potential reputation management hit that they could take from this? Already they have people talking about how irresponsible they are being, what about when people actually start doing what they’re told and damage other’s property? Are they prepared for that kind of backlash? Do they have a Reputation Management plan in place? From the looks of it, there’s one heck of an opportunity for any negative press to hit on page 1 for “Cheetos”. Will it happen? Well, it depends on whether the campaign picks up or not, apparently it’s been running for a while now, and so far it has little traction.

What’s the most common reason brands find themselves on the “ouch” side of social media?  I started thinking about this after reading Jeremiah Owyang’s list of brands that have been punk’d by social media in the past few years.  As I made my way through Jeremiah’s list and began adding some of my personal favorites, my mind sorted each incident into broad categories:

• Brandjacking for nonprofit cause (Louis Vuitton, Starbucks, Chevy Tahoe)
• Brandjacking for fun
• Silly PR firm gaffe (nothing deceitful, just not terribly smart…like the Johnson and Johnson Baby Camp example on Jeremiah’s list)
• Sneaky, underhanded behavior designed to deceive (Walmart, Sony, Whole Foods, Burger King)
• Poor quality (products that don’t work properly, bad service, mistreating customers, etc. – Dell, Kryptonite, Delta, Ted, AOL, Best Buy, Panasonic, Comcast)

Sadly, deceitful tactics like fake Blogs are the reason for a big chunk of the social media problems companies have experienced.  Hopefully enough of these incidents have been exposed to frighten big brands (and their PR firms) into better behavior in the future.

But the biggest category, hands down, is the last one on my list:  Poor [fill in the blank].  In the days of Web 1.0 (i.e., the digital newspaper, the uncomplicated landscape of “one to many” communications), companies didn’t have to worry too much about trivial things like product quality or making customers mad by holding them hostage on a runway for ten hours (Delta). 

Those days are obviously over.  Today, if you abuse your customers (by selling them a poor product, not delivering the customer service you promised, or letting rats run rampant through the kitchen you use to cook the food you are selling), chances are, you’ll be busted in a big, very public way. 

It really isn’t that complicated (Bull Durham: You throw the ball, you catch the ball, you run around the bases), but some companies seem to be having a hard time grasping the new realities of a Web 2.0 world.  Perhaps, come to think of it, this is why we’ve seen so much deceitful behavior.

Here’s a thought: Instead of hiring a PR firm to create a fake Blog and convince America that the Blog is real and that people really love, love, love you, why not…

Play fair.  Clean up your own mess.  Say you’re sorry when you hurt someone.  Share/give back. 

Oh, wait…those rules are for kindergartners, right?

No company can protect itself from the ”ouch” side of Social Media completely.  However, if you focus on delivering what you promise and treating your customers with respect, you’ll go a long way towards mitigating the risk of being punk’d.

In a presentation that I gave at SMX-London last year, I used Somerfield (a supermarket chain in the UK) as an example of a firm that was having an issue with Universal Reputation Management. Back then, there was a YouTube video ranking for their name that was displaying with text talking about how Somerfield was not a nice place to work (basically the last comment on the video). Six months on, I thought I’d take a quick look and see if that problem was still there. As you can see, that comment has been replaced by a more recent, fresher one, in this listing displaying in the 10th position.

Good news for Somerfield, now there’s a barely literate semi-positive comment about them instead. Knowing the issues that they’ve had over the last year (see this self created reputation management issue from last Easter as an example), I thought I’d click on to page 2 and see if anything was bubbling up over there. There in 20th position was this listing. (note I’ve only edited the image to pull the Google bar under the image for display purposes).

Huh? The exact same URL on YouTube displaying in 10th and 20th positions. I went over one more page… Yep there it was in 30th… One more page, and there it was in 31st. The same URL, from a Google property, displaying 4 times in the first 4 pages.

I’m sure it’s not intentional, and I’ve not seen it for other searches that I’ve done, but if I were Somerfield I’d be monitoring that YouTube video as much as possible. I’d make sure that the latest comments were as positive as they could be, especially when this video is receiving as much SERP visibility for their name as it is.

Additional: It’s not just the video, it’s also happening with some listings. Do a search on Somerfield Massive, and look at the 10th result, which should be an article from the Independent on battery farming titled “How Do You Like Your Eggs?”. Go to the next page, there it is again, go to the next page, once more it appears there. In the first 150 results, I found that same article, with the exact same URL (no session IDs or strange parameters to throw it off) 5 times.

Update: Naturally the SERPs have changed so the actual results I found yesterday are not there (I’m glad I had Li confirm that she saw the same thing), but if you do that search for “Somerfield Massive” above, you’ll now see this blog post in 10th and 11th, at the same http://endlessplain.com url, so while the players have changed, the issue remains the same.