Delivered a presentation with Clint Schaff from M-80 on Blogging and your Brand yesterday in Las Vegas. We had a decent audience size and mixed up the session so that we could drive audience participation and conversation verses sitting in the front of the room reading from slides. Viaspire blogger captured the essence of session. Lots of good discussions and insights. Appreciate everyone who attended and participated in the discussion.
Blake
Entries Tagged 'Reputation Management' ↓
Live from BlogWorld Expo
11.8.07 by Blake Cahill {Blake Cahill, Blogs, Brand Management, Consumer Generated Media, Customer Experience, General, Reputation Management, Social Media, Social Networks}
Pats Fumble Reputation
9.13.07 by Mike Spataro {Brand Management, General, Mike Spataro, Reputation Management}
My hometown New England Patriots have proven beyond a reasonable doubt how fast an organization can fumble away its reputation. Raise your hand if you thought Randy Moss’ reputation would be higher than his head coach when the season started.
It took owner Bob Kraft years to build one of the most well respected brands in the NFL, if not all of professional sports. Along the way the Pats won three recent Super Bowls and became the class of the league. In the time it took to click on and off one video camera, they are now being labeled as world-class cheaters and their harshest critics are located in the shadows of Gillette Stadium - namely their own fans.
“We’re the bad guys and it seems like everyone out there hates us,” Geoff Gottbrecht, a senior on the BC High School football team, told The Boston Globe. The Pats were always looked upon as the team that worked the hardest to find ways to win. Now, the team’s sportsmanship is being questioned on a national scale. “It’s really disappointing. This really sets a bad example,” said Mitch McClune, another BC high student.
You can argue this is all on coach Bill Belichick’s head and not the Pats, but he’s tarnished the reputation of the entire team and, in the process, added another negative notch in the belt of the NFL, which I alluded to last month is facing troubled times. This week’s “Inside the NFL” show on HBO spent a chunk of time on the New England cheating scandal, players off season arrests (comparing the NFL to a season of The Sopranos), and pointing out that a recent poll found politics is viewed as more honest than pro sports these days.
The Patriots have a lot of work ahead of them and there will be no fast-track reputation makeover for them. They are going to have to earn their way back up the reputation standings one step at a time. How they fare will depend greatly on how their embattled head coach handles himself starting with this week’s penalty.
ZoomInfo is Not your Brand Manager
7.24.07 by Michael Martinez {Brand Management, Reputation Management, Search Engine Optimization}
“Reputation management” and “brand management” are becoming confused in the media and in the various search engine optimization blogs and forums. As more companies express an interest in managing their online images (which is also an entirely different thing), they seek out SEOs for advice. Most SEOs don’t really understand reputation and brand management and they are, in general ill-equipped for the task.
You measure your reputation by what people say about you.
You measure your brand by what you say about yourself, by how much other people know about you and by how much information is available about you.
A typical search engine optimizer doesn’t work in a world where reputation and brand are distinct. To the average SEO, search results are a road map to traffic, not a source of information. A highly skilled, very experienced search optimizer understands the value of the first impression that query page makes on the user, but even at such a high level most SEOs are thinking in terms of positioning one Web site, not in terms of measuring the impact of 10, 20, or 30 Web sites.
Several popular SEO blogs have been advising people on “cute” methods for managing their search reputations. These are link worthy blogs that spend a lot of time in social media sites, and the bloggers often speak at SEO conferences. In terms of professional community standing and recognition their credentials are impeccable. These are not the wannabe second-stringers who are still parroting what they read in SEO blogs and forums.
Nonetheless, the typical SEO advice on reputation management is for you to rush out and create profiles on all the social media sites. Now, maybe if you operate a world-renowned delicatessen that has been featured on Food Network and some mean-spirited, disgruntled former customer is bashing you on blogs — maybe setting up a profile at ZoomInfo and LinkedIn will help you. Maybe not.
But if you’re, say a Fortune 1000 company, ZoomInfo and LinkedIn won’t cut the mustard. Not to belittle the great delicatessen owners who appear on Food Network and the Travel Network, but their brands are much smaller, very different entities from large corporations. And the online reputation of a specialty restaurant owner is much more personal and emotionally tied to the personality of the owner than the online reputation of a publicly traded company.
Furthermore, the more visible your brand is the more content there is on the Web. High profile individuals may generate a great deal of content, some of it quite unfavorable. The odds are pretty good that as search references of your name increase some of those unfavorable references will appear on sites that outrank ZoomInfo and LinkedIn. What many SEOs who preach the value of Zoominfo and LinkedIn don’t appreciate, however, is that profile pages by themselves don’t necessarily rank well.
In Google’s search results, for example, your social media profiles may never appear for your name. I have several that don’t even begin to approach the top 10 results for my own name. I am a published author, I have contributed to several high profile and popular blogs and Web sites, and I create my own Web content under my own name. Social media profiles just don’t score as highly relevant for my name the way other, more traditional content does.
Many profile pages on social media sites don’t accumulate links from other pages (either on the same sites or externally). Without those links the social media profiles don’t build enough internal PageRank to be admitted to Google’s Main Web Index. Hence, those pages won’t be allowed to rank well. That is why when you look at some of the new reputation managing SEOs they are occasionally posting links to their social media profile pages from their blog posts to build up the value in those pages.
With all due respect, that is pretty blatant and obvious search engine results manipulation. Now, it’s second nature to many SEOs to drop links in blogs and forums. A lot of them do it to the extent that SEO forum moderators very strictly monitor link placements and Google launched the “rel=’nofollow’” initiative to persuade (and in some cases bully) Web site operators to help devalue links that were clearly being placed for manipulation.
You can shape your search results management any way you prefer, but ZoomInfo doesn’t really tell people much about you. It certainly doesn’t address your brands very well. In fact, your brand and your reputation may differ radically. You may have a reputation for being curmudgeonly, abrupt, and abrasive but you may have a brand that people respect and appreciate.
So how can a social media profile page help you manage both your reputation and brand?
There is no one secret special formula for success. In fact, there is no one correct way to manage a brand campaign and a reputation. Each type of campaign needs to be strategically shaped and carefully implemented. You have to know the audience you’re dealing with, and how many audiences you have to address. You have to know where the search engines are placing their trust. You have to know where people are looking for information.
Social media sites are productive resources in some brand and reputation management campaigns. If your intent is to engage people in direct communication, some social media sites may work very well for you. But engaging people in direct communication doesn’t necessarily manage your reputation or brand.
All it really takes is one dedicated hostile voice that repeatedly points fingers at you on every possible Web site, and your reputation (possibly your brand) will suffer. How you respond to the hostile entity is a topic for another day, but if you’re hoping that ZoomInfo will manage your brand in a storm of criticism, protest, or false allegations, you need to be more realistic.
When people search on your name, be that your own name or your company’s name, do you want them to see ZoomInfo or do you want them to see your Web site? That’s really where reputation management and brand management begins. Where it all goes and where it ends is up to you, not to the social media marketers.
Search Reputation Management: Is That All There Is?
7.10.07 by Michael Martinez {General, Reputation Management, Search Engine Optimization}
My colleague, Blake Cahill, asked that I offer some thoughts and follow-up on the John Bell at Ogilvy PR’s ideas about Search Reputation Management.
Many people have been blogging about the value and methods for implementing search reputation management over the past few months. Even the major media have begun running stories about it.
Your visibility in the search engines, as John points out, begins with you: what you do, what you say, and in some ways where you say it. Whether you need several domains to work with is really open to discussion. One person can be very visible across multiple domains without having to control them. That is also true of corporations.
Before you run out and buy 10 domains for your reputation management campaign, assess where you have already achieved online visibility. Maybe you can leverage that existing visibility into helping with your reputation management.
John also suggests you create a profile in “all the major social networks”. This is a standard tip being offered in many places. It’s a very good idea for people who have developed little to no visibility on the Web. But for people who have already blown the gates off the visibility race track — especially those people who are now experiencing some hostile negativity — social media profiles rarely do the trick. These pages by themselves don’t have much value to the search engines. Major blogs, news stories, and even specialty stop-the-guys-i-dislike Web sites often prove to be much more visible than profile pages.
If you already participate in online discussion groups, help people find your profile pages by linking to them in obtrusively from time to time. Use your name when you do. This helps people find pages where you can tell them a little about yourself without raising sensitive issues. It also helps the search engines decide the profile pages may be worth promoting. But don’t expect to knock the New York Times out of the search results with a social media profile page.
John also suggests you “get social publish”. I agree. If you are establishing a reputation, you need to share your passions and/or your expertise in a way that will encourage people to interact with you. You should treat people with respect and dignity, even though some of them won’t return the favor. Always be courteous and professional because that one angry response may not only come back to haunt you, it may launch a long, emotionally draining battle you’re not really interested in.
Be honest. Show integrity. Share the best side of yourself. People will support the good things you do, often by linking to your Web sites and what you write.
Finally, John suggests “stop doing bad things”. Of course, not everyone feels they are doing “bad things”. Different points of view may present both sides of an argument as “the right thing to do” or “vital for the needs of humanity”. If you cannot avoid provoking people you need to accept that you’ll be in a constant state of defense until the prevailing winds change in your favor. That may be a long time.
Reputation management begins before there is a problem.
Customer Experience - A Bad Example or a New Way to Get Rid of Unprofitable Customers?
7.9.07 by Blake Cahill {Blake Cahill, Brand Management, General, Reputation Management, Social Media}
Sprint has decided to cancel service for over 1000 customers because they call customer service too much. Is this a Sprint service/product, customer service or a revenue/cost per customer issue?
Every call to a customer service agent at a large company costs that them money. Anywhere from $5.00 to $20.00 depending on whether the call is handled domestically or internationally and how long the agent/customer talk. A few calls are factored into an average customer support cost over the lifetime value of the customer. However, imagine if a customer has a $19.99 a month plan or low-value plan and they begin to call over the threshold of the model. Therein lies the Sprint story with this group of customers. They simply become “unprofitable” or less desirable to the company.
The decision must have been an economic exercise likely executed by a product or pricing organization within the company without much consultation of the corporate communications or public relations teams. The impact of bad press from the move should be interesting to watch. A quick scan of Technorati revealed a couple hundreds posts, but how many people read the Wall Street Journal article, saw the MSN coverage, or MSNBC.com story online? A couple of million or more? For a 1000 customers that a pretty bad hit to a company and brand that have acknowledged issues with their customer service programs in the wake of the merger with Nextel.
One just hopes other companies don’t begin to take this approach to managing and exiting their customers. Maybe if customer experience was better then those customers would have call so much.
