SEO Blog | Search and Social

The M&Ms of Online Reputation Management

davesnyder — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 05:54:26 +0000

Online Reputation Management is a term thrown around a lot today.

However, it is a concept few understand in full, and even fewer employ correctly.

It is a marketing concept that has its roots in both social media and search, and it is as much about salvaging brands as it is about creating brands.

When thinking about how I would discuss the topic in full, without leaving anything out, and keeping a bit of entertainment in the mix, I had to think of a metaphor that fit ORM (online reputation management).

I am a big guy.

I am a lover of candy.

So here are my M&Ms of Online Reputation Management.

Manage
Monitor
Measure
Mediate

Manage

Too many people think ORM is about defending reputation issues once they arise.

No.

ORM is about creating a management system that keeps reputation issues from ever arising.

The Customer is King

Before you even turn on your computer to setup and manage your online reputation you need to manage your customer service.

Listen to your customers’ issues with your product or service and redesign based on those thoughts
Add additional customer service outlets
Telephone customer service
Live site chat
Q&A
Customer forums
Hire the right people to perform your customer service. Remember that if the phone call is going to upset your customer more it isn’t worth having a customer service phone line.
Be proactive with your customer service. Send thank you notes, prefered customer discounts, or coupon codes. Let your customers know how much you value them.
Never say no to a customer. Do whatever you can to say yes, realizing once you utter that “no” you likely lose that customer forever.

SERP Domination

Once your customer service system is fully established it is time to open up your laptop and put on your SEO hat.

The #1 reputation issue facing companies in terms of search, are complaint sites such as the controversial RipOffReport.com.

Sites such as RipOffReport.com rank well in the engines, and often times for the names of brands and companies. This can create an ORM headache as millions of Internet users utilize search engines as their gateway to purchasing decisions.

The best way to combat these sites is to create a branded SERP (searc engine results page) that will keep the complaint sites of the first page.

You can create a branded SERP by utilizing UGC and Social Media sites to create content rich pages based on your brand. Twitter.com, FriendFeed, Youtube, and Flickr.com all provide great platforms for creating pages with brand equity.

The first step in this step in this strategy is both an offensive and defensive one, snag up all of your company’s names (CEOs names, high visibility employee’s names) in the social networks.

Below find a SlideShare presentation with some of my tips on this strategy.

Smo Tactics David Snyder

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.

Creating a Network of Publishers

After you have solidified SERP dominance it is time to look towards managing your reputation in the publishing and social media communities.

Every niche on the Internet has hundreds of blogs dedicated to it.

All of those blogs have publishers looking for content.

Befriend the publishers in your niche and feed them content. This could become a symbotic relationship if you ever need to put out a fire in your market.

However, even if you fair well on the web, those publishers can help get your message out when you have new product or service launches.

Monitor

Even if you have a great plan in place to manage your online reputation hiccups can happen.

You cannot please all of the people all of the time.

It is important that once you have your ORM management in play you create a quality monitoring plan.

The Free

The Inexpensive

The Expensive (Robust)

Buzz Numbers

Measure

You should approach your online monitoring system like any analytics system, you should put more energy into deciphering and utilizing the data than simply gathering the data.

An expensive shiny tool is great, and everyone loves the big name toy, but if you aren’t doing anything with your ORM system, then the guy using Google Alerts and spending time figuring out what that information means in terms of their reputation and product/service development is beating you.

Take the time to look at the data you are retrieving from your tools and make important decisions that can effect your future online reputation.

Utterances

One of the main functions of the your online reputation strategy needs to be a measurement of negative and positive utterances of your key terms online.

There is a wealth of information in these simple data sets.

How are products being accepted by consumers?

How is your customer service being viewed?

All of these questions can be answered by viewing how the Internet community is discussing you in terms of approval and disapproval.

Aproach it Like Its 1999

Before we became such a “give to me now” industry, we used to do things called Focus Groups.

These groups were comprised of differing types of prospective customers, whom marketers could bounce ideas off of to help better products and marketing approaches.

Fast forward to the days of the Google Machine.

You can now use the data extracted from your monitoring system as a Focus Group of the new millenium.

Dig through the data.

Look at the language your customers are using to describe your product. Isn’t that the language you are going to use when selling your product?

Take negative sentiment and use it to reshape products and services. This could increase sales and have an effect on your profits and losses. Combining old school marketing mentality with new school tools isn’t outdated thinking its just smart.

Mediate

This is probably the most important section of the M & Ms.

Don’t approach your online reputation management form the perspective of a company drone, approach it as a mediator.

In order to get customers to buy into your effort to better your online reputation, you need become transparent, and look out for the best interest of your customer as much as your company.

This is a sound business ethics concept regardless.

However, in the world of the social web it becomes increasingly important.

Stone walling for a company, and keeping a corporate face, and add gas to a consumer flame ware. By taking down that wall, admiting wrong doing, and acting as a mediator between “the brand” and “the customer” you can solve most issues with ease. You may even be able to turn negative sentiment into positive sentiment with your willingness to put the customer first.

The companies that are not willing to make these strategic changes are the same companies that have ongoing online reputation issues.

Learn from their mistakes, and mediate.

And there you have them…

My M&Ms of online reputation management.
Manage
Monitor
Measure
Mediate

If you setup a comprehensive plan focusing on each of these factors within your company, you will be ready for online reputation issues both big and small.

You will also be prepared to utilize the wealth of information available on the web to restructure your product, service, or even business to meet the difficulties that face all companies as they grow and age.

Online reputation management isn’t just about saving revenue, its about generating it as well.

Google’s Over Personalization

davesnyder — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 16:57:51 +0000

by Kate Morris

Kate Morris is an independent Search Engine Marketing consultant. You can always find her on Twitter @katemorris.

Google has been at the top of the PPC and personalization game for the past few years. Their goal has always been to produce the best results for the end user, no matter the results
to the advertiser.

In late September 2008, some friends on Twitter, SEOMike and Sallymander, asked about some weird results they were seeing on Google search results. As SEOMike pointed out, a search for one product (office furniture) followed immediately by another product (car rental) returned some odd paid advertisements.

The first search looks very normal. The subsequent search for car rental displays an ad in position 10 for “Office Outlet of Austin.” Please note that I am logged in, so Google knows that I am in Austin.

Now this is nothing “new,” there are industry mentions about it all the way back to mid-2007. WebmasterWorld first noted it on April 24, 2007. Sphinn had a story post on Google Personalization in July 2007, but even that didn’t get a whole lot of attention from the SEO community. It was noted by a few industry people, namely Danny Sullivan and Barry Schwartz, but hadn’t really gotten anyone’s attention.

Why not? Well I think SEOs on the whole (warning: gross generalization) are afraid of Paid Search. The real sexy part of this industry is the natural stuff, the code. So I personally think very few people paid attention to this development. Also, most of the examples out there made sense when the feature was announced. The idea of showing ads for a previous search in the results of the next one works when the searcher is just modifying the original search. The issue comes when people turn ADD and search for completely unrelated terms in succession.

I was a little perturbed by the situation and came up with a list of questions for my AdWords representative. She got back to me with some answers that were on Google’s site, but nothing specific. {Update: she called while I was editing this post with an answer to question 3 below}

So I am going to attempt to answer my own questions using what they give on the site and my own knowledge of PPC campaigns. I welcome anyone from AdWords to please comment on here or contact me with the real answers, inquiring minds want to know!

There are some ads and campaigns specific to user queries. For example, my company only has one product but different ways to describe it. We have developed different ads based upon search needs. So someone searching for “lower my interest rate” is different than “auto refinancing.” If the ads are served in different places, then the quality may go down.

Google: Whenever an ad is served based on the associated keyword’s relevance to the previous search query, the ad’s performance has no effect on that keyword’s Quality Score.

My Answer: Basically what I read this as is Google isn’t going to count it against us if the ad is not clicked on in this environment. We all know that CTR is still a determinant in Quality Score, so this is a relief.

How does Google pick which ad from the previous set is chosen to show on the next query?

My Answer: This question had two meanings. Which competitor’s ad and then which ad of that competitor?

What happens to dynamic ad titles?

My Answer: Lots of advertisers have dynamically inserted titles based on the keywords used. The ads might not make sense with the second query’s text. I cannot find an example of this, but my guess would be a hope that Google would default to the predetermined title, rather than using the second term query for the title.

What questions do you have about this? The idea with this “feature” of the Google paid advertisement system is good, but the execution is rusty. I would love to see more transparency on how Google controls relevancy and ad text based on the search stream.

Until that day, my recommendation is to just ignore it. We as advertisers cannot change what is being shown in this fashion. So until Google gives us more information I think we are best off making our campaigns and ad groups as streamlined as possible so that Google knows what we are selling and who we are targeting. Optimization is always going to be the key in search marketing!

CRM: The Key to Online Growth in a Downturn Economy

davesnyder — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 02:29:45 +0000

by David Snyder

In the midst of every recession there are a handful of people that actually see growth.

These individuals and companies learn how to adapt to the economic environment, and through ingenuity they make strides.

In the online world, many have already begun to make changes based on the current instability of world markets.

One way that you can begin to make changes to benefit your online campaign is by focusing more on CRM in the downturn.

For those of you that are not acronym savvy, CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management.

It costs 5 to 7 times more to induce a new customer to buy than it does an existing customer. This is a sound reality.

This means that instead of increasing pay per click budget in a downturn, you should think about increasing your email marketing efforts. It means instead of offering discounts to new customers for signing up or purchasing, offer your existing client base a rewards system for an increase in purchases.

This doesn’t apply across the board, for example if you are involved in debt consolidation products right now, the key is new customer production, but in general this concept is sound.

I figured I would add some examples of CRM concepts you can build off of, and I am hoping that those who read this post will add their own ideas in the comments:

1) If you only deal with one product, lets say an ebook for examples sake, then think about adding a supplementary product to your offerings. So for an ebook on golf techniques, lets offer a guide to golf courses of the Southeast, or an affiliate offering for Cobra drivers. Utilize the existing database to create new sales.

2) Up the ante on your email marketing campaign. DON’T SPAM. However, do segment your existing list and begin to create themed emails that will target different groups. If you sell shoes, segment your customer mailing list into brands i.e. customers who bought Nike go in one list, customers who bought Reebok go in another. Create themed emailers based on your segmentations, shoe brands in our example, and target these customers with a special offering.

3) Perhaps you have a service based business and CRM is the life blood of your business. In a downturn economy, customers will be looking to save money wherever possible, and a lapse in quality customer relations could make this decision easy.

Think about adding a live chat function to your site (as we have with Search & Social). It doesn’t have to be cheesy, like a picture of a sales rep with a headset on , it can be a tasteful chat button that simply pipes into your existing IM service.

GTalk gives you this option for free.

The people that will come out of this economic situation are those that learn how to meld little into much. That means turning shallow customer pools into sales and growth. It means matching a cut in marketing with a growth in revenue.

Share your CRM concepts below…

The Future of SEO

jordan — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 03:29:55 +0000

By Jordan Kasteler (Utah SEO Pro)

Search engines are getting smarter day by day, technologies are advancing minute by minute, and search engine optimization specialists need to get on board and prepare for the future of SEO.

While many traditional SEO tactics and strategies may always hold true, creativity and ingenuity is needed to master the newest formulating technologies being developed now.

Let’s take a brief look at some of the upcoming technologies and explore possibly ways Internet marketers can and will be taking advantage of these.

User Behavior Data & Personalization

Google offers many services that collect our data, surfing habits, and search behavior like:

Google Analytics
Google Desktop
Gmail
Google Toolbar
Google Chrome
GOOG-411
Bookmarks
FeedBurner
Google RSS Reader (thanks Sugarrae)
Etc

With this data they can provide “more relevant” results to searchers by analyzing how people behave with the content provided to determine it’s adequacy and by personalizing the search results for users with behavior patterns.

Microsoft recently filed a patent about BrowseRank, a PageRank competitor, to determine content relevance and adequacy by measuring a users behavior and engagement with the content. Some of the things they desire to measure are:

Bounce Rate
Time Spent
Click behavior
etc

With this data they can determine if content is actually valuable to a user by seeing how they interact with it rather than just basing it’s authority off links.