Listening In the Internet ‘Hallway’
Photo credit: www.trueforcedloneliness.com/
Received some nice amplification of my recent interview with the Spiral16 blog:
You’re going to be hearing more about this as we get further into the social media age, but Alex Greenwood outlines the case for monitoring social media as a means of growing a business or other organization and protecting its interests. Isn’t that what PR is about?
[...]
Alex Greenwood likens social media monitoring to being out in the hallway, say, the Internet, listening to the talk there. How do you know your organization’s name will come up? You don’t until it does, or a reporter calls. But even if your organization doesn’t come up for a while, the names of competitors, or the emergence of new business conditions, will be generating buzz. If you’re listening, you’ll be gaining valuable new business intelligence.
“Companies and organizations that monitor the social media space today – and use the data to address problems and opportunities –are years ahead of the game,” Greenwood believes. “Aha,” he adds, “a competitive edge. Who doesn’t like that?”
Read more at: Listening In the Internet ‘Hallway’ | Flack Me.
Step In Front of the Ball
Ouch.
I just received a call asking me to join a national PR consultancy cooperative. They found me through Google search while looking for a PR firm in this area. After a couple of phone calls and some vetting on both sides, I got the offer and accepted.
They found me on Google–and I think mostly because of this blog. Blogs are good for search engine optimization, or SEO. (More on that in a minute.)
I have a client who hates blogging–thinks it’s a chore even though she’s a very good writer with a real knack for blogging. She was telling me today her business had fallen off and I said one very inexpensive marketing activity was to update her blog daily.
“I know,” she said wearily. “But–”
I told her about the consultancy call–one I received purely by virtue of blogging (and having a cool website, many thanks Shelly!). My client thought it over and agreed to blog every day for a few weeks to see what effect it would have.
Here’s what I think she’ll find (source: NewMediaSocial) if she does it:
But new evidence strongly demonstrates the SEO and traffic-building benefits of regular daily posting — that’s every day daily — are very compelling. In fact, when social media blogger Justin Kownacki reasoned that fewer, longer, more carefully written posts might be a better strategy for him than shorter, daily posts, he kept careful track of the results.
It wasn’t pretty. His page views declined 36% in a matter of four months. His Alexa traffic ranking, relative to other websites, slipped from about 162,000 to over 245,000.
What Kownacki’s data doesn’t show is whether the fall-off was related primarily to declines in organic search visits, but that’s the conclusion drawn by Bruce Clay in a related post.
The lesson here: Google and the other search engines are on a constant, minute-by-minute scouring of the web for fresh, high-quality content. Google treats blog posts and news posts as a special type of content, often rewarding them with high rankings right out of the gate, then (unless external links argue otherwise) usually letting them sink in the rankings as they age.
Heck, I don’t consistently blog every day, but I’m going to.
Let me use a baseball metaphor:
You don’t get on base unless you swing the bat, wait for the pitcher to walk you or you step in front of the damn ball. If you want to guarantee you get on base, you know what you have to do. Sure, it stings a little, but it gets you there.
Of course, it can also kill you. But I digress…
Share what you know, what you care about and what drives you–share it with the world on your company or personal blog. Get in the game. You may even hit a homer.
Google Commands Big Cash from PR-Damaged Brand
Public relations is all about reputation management–your credibility is the coin of the business realm. We’re pretty hard on companies and brands that take a cavalier attitude about their credibility–because once you lose that, it’s all over. Or is it?
Admittedly, we have strongly implied that you can’t buy your way out of a PR disaster, but the oily BP sure makes us think twice:
Before BP could stem the oil gusher at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, it unleashed $100 million in ad spending, largely on network TV, to stem the damage to its image. But it also started spending heavily where it had never spent much before: buying ads in Google’s search results.
How much did BP spend on search? In two months, BP went from spending very little on search advertising — about $57,000 a month — to becoming one of Google’s top advertisers, dropping nearly $3.6 million in the month of June alone, according to an internal Google document obtained by Advertising Age. That pushed BP into the upper echelon of search advertisers, in a league with Expedia, which spent at least $5.9 million in June, Amazon, which spent at least $5.8 million, and eBay, which spent at least $4.2 million.
This is a significant outlay, even for BP, which spent $94 million on advertising in 2009, and $78.7 million in the first six months of 2010 alone excluding search, according to Kantar Media. Search advertisers only pay when their ads convert or get a click, and in June the crisis was still at full-boil, driving clicks on BP&’s ads. But if BP kept spending at this rate, search would’ve become one of its bigger advertising line items by the end of the year, up there with network, cable or spot TV.
[...]
BP’s increase underscores how important Google has become for reputation management, and in the battle for public opinion. In the wake of the spill, Google was a natural first stop for people seeking information, and BP bought up dozens of keywords associated with the disaster such as “oil spill,” “leak,” “top kill” and “live feed” as it vied for clicks with news stories, images of oiled wildlife and plaintiff attorneys trolling for clients.
via What Big Brands Are Spending on Google – Advertising Age – Digital.
According to BP, ad expenditures during the active spill were $5 million per week.
BP’s ad strategy now follows the typical trajectory of crisis PR, he says. It didn’t start out that way. BP was slow to connect with consumers and gulf residents right after the spill. Tony Hayward’s numerous gaffes didn’t help the company’s image, which came across as inept and out of touch. There’s little question that his mismanagement of the company’s public image led to his ouster as CEO.
So how’s the advertising paying off in PR improvement? A recent AP poll says that “some 66 percent of those surveyed continue to disapprove of BP’s performance, down from a whopping 83 percent in June.” Though still dismal, it does look like the ad spending is helping. However, it’s also certainly due to the fact that time has passed and the oil spill isn’t leading the newscasts anymore. The public has turned to the latest Sarah Palin Facebook pronouncement, Paris Hilton’s cocaine possession arrest and even something important, like the president’s new rug.
Sure, we’ve seen the TV ads BP is using to rebuild its tattered, oil-stained image–that was as predictable as a blob of oil on the beach at Destin. But who would’ve thought they would have spent all that coin on Google search ads?
Clearly, the internet is now the 800 lb. gorilla of reputation management, and Google has some serious bananas.
Hat tip to Shelly Kramer for inspiring this post.
Ignorance isn’t bliss. It’s expensive. Invest in Online Brand Protection
Source: http://www.sanfranciscosentinel.com
The internet can be either a boon or boondoggle to companies when it comes to the monitoring of their online brand presence.
For companies that pay little attention to their online storefronts, the rewards are continual brand hijacking, abusive pay-per-click tactics and outright attacks on brands.
MarkMonitor, an enterprise brand protection firm, offers solutions and services to safeguard brands, reputation and revenue from online risks. In their white paper “Online Brand Protection: A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating a Proactive Strategy” MarkMonitor recommends a series of protective measures, including:
- Identifying all domain names in your portfolio
- Manage your portfolio proactively
- Monitor for potential abuse
- Respond to abuse
Great paper–in particular, we recommend you take a look at the section on monitoring for potential abuse. You can do this inside your company, or there are several online services that offer affordable methods to do this for you. No matter how you do it, the key is never-ending vigilance.
Creating an ideal domain portfolio is a good start to establishing and protecting your corporate brands online. However, it is just the beginning. While defensive registrations enable you to own and control the domain names that may be abused by third parties, it is simply impossible for any corporation to register every potentially harmful domain name. Therefore, the next critical step for defending your brands online is to establish a strategic monitoring program that constantly searches the internet for potential abuses, including:
- Cybersquatting
- Domain kiting/tasting
- Trademark infringement
- Traffic diversion schemes
- False associations with unrelated third parties
- Pay-per-click abuse
- Sponsored in abuse
- Logo/image abuse
- Offensive content
- Channel non-compliance with brand guidelines and/or pricing
Many small–and even larger–companies cannot afford to hire a person devoted to these critical tasks. This is what the bad guys count on. Again, a monitoring service is worth the price if it can save you the damage of brand equity loss, not to mention real money gone forever due to internet banditry. (They can also help you identify new customers–but that’s another post).
A comprehensive, proactive social media monitoring and interactive strategy is also a hedge against bad actors, as your customers will be in regular communication with you and often tell you when they spot a spoof site or a shady deal involving your brand.
Brand managers should assess the degree to which website traffic is diverted to sites that abuse its brand and the amount of lost advertising revenue that is diverted to fraudulent pay-per-click sites, You should look at quantitative and qualitative indicators, including:
- Degree of fewer “negative impressions” due to successfully shutting down web site which degrade your brand
- Improvement in website traffic due to successfully shutting down traffic diversion tactics (Cybersquatting, pat-per-click sites, paid search ads)
- Better quality response rate to online advertising due to successfully shutting down fraudulent pay-per-click sites
- Productivity gains and/or hours saved per week in detecting and responding to infringement by leveraging available technologies and solutions
From the public relations perspective, monitoring is critical in protecting your brand’s reputation and credibility. One of the services we provide at AlexanderG Public Relations includes online brand monitoring and image management. This helps us head off potentially bad PR by identifying and addressing problems before they become full-blown crises; it also helps our clients determine where best to apply their messaging and online resources–often increasing market share in the process.
Nasty stuff outlined in this post is happening to oblivious companies everyday. The message is simple: if you don’t know what’s going in your online storefront, it’s the same as someone setting up a fake store just around the corner from yours in real-life –selling low quality goods and ruining your good name.
Ignorance isn’t bliss. It’s expensive.
