Getting a Reputation
By: Alexandra Wharton
If you don't join the conversation about your brand online,
you'll likely get a bad rap.
If you didn't see it, you probably read about Snickers' Super Bowl advertisement,
"The Kiss," which featured two men unintentionally kissing
after they were both eating the same Snickers bar. Immediately after
the Super Bowl, much of the feedback in the blogosphere was that the ad was
funny. But the next day two gay civil rights organizations denounced the ad as
homophobic. The blogosphere reacted again, much of it negative about Snickers.
By that evening Snickers pulled the ad and took down its website. The day
after that, Snickers issued a statement expressing that they did not intend to
offend anyone. For the remainder of the week, much of the mainstream media
coverage was negative for Snickers and there was much debate back and forth
on the Internet.
 For weeks, the conversation raged online, which affected search engine result
pages (SERPs). Meanwhile the press, including The New York Times and
USA Today, picked over Snickers' bad judgment and missteps. More than two
months after that commercial aired at the Super Bowl, four out of the top 10
listings for the search term "Snickers" in Google's SERPs were about "The Kiss"
and three of them were negative.
"The Kiss" is the latest high-profile illustration of
the long-term repercussions online conversations
have on a brand's reputation. The content of what is
written on the Web not only affects the people who
read it, it affects the rankings on the search engines
and what the media chooses to cover.
The advent of consumer-generated media (CGM)
has transformed the concept of brand management.
Nowadays it is possible for a consumer to never encounter
information created or endorsed by a company,
but instead to rely completely on CGM for
recommendations and insights. The bottom line,
explains Rob Key, CEO of Converseon, is that "you
no longer own your brand – your customers do."
CGM includes community scoring programs
like eBay, feedback rating systems like Yelp,
opinion sites like Epinions, social networks
like MySpace sites, and blogs. Blogs range from
the very influential and highly trafficked, like
TechCrunch and Jeff Jarvis' BuzzMachine, to millions
of average blogs that in the aggregate can
reach tens of millions of readers.
When a company does something considered
egregious, such as produce an offensive commercial
or provide bad customer service, bloggers often
react harshly and create a far-reaching buzz called
a blog swarm, which can cause damage to a company's
reputation. In 2006, there were blog swarms
that had serious long-term consequences for companies
including Dell (dubbed "Dell Hell"), which
started when Jarvis complained about Dell's customer
service on his blog, and another surrounding
AOL, which began when a subscriber posted his
phone conversation with a rude AOL representative
to his blog.
Key explains that because blogs are spidered
well (due to their large amount of refreshed
content and inbound links) they can rank higher
than other sites, including corporate sites. In
the past, a brand could control the placement of
their site with tags and by the way it designed
the site's pages. But Jim Nail, chief marketing
and strategy officer of market influence analytics
company Cymfony, says that currently corporate
sites are getting outranked by consumergenerated
sites "and frequently those are the
ones that are negative."
However, it's not just the first or second listing
on SERPs that brands should be worried about.
Holly Preuss, principal of Granular Solutions, an
online customer acquisitions services company,
says companies should be managing the top 10
and particularly the top five because "above the
fold is crucial." Key agrees. He says it's similar
to how companies must manage their brand on
the shelf in the supermarket: Companies must
manage their top listings – "their shelf space"
– to maximize their brands' positioning.
Brands have to make their top listings a priority.
An April 2006 study conducted by iProspect
found that when users perform a search, 62 percent
of them click on a result within the first
page of results, and a full 90 percent of users
click on a result within the first three pages.
Andy Beal, creator of the site Marketing Pilgrim,
says sometimes companies find a negative
post and think, "it's only one blogger; it won't
have a long-term impact." But then a blog swarm
begins and the negative buzz ranks high in the
SERPs. Then the issue reaches a whole new audience
as mainstream journalists increasingly use
search engines to research new story ideas.
Because consumers rely heavily on the Web
as an authoritative source of information, managing
a brand's online reputation has become a
top priority for companies. Strategy consultant
Amanda Watlington says the participatory environment
of Web 2.0 requires companies to monitor
and measure their public perception so they
are able to take necessary actions to preserve
brand equity and maintain a brand's personality.
This necessity has spurred the development
of new strategies, tactics and tools.
Monitoring Tools
Agencies like Converseon and Nielsen BuzzMetrics
have tools for monitoring social networks,
blogs and communities. They measure the volume
of buzz, track the source and gauge the emotions
of a comment – whether positive, negative
or sarcastic.
But monitoring systems don't need to be expensive
or complicated. Granular Solution's
Preuss recommends that companies "think like
a customer" and Google themselves. Companies
can create RSS feeds based on keyword searches
and narrow down the results to a specific domain
with tracking systems like Technorati and Feedster.
Sites like BlogInfluence.net and SocialMeter.
com provide a snapshot of the credibility of
any blogger by showing the audience-reach and
popularity for the entered blog URL.
New tools are popping up all the time. Pronet
Advertising launched Serph, a tool to find what
is being said on social media websites. Do The
Right Thing is a community that rates companies
positively or negatively. Its goal is to hold big
businesses accountable.
Once You Monitor, Then What?
Converseon's Key says that once
companies mine the conversation for
detractors, they can separate them
into two groups. Continued on Page 2...
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