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FEATURE
Seconds count in online reputation management
By Blake Cahill
News travels fast these days. A
YouTube video can birth its own
Internet meme within days of
being posted — and fade away just as
quickly. A single tweet can reach thousands
in seconds, and with a current average
of 600 tweets a second (as of
February), historically huge amounts of
information and opinion are now being
exchanged online at an incredible rate
With consumers on a constant stream
of updates, it’s very easy for a negative
story to grow legs and run away.
Seconds matter when it comes to noticing
— and then reacting to — online
sentiments that affect your brand. This
means companies and individuals must
be more aggressive than ever when it
comes to online reputation management.
Google has played up this “seconds
matter” idea with some of its more
recent search developments. In
December, the search giant added realtime
search features, which show live
updates from news and social media
sites on users’ results pages. Users can
even whittle down their search options
to just these by-the-second updates by
selecting “Latest” from the search
options menu. If there is enough buzz
around the topic, the latest will show a
full page of up-to-the-minute blog
posts, tweets and other social content.
Search results can also be filtered to
show only the latest “updates” from
micro-blogs like Twitter and
FriendFeed. Along with its real-time
search launch, Google added “hot topics”
— showing the most common subjects
in real-time web publishing — to
Google Trends.
These real-time updates only add to
the already lightning-fast results users
can get from Google’s Suggest tool.
Suggest is a less recent development
than real-time search, but many companies
are still under-estimating its potential
impact on their brand’s reputation.
Because Suggest, as its name implies,
suggests terms while a user is typing in
the search bar, users are shown relevant
and related topics before they can even
write a complete word. This near-psychic
tool is great if the most relevant
search terms for your brand are “brand
X wins award” or “where can I buy
brand X.” But if your brand is suffering
from negative buzz, Suggest makes it
even harder to downplay bad news. The
tides of online sentiment can quickly
turn searchers — even those with the
best of intentions — against you. For
example, I might be interested in buying
a Toyota, but when I type “Toyota” into
my Google search bar, the word “recall”
shows up in three different suggestions
— guess I’ll rethink that purchase.
Tools like this make it so much easier,
and faster, for consumers to find
good and bad brand PR online. The
question for PR pros now is how to
make sure that information remains
positive.
The first step is to get to know these
search tools. How do they work, and
how can you use them to your advantage
The same things that can make it
harder for you to manage your brand —
the speed and the suggestive power —
can make it easier for you to monitor
your brand and competitors. Just by typing
half of your company’s name into a
search bar, you can see what people are
saying about it online and what other
products, people or news it’s being
associated with. This means you can
know about potential PR problems
almost as soon as they start.
Having access to such a rapid feed of
information puts the responsibility on
you to react quickly if a crisis emerges.
If everyone else knows that director
Kevin Smith is mad at you for kicking
him off a flight, as happened to
Southwest Airlines a couple of weeks
ago, you have to be ready with an apology
and a PR plan of action.
Waiting until the news is old (which, in
Twitter time, is about two days, tops)
makes your company look out-of-touch or
worse, that it doesn’t care about its customers.
Even if your initial monitoring results
are good, you can’t rest on your laurels.
Brand perception can always improve.
Start by participating in the same social
networks that are feeding your brand’s
buzz. Enthusiasts will appreciate the
recognition and possibly build you up
even more, and detractors may just
change their minds — as long as you are
authentic, offer relevant information, and
are sincere about hearing them out.
Your PR team can also boost your
search results by reaching out to “authorities,”
from the New York Times to certain
bloggers, if what they offer is relevant to
your product and your audience. Of
course, no self-respecting authority will
write a puff piece just
because you ask them
to. Interact with them
on their terms, and
offer something that
is useful to their
brand. Step in as an
expert source, remain
open to interview
requests, and interact
one-on-one with Blake Cahill
influential social networkers.
The more you can tie positive
mentions of your brand to a high-authority
source, the more likely it is that the
casual searcher will be exposed to brandpositive
search results. And the more that
good buzz gets around, the more likely it
is to be searched, and thus suggested as a
future search term.
The more good news you have out
there, the less-prominent bad news
becomes, provided that you’re optimizing
that good news to show up in organic
search. Aside from tapping vibrant social
“Waiting until the news is old (which, in Twitter time, is about two days, tops) makes
your company look out-of-touch or worse, that it doesn’t care about its customers.”
networks and authorities, you can further
boost your brand name in search by riding
the news cycle. Keep your positive
search results fresh by regularly pushing
out new stories through traditional publications
and social networks. The fresher
it is, the more likely it is to show up on
that first page in the “Latest” results from
the social web. This doesn’t mean you
should spam; as the old adage goes, if
you have nothing good to say, don’t say
it.
Brand management has gotten more
complicated in today’s faster, louder,
multi-channel world. Fortunately, the
same tools that allow consumers to spread
information and opinions so quickly can
work to a savvy PR team’s advantage. All
it takes is vigilance, listening skills, and
authentic, timely engagement with the
right online outlets. Seconds count in this
world — use them wisely.
Blake Cahill is Senior Vice President of
Marketing at Visible Technologies in
Bellevue, WA.
20
MAY 2010 WWW.ODWYERPR.COM