Corporate Reputation Management Articles by SEO Speedwagon

July 14, 2008

Track Corporate Blog Activities Online

There are a variety of paid tools available to marketers regarding what bloggers are saying about their clients. For people looking for a free alternative to seeing what's being said about their clients in the blogging world I would recommend checking out Trendpedia. It is currently in Beta but offers some basic information to help marketers create a benchmark before they conduct social media marketing activities. Trendpedia is a good starting point if you don't have a large amount of money to put into social media monitoring services and need basic data related to your campaigns.

The only major downside to this site is that users can't download the data that's presented when search queries are conducted. Other than that I think this site can be a good resource for people who looking for a snapshot regarding their social media monitoring campaigns. This can be a good to tool to use initially while you are looking for a professional social media monitoring solution.

Track Corporate Blog Activities Online
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July 01, 2008

Micro-blogging Submission Tool: Brabblr.com

Trying to keep up with friends across the myriad of micro-blogging communities can be quite difficult if you have many profiles created in this space. Rather than trying to go to each one on a daily basis to keep your followers updated wouldn't it be cool if you could log into one location and zip your messages to all of them. Well, Brabblr is now making that possible through its "Alpha" platform, where users can make submissions to the following micro-blogging communities with one submission:

- Twitter
- Pownce
- Jaiku
- tumblr
- Jabber
- Frazr
- Wamadu
- Mambler
- Boomloop
- Wevent
- gmail
- Roundhousekick

Brabblr calls itself a mashUp for the micro-services and looks like a promising solution for people who are on the go and have little time to keep their friends up to date with the changes taking place in their lives. Here's another interesting way to make sense of our busy lives!

Micro-blogging Submission Tool: Brabblr.com
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March 07, 2008

Social Media: Why Some AD/PR Agencies Don't Get It

I have seen a tremendous amount of hoopla online over the last couple of months related to social media marketing strategies being implemented by AD and PR agencies. Unfortunately, many of these types of agencies seem to be trying to make a square peg fit into a round hole. Rather than spending time researching for portals to have their clients generate buzz related to their products and/or services, they are taking a shotgun approach to social media marketing.

At the beginning of each social media campaign there should be a great deal of research conducted to find a needle in a hay stack; being a niche marketing opportunity. After a good deal of social media portal candidates are selected then the next step in the process is finding out what type of content the active users will find interesting. This way you can be sure that the most active members within these portals will positively interact with your clients brands, products, services, etc. Building a presence within each social media portal will take time and should be looked at as one of the most important activities one can conduct on behalf of a client.

If you are actively engaged in social media portals and constantly creating content that users can find meaningful, then you will ensure your clients have the greatest impact when they introduce new material to active bloggers, and social media participants. Then your biggest challenge will be monitoring how much buzz you are generating for your clients and not whether or not you are reaching the right target market.

Social Media: Why Some AD/PR Agencies Don't Get It
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February 05, 2008

Reputation Management: How to Track Corporate Buzz Online

Tracking corporate buzz can be easy if you know the right Web sites to monitor online. Companies wishing to track their corporate buzz online should utilize blog and social media Web sites that have active users who are engaged on a daily basis with a variety of brands from companies across the Web. In an attempt to make this easier for you marketing professionals out there I have compiled a list of the sites you should monitor along with brief descriptions about each site.

Serph - A search engine that crawls online social media sites to find the latest buzz about a company, product, etc.

Technorati - Allows users to search for user-generated media (including weblogs) by tag or keyword.

Digg - A great place to monitor if your clients are in the technology industry.

Reddit - A social news site that was launched in June 2005 and is a competitor to Digg.

ShoutWire - Provides discussion of news, entertainment and videos every day, as well as a provides a free blogging platform with image and video hosting.

Propellor - Owned and operated by AOL LLC, a Time-Warner company and provides news and video online.

NewsVine - Site built with the purpose of allowing users an efficient way to read, write, and interact with the news.

A great way to monitor these types of sites is to set up Google Alerts that use your company name, products and services, or corporate professionals plus the name of the social media/blog news sites as your search query. This way you will be notified via email if Google's search results are displaying any information about your brand at any of the sites mentioned above.

Reputation Management: How to Track Corporate Buzz Online
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November 23, 2007

SEO Won't Help You...

... When you're Sears and your site's not prepared for the Black Friday Effect:

SEO Won't Help You...
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October 13, 2007

Web 2.0 and Social Media Optimization Trends: Memetrackers

I have been scoring the Internet the last few days trying to find resources related to Web 2.0 and/or Social Media Optimization and I came across the idea of “Memetracker Web Sites.” From a Web 2.0 perspective these sites are geared towards collecting information about “hot topics” or things that create a “buzz” in the news or Blogging communities and make this information readily available to the masses. Wikipedia defines the word “Memetracker” as “a tool for studying the migration of memes across a group of people. The term is typically used to describe Web sites that either: A) Analyze blog posts to determine what Web pages are being discussed or cited most often on the World Wide Web, or B) Allow users to vote for links to Web pages that they find of interest.”

The first Memetracker site was most likely Gabe Rivera’s news and politics site called “Memeorandum.com,” which used an algorithm to collect top stories from a plethora of news Web sites and Blogs.

Here’s a list of the top old school Memetracker sites online:

1) Blogniscient
2) BlogRovr
3) Blogrunner
4) Blogsnow
5) Buzzfeed
6) Chuquet
7) Daily Rotation
8) Feedable
9) Megite
10) Newroo
11) Slashdot
12) StrategicBoard
13) Tailrank
14) Techmeme
15) Technorati Kitchen
16) Tinfinger
17) Topix.net
18) TruthLaidBear

How do I benefit from visiting these sites?

Although these sites are viewed as old school Blog news aggregators, they can still be utilized from a “Reputation Management” standpoint. These Blog sites will enable you to see exactly what is being said about your company products, services, complaints, etc. Use these sites as monitoring resources and be proactive in terms of reputation management – don’t get caught being reactive!

Web 2.0 and Social Media Optimization Trends: Memetrackers
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August 21, 2007

Microsoft Talking Points Parroted: Day II

Article or Press Release?:

It's always seemed strange to look for information on a brand, and to see it appear both in the organic search results and at or near the top of the paid listings. Why spend money on a brand term that's going to deliver a top five organic result for the same query anyway?

If this sounds eerily similar to what many Wagon Riders thought yesterday was a lede of questionable intelligence, then your parotid attention may have kept you from swallowing full gulp. For those caught in the act of mastication, though, it's good to know that the above meme is being pushed by Atlas, owned by Microsoft, neither of which are owned or own or like Google, beneficiary of the great majority of the branded ad spend currently under PR assault.

Here at The Wagon we get the same strange feeling the Talking Point pushes in the quote above when we fix our eyes on a graph like the below:

With search behavior like that, why in the world would you want your brand to appear more than once, let alone a single time, in the same screen space above the fold? Good advice from the originator of democracy of screen space.

Microsoft Talking Points Parroted: Day II
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August 20, 2007

New SEM Industry Term Coined: Disposable Clicks

We sure did have fun with this Quote of the Month while taking The Wagon for a spin this morning. From the magazine that takes itself so seriously it demands all caps, ADWEEK, we are treated to this breathless lede:

New research by Microsoft suggests a big chunk of search ad spending is wasted because advertisers pay top dollar for high ad placements clicked by consumers who are en route to their sites anyway. Listings tied to such "branded" keywords, typically a company's name or products, eat up about half of search budgets, Atlas estimates.

Wasted, indeed. Heard while The Wagon pulled up to fill itself up with coffee:

It's like saying Applebee's doesn't need specific signage or identifiable markings on its building to show out-of-towners where it is, because people are going to go there for dinner anyway. That is exactly how stupid this is.

Isn't this also an argument against any brand advertising of any kind?

New SEM Industry Term Coined: Disposable Clicks
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July 12, 2007

Web 2.0 Product and Domain-Naming -- from 1877

I came across a perspective-offering gem today while listening to the Writer's Almanac (Real Audio version).

It's the birthday of the man who gave us the Kodak camera, George Eastman, born in Waterville, New York. He was working at a bank when he got interested in photography around 1877. He took his first dry plate photograph the next year with the camera that he invented—a view of the building across the street from his window. He developed this little handheld camera, and he called it the Kodak because it was easy to remember, difficult to misspell, and it meant nothing, so it could only be associated with his product.

With company (i.e. domain) names always a hot issue, especially as they pertain to search reputation management, typo traffic, and owning the SERP for your company/product searches, it's quite interesting to hear similar philosophies dredged up from yesteryear.

Stories like this always make me happy that I'm not in charge of the search presence for the Hilton hotel in Paris.

Web 2.0 Product and Domain-Naming -- from 1877
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May 02, 2007

More Sitelinks Hijinks with Google Duality : A Tail of Two 301's

It's not just Rosie enjoying the new Google Sitelinks Value Meal. FON, that guerrilla Wi-Fi startup knocking at Starbucks doors via their neighbors, is also now seated at the table:

But note in the above the two highlighted URLs, which are indeed the same page, do a bit of a pa de deux with how they serve the language, in this case English. The Sitelinks serving places the language as served from the en subdomain, yet that very URL redirects in this manner:

So that subdomain 301s from its English language subset that the subdomain indicates back to the non-language specific setting at the WWW level, whence it makes another direct turn back toward the language specific:

The whole trail of 301s serving to have moved the language specification in the URL from subdomain to folder level, with a waving pass through nothing. Quelle bonne idée !

Perhaps it is if it's another way to order a Google Sitelinks Value Meal.

More Sitelinks Hijinks with Google Duality : A Tail of Two 301's
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April 26, 2007

Rosie O'Donnell's Google Sitelinks Value Meal

An interesting thing happened on Rosie's way out of the door of The View; her sudden, earth-shattering departure caused a quake of an anomaly in the Google result for her name -- namely, the exact same URL appearing twice as a result, both #1 and #2:

What gives? SEO purists might argue that as result #1 is in the Sitelinks formation and Rosie’s site itself links out in the main navigation to her blog, the URL highlighted above exists as both a shortcut that will save users time, per Google’s explanation of the criterion for URLs selected for the formation--

Our systems analyze the link structure of your site to find shortcuts that will save users time and allow them to quickly find the information they're looking for.

--and also exists on its own, as a blog, and thus merits a listing apart from one tied to Rosie's site, ergo the Value Meal Result.

But surely this rare achievement cannot be helped by the fact that Rosie's site itself argues against that very justification with its Title Tag. Aren't those supposed to be quite important, and importantly unique?

Does Rosie's massive influence extend even into the algorithmic sphere?

Rosie O'Donnell's Google Sitelinks Value Meal
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April 05, 2007

Rudy Giuliani Finally Winning the Race to be Himself

We said we'd keep an eye on Rudy's race against himself, and almost a Month to the day after we noted he was losing, he's now finally pulled into the lead, at last vanquishing Wikipedia as the most relevant Rudy Giuliani on the web.

It is appropriate now, literally, to say the candidate is coming into his own.

Rudy Giuliani Finally Winning the Race to be Himself
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March 07, 2007

Over Half of 2008 GOP Presediential Candidates Outranked by Wikipedia in Google for Own Name

Here and there The Wagon has been known to get political in its analysis, often to illustrate pols know not what they do on the internet. Today we have a new honey of a rankings scandal courtesy of techPresident:

In a recent survey, I found that Wikipedia has an expansive influence in organic Google search results for 2008 presidential candidates. For each candidate, their Wikipedia entry is ranked no lower than 5th place by Google. In addition, the Wikipedia entry ranks higher than the election web presence of that particular candidate for 25% of Democrats and 60% of Republicans.

Now first, lest the uninitiated, casual SEO observer not fully grasp the above search incompetence, it is quite difficult for a major brand not to rank first for its own brand name. You almost have to be doing something wrong at the site level, and most competent SEOs will be able to discover the reason for the glitch and remedy the error fairly quickly. The higher the brand recognition the greater the ease, if for no other reason than Google understands that a pure brand search will almost always signal an intent to find the brand site itself. Google's product is relevancy, as we like to say here.

Is there a more recognized brand on the techPresident list than America's Mayor, [Rudy Giuliani]? Yet at second he languishes, behind the Wikipedia entry replete with detailed analysis of the controversies not broached on the site he would like for you to rather visit instead.

The difference between these first and second positions? We know from the massive AOL search data leak that on that engine, at least, about half of all searchers click on #1 and south of 15% on #2, at least for the 20 million searches performed by 658,000 subscribers in that data sample.

If you are losing half of all searches on your brand that should be visiting your site uncontested, you should try and do something about it. Let's keep an eye on Rudy and see if he does.

Over Half of 2008 GOP Presediential Candidates Outranked by Wikipedia in Google for Own Name
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February 22, 2007

Steve Jobs and Apple - 1997 and Today

This post has very little to do with search other than a) I found an interesting article while searching for some Apple information at Google, and b) I continue to plod along on a large post that will discuss how Apple is missing out on tremendous revenue opportunities via search.

I'm neither a particular fan nor foe of Steve Jobs, although I think he's extraordinarily smart and savvy. I was doing some research and found a great article from Business Week that's almost exactly 10 years old. In 1997, Jobs had just returned to a languishing Apple as an "advisor" to then-CEO Gil Amelio.

The article is full of tidbits that seem either silly or ironic, including quotes from Jobs like "They want me to be some kind of Superman. But I have no desire to run Apple Computer. I deny it at every turn, but nobody believes me." Later that year, of course, he became Apple's CEO.

Some parts in particular are quite prophetic:

These days, every doing at Apple is examined for the Jobs factor--a management change could be a power play, a strategy shift might be proof Jobs is remaking the company, a new product direction becomes confirmation that the good old days of ''insanely great products'' are returning.

While progress was slow at first, the stock chart since then (along with a line of products that speaks for itself) tells the tale:

Steve Jobs and Apple - 1997 and Today
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September 11, 2006

Welcome to the Real Wiki, George Allen!

Allow me to play Oliver Stone for a moment. With the exception of the initial incident, I’m filling in the blanks entirely because I don’t care about the blanks. For the purpose of this post, my sole concern is illustrating how Wikipedia is impacting Election 2006, at least in one race (does anybody appreciate puns anymore?).

The initial incident is this video. Virginia Senator George Allen twice threw a racial slur at a gentleman holding a video camera. All else is conjecture.

Somebody at the Webb Campaign must have realized the power of natural search and the power of Wiki with respect to natural search. Perhaps it was the same person that realized the power of a blog. When the Webb campaign members got together and thought aloud about how to get this video in front of as many people as possible, somebody must have said, "YouTube!" Maybe those same people sat with Jim Webb and wondered how to get people to YouTube, and further, they just might have wondered if people would recognize this racial slur.

At this point, our conjectural hero would have gazed triumphantly over at Jim Webb, as theme music filled the room, and proclaimed, "You just keep talking about macaca. Wiki will tell people what macaca means AND show them the video." You see, our hero would know that search engines love Wiki, and our hero would also know that, although anybody can contribute to Wiki, it bears the authority and credibility of an encyclopedia. Get your story at Wiki, and trusting eyes will find it.

Now let’s see where google directs people that want to know more about macaca.

ADW: Macaca fascicularis: Information - Doesn't appear relevant. Move on.
ADW: Macaca fuscata: Information - Doesn't appear relevant. Move on.
Macaque - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - "For the slur see Macaca (slur)" I wonder who added that to Wiki.
Macaca (slur) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - that looks about right. And what do they see when they get there? A definition, and later "Macaca and the George Allen Campaign Incident." And what else is there? A link to the Washington Post article and the YouTube video. Funny, those are the 5th and 7th Google results, respectively.

Now allow me to play Mastercard for a moment.

George Allen's Campaign - Big Bucks, One Whammy
Jim Webb's Campaign - Smaller Bucks, No Whammies
Video Upload at YouTube and Contribution at Wiki - $0
Racial Slur Pointed Directly into a Camera - Priceless

Update: The Wiki Battle Rages On
One of the coolest Wiki features is the edit history for a given page. Do you want to keep your eye on this vicious cock fight (politically speaking, of course)? Click here. And after that, click here.

Update Update: Destiny Takes a Hand
Macaca is now redirecting to Macaque. The former Macaca page is still here.

Stay tuned to find out how our fearless hero responds . . .

Welcome to the Real Wiki, George Allen!
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July 11, 2006

Are you B2C or B2B? Are you sure?

Wendy Davis at MediaPost shared some interesting numbers earlier today (pulled from a JupiterResearch report) about how small businesses use the web for online shopping.

According to the report,

Sixty-two percent of those that make online purchases said familiarity with the vendor is among the most influential considerations; 46 percent said the same for online research and 39 percent said that advice of friends and business associates plays a major role. (Respondents were asked to choose up to three factors that influence online shopping.) E-mails and coupons were influential for just 21 percent of small businesses’ online purchases.

In the quote above, I've emphasized the key factors that drive employees to select an online vendor:

• Familiarity with the vendor. How strong is your web presence? Does your name consistently appear for searches within your niche?
• Online research. Do you own your online reputation?
• Advice of friends and business associates. What's your track record for keeping customers happy, and giving potential customers a reason to come back when they're more motivated (i.e., further along the purchase track?)

One of the report's major findings was that "almost eight in 10 small businesses, 79 percent, shop online regularly, compared to 65 percent of online consumers."

The end result is a blurring of the lines between B2B and B2C. In other words, while you can be pretty sure that an order of 8000 boxes of thumb tacks are a "business" purchase, there's also a pretty good chance that when Mark in Memphis orders a microwave oven, he might need it for the company break room. And maybe Mark's company is growing, so he might need an espresso machine soon.

What does this have to do with Search?

• Do your page descriptions and web copy (and thus, your search results) discuss corporate relationships? Corporate accounts? Bulk discounts? Despite the type of business you're in, are you friendly to both the big "B" and the big "C"?
• Does your PPC dayparting (changing bid strategy based on time of day) make (perhaps faulty) assumptions about who's coming to your site at 2 pm?

Search results mean very little if the user clicks over and doesn't find what she's looking for - either specific products, or even a subtle vibe. Ensuring that your site appeals to people when they're both on and off the clock, despite what you think you know about your vertical, is never a dumb move.

Are you B2C or B2B? Are you sure?
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April 17, 2006

Stopping Short on Brand Search Repution

Search Reputation, that grande brand dame of the corporate boardroom, has just become a bit more difficult to please. While most big brand boardrooms are finally just learning to be mindful of the brand itself in the SERPs, a new study by Hitwise, as reported by ClickZ News, illustrates there's a bit more to worry about than just one keyword:

The number of brand-related searchers diverted away from a brand's site can also be affected by other words associated with the trademark. When people searched for "allstate," for example, 83 percent ended up on the brand's Web sites. But when "allstate insurance" was the search term, only 74 percent of searchers found their way to the company's sites.

We've always referred to that here as "Brand +". And we've learned that while most companies have a big algorithmic advantage out of the blocks on Brand + phrases simply due to "Brand" they own being a large part of "Brand +", they aren't always leveraging that advantage, and thus suffering unnecessarily in the SERPs, for primarily two reasons:

1) They aren't aware of the exact "+" composition of "Brand +". Read: keyword research.

2) They don't use these full Brand + compositions in html text copy on page, anywhere.

Other factors obtain, of course, and if it were really that simplistic Search Reputation Management wouldn't be the burgeoning subset of SEO it is today. Yet the above two points are really foundational elements to any Brand + issues becoming resolved.

We like to start by reminding them how much time, money, and years were spent building the brand. Why stop short on the + side of things?

Stopping Short on Brand Search Repution
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April 03, 2006

A Search Reputation Storm on the Horizon

They know the storm's a comin'. One has to imagine pesky results three and four in the search for [mcdonalds] on Google may very well be joined by the upcoming book and film in the top ten, pushing out the tidy .ca, .co.uk, .au, or .sg international domains the Golden Arches have constructed to aid the global fastfood aficionado.

Yet amidst the gathering, ominous clouds, for which even a "war council" has been convened, according to the AD AGE story--

Even though details of the film are closely guarded -- it's being filmed under the code name "Coyote" -- McDonald's has gotten enough wind of the plot to warn franchisees. Both projects have been key topics in recent meetings at the Golden Arches, the latest two weeks ago, when McDonald's executives outlined plans to the U.S. franchisee advertising committee to fend off any potential damage.

--you'll note nary a word in the article about potential repercussions at the search engines. And it's not because they don't expect just the type of buzz that would immediately propel a constellation of sites to the top:

Indeed, where industry executives could easily pooh-pooh the low-budget documentary "Super Size Me," it will be much more challenging for McDonald's to deflect the potential impact on consumer attitudes of a star-studded drama from one the hottest film producers on the planet.

No, it's likely because they just don't know it will hit them algorithmically. At least in the highest places where decisions are made. If and when it does, though, you can be sure there will be a panicked, digital "war council" convened --replete with at least a few spam advocating mad-hatters-- and a furious wave of SEO retrofitting will ensue.

If you're interested in Search Reputation Management this is just too perfect a laboratory setting not to regularly grab some goggles from time to time for a peak at the results. They might very well be a-changin', and quick.

A Search Reputation Storm on the Horizon
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