I’ve seen several linkedIn discussions and more than a few blog posts about using Google as a free reputation management system. Doing so could cost your business in a big way and result in failed engagement in social media engagement – the same goes for Yahoo! or Bing. Why?
1.) It’s A Search Engine: Google et al, are consumer search engines. They are NOT designed to search Social Networks, .alt networks, forums and 99% of newsgroups. That’s not what they do. Most issues regarding reputation and brand are in those semi-closed networks. Sadly 97% of the “online reputation management” services also only search Google and miss everything else.
2.) The Deep Web: Yes, it goes deeper than what Google, Yahoo! or Bing delivers. There are crackers and hackers and more in the subterranean depths of the Web. What they’re doing there can be critical to financial management firms, multi-nationals and more.
3.) Ecosystem Bias: Google owns “Blogger” the blogging platform, Microsoft owns “Live Spaces” their “blogging” platform. That means those platforms may be carrying their advertising – they inherently have a bias towards their own network of online properties. Therefore you may miss what’s critical.
4.) News Is Not All The News: Google News Alerts is very good. But. They only deliver news alerts for those news agencies with whom they have news distribution agreements. That means you again may miss what’s critical.
Only MediaBadger and 2 other companies go beyond Google, Yahoo! or Bing to explore the deep web and source the information that matters, one is in the U.S. and the other in France. If you’re truly concerned about online reputation management and seeing what’s happening online, relying on Google, Yahoo! or Bing may be the most costly mistake you make.
A co-worker or friend sends you a link to a blog post. Someone’s ranting about your company, or maybe about you. There it is. In digital print. For all the world to see. It’s on the Web. That means at that very moment, thousands upon thousands of eyes are reading it, laughing at you, gloating and preparing witty responses to the comment section. You simply must respond, jump to defend your brand, your personal image…you start to type. Stop. Stop it right now.
I’ve seen this reaction more than a few times in the past year. It usually comes with a phone call or email “I need help” because suddenly, it is a crisis. But if you hadn’t responded, hadn’t typed out that long-winded and certainly well justified response, it wouldn’t have escalated.
This response I think, is an inheritance of the days when all we had really was newspapers, magazines, TV and radio. And if something bad was said about you, then it probably was seen by a lot of people and a response was pretty much a necessity – since you’d likely get a call from a reporter, eager to pour some more wood on the fire.
Yes, anyone can publish anything they want to the Web today in moments. Without fact checking. But that doesn’t mean many have seen that smarmy tidbit of nastiness. In fact, only a few may see it.
So before you’re tempted to start madly typing, stop. It’s time for an assessment. The blogger in question may have little or no audience. The audience they may have may also be sycophants with little further influence. Do some queries on a search engine, see what pops up. Try to assess the circle of influence of the blogger and if the “story” has spread to other Social Media channels or if it may be newsworthy. Call your PR agency or a Social Media research/consulting firm and ask them to take a quick look. You’ll have a response fairly quickly on how to proceed.
But first, assess the story and the spread. If it’s minimal, don’t engage. As soon as you do, you’ve given them power and the cats out of the bag…hissing and ready to go. A whiff of controversy and the story will spread in moments.
Keep in mind, just cause it’s out there, doesn’t mean anyone’s reading it. Millions of blogs rarely get much traffic, ever. The upside may be instant publishing, the downside is it’s also harder to get noticed.
Or what would you recommend?
(Author: Giles Crouch)
One of Canada’s top marketing minds, Mitch Joel, rightly asks that if the big companies and marketers have truly delved into the Social Media sphere, then is Social Media dead?
I wonder if perhaps the reverse is more true? Is marketing dying as a result of Social Media? Let’s face it, marketers walk an uneasy line of stretching the truth and so it’s no wonder that only 14% of people trust advertisements. As marketers, we’ve gone and shot ourselves in the foot.
Social Media is a ray of sunshine into media channels previously controlled by gatekeepers (editors, journalists, broadcast network owners)…and don’t they say sunshine is the ultimate disinfectant?
Each company that has waded into Social Media channels with a heavyweight or heavyhanded approach has suffered; Motrin, Nestle with Facebook (just this past week!), JetBlue, Rogers and so on.
It’s still far, far too early to make any concrete predictions when it comes to Social Media (no one is truly an expert yet in this space) and perhaps all we can say is that it will change. Quite significantly. People are only just finding their voices.
I suspect Social Media will thrive, while it is marketers (I’ve been one for nearly 20 years) will be the ones to suffer and businesses will adapt in whole new ways. Eventually. In the meantime, it’s going to be a rocky road…
What do you think?
(Author: Giles Crouch)
There’s a lot of nasty behaviour online – understatement of 2010. A tweet from a smart communicator, Lauren, lead me to a post about Richard Dawkins feeling slighted over improper behaviour on his forums. The irony of the subsequent comments on that blog post were rather enjoyable.
We’re facing a complex set of new issues around social rules on the Web; in Social Media channels and other online channels. As humanity, these technology tools give us an ability to express ourselves unlike ever before.
Given all the research we do on Social and Digital Media, behaviour is something we look at regularly. We wade through an immense swampland of comments and discussions daily. And probably 85% of it is junk. Spam, nasty comments that are destructive rather than constructive. Porn spammers and the rest. The problem is, we face a challenge in moderating this behaviour in Cyburbia that we don’t have in the real world.
In the real-world in a group of people gathered for whatever reason, a naysayer or nasty person can be quickly shut down and asked to leave. In forums, newsgroups or blog/newspaper comments, there are moderators or a person can be deleted from a forum (but they can easily re-register.) So there are limits to what can be done effectively in Cyburbia. Then you get to issues like Richard Dawkins’ and the final result is to shut off the channel altogether, then we all suffer. Something that can be avoided in the real world.
We often call this online behaviour “childish”. Perhaps because that is exactly the phase we’re in with Social Media; we’re just finding our “Voice of Humanity” and so much of our behaviour is immature. We haven’t established many social rules yet. The “culture” of the Web is unsettled and as yet not entirely defined. It’s easier too when we can hide behind anonymity in these instances – another issue that will need addressing?
Over time I suspect, we’ll develop rules. Ways to shut out overly negative behaviour. It will take time. So meanwhile it’s just part of the “noise” that we have to learn to self-filter or we all suffer for one rotten apple. Issues like this is part of the reason governments are starting to look more closely at online regulations and legislation.
What do you think? What stage are we at?
(Author: G. Crouch)
We’ve done a fair amount of research into the financial sector in the past year, both Canada and the United States. Most of our data is of course, confidential to the client. But we can speak in “aggregate” terms of our findings. The broad strokes so to speak.
To put it bluntly, there is a lot of anger, frustration and distrust out there. No surprise given the tail end of 2008 and the subsequent spiral into a financial quagmire. Canada may have gotten off a little better, but it still saw a wallop at the banks in terms of consumer mistrust.
There’s lots of chatter going on, as might be expected. We found women tend to discuss bank services more than men (62% female overall) and that the most popular age group for discussion was 30-45. We looked at commentary in online newspapers, newsgroups and forums, blogs, microblogs and some social networking sites. Over 1.7M “conversations” in total across Canada and the U.S.
The topics that ranked the highest for consumer negativity towards the financial sector;
1. Mortgages
2. Fees and service charges
3. customer service
As might be expected, the larger the bank, the more negativity. Smaller, more localized banks in the U.S. had higher consumer sentiment while in Canada it was credit unions that saw the most positive sentiment. People are frustrated. Banks that used “trust” statements in their slogans were hit the worst with re-purposed content turning those slogans back on themselves.
So what does this all mean? As an industry sector, the financial world of businesses has a lot more trust building to do with consumers. It’s no small surprise, but banks and other financial institutions are likely addressing this issue. One wonders how consumer sentiment might be in a year or two from now. The volume of discussion is still rising across multiple social media channels as well. We expect to see a peak by May or June of this year, but that remains to be validated.
Reputation, Research, Thunking•
on January 6th, 2010•
As a “consumer” of a brand, is there a point where your engagement with that brand actually dilutes its value to you? Can you “know” too much about that brand? Can Social Media engagement by a brand be too much?
As consumers we engage with various brands in different ways. Some are brands we are loyal to, but only in the sense of continuous purchase. We don’t want to engage anymore than simply buying and using that product or service. Others, perhaps due to the nature of the brand (i.e. a computer or Smart Phone brand) we have to engage more deeply with – like needing customer service.
But I’m thinking separate from customer service issues. Do we want to continuously engage with a brand, like Walkers crisps or Skittles? At some point, do consumers find less connection with that brand as a result of engaging with them on Twitter or via Facebook?
Now, with so many brands dipping their toes into Social Media and some going full-bore into these social channels, are they diluting that sense of attachment we have to a product or brand?
Put on your “consumer” hat and ask yourself; do you feel a stronger engagement with that brand because they’re also in those social media channels your using? Do you want to be engaged that much? Perhaps it depends on the product?
Personally, when I find out more information on some brands, that brand loses some of its mystique. What about you?
(Author: G. Crouch, Managing Director)
In 2001, market regulators in Canada, Europe and the U.S. required public companies to simultaneously issue press releases to the Web and the newswire. In addition, any public meetings were to be broadcast to the Web via video feeds. All this before the rise of Social Media in a significant way. The bulletin boards (newsgroups) for discussion on public companies have been rampant for years, Stockhouse being among the pioneers.
My days running communications for a public company at the turn of the century saw us monitoring those newsgroups every day. Some days it was hard to not tap a condemning response to the idiocy of some of the comments and speculations made there. But other issues became apparent, among them was the damage that could happen when an employee spoke of something to a friend who then posted to the BullBoard on that company – this could wreak havoc on a stockprice; and nearly ended up in a line employee being fired once.
This was several years ago. It’s not about to get better. Public companies will face even greater challenges with Social Media in the years to come. Regulators may eventually require public companies to also post information to Social Networks, the same time they issue a press release. Video’s might have to be posted to several video networks and across mobile platforms as well.
Given how the content is both consumed, shared and managed across these channels, public companies are going to face complexities in shaping, distributing and monitoring those messages. What if the company must also issue notices across microblogging platforms like Twitter?
What will public relations and investor relations practitioners have to to consider if such issues arise? Increasingly, companies that thought they didn’t really have to concern themselves with the Web beyond marketing, will soon find out differently.
2010 will, I think, see some interesting changes to governance on communications issues for public companies.
(Author: G. Crouch, Managing Director)
From Ebonics to Standard English (SE) to regional dialects, accents and contractions – all are elements of our daily lives in an urban setting.The larger the city you live in, whether it’s the U.S., Canada or Europe, the more ethnic groups we find and the bigger the challenge in Social Media engagement. Executing a Social Media campaign in one language is hard enough, crossing multiple cultures in one urban area is another. read more
Some Social Media consultants will tell you “hey, just set up Google Alerts and do some occasional checking across search engines, it’s all you need!”. There’s two major flaws to this approach.
1. Regional Result Changes: Google, like other search engines, collects massive amounts of data constantly. To help manage this load, Google, among others, have data centres scattered around the world. If you try a search string in Atlantic Canada you will get different results from New England etc. This effect can be seen with Google Alerts for news and other data as well. The same impact is seen with Bing and Yahoo! While you may get some data, you’ll miss a lot more. Perhaps what is critical.
2. They Don’t Dig Deep: Yes, the search engines dig into a lot of content, but they miss a lot of newsgroups, Bulletin Boards, Usenet, .alt discussions and all of the Social Networks, such as Facebook Groups and Fan Pages. It’s these places where the deeper discussions about your brand, service or organization are often taking place. In fact 95% of the monitoring or “reputation management” solutions out there also miss this critical data.
3.The Context and Sentiment is Missed: Search engines just deliver results, they don’t care if it’s good or bad. That means a human resource needs to read, analyse and place into context all that information. Is that an effective use of time?
4. The Flow of the Conversation: It’s often to also understand the “flow”, “spread” and valleys of a conversation to gain perspective. Search engines don’t provide this. Neither do most reputation management solutions.
5. It’s Getting Too Local for Search Engines: With smart phone usage growing and increased free public Web access, the Web is becoming very local. As this trend continues, consumer search engines will face a challenge in keeping up. Alternative local search engines may help. But reputation management and online brand monitoring solutions have yet to catch up to small and local as well.
6. The Commercial Ecosystem Bias: That’s a fancy way of saying “search engines are more likely to deliver results in Social Media services from applications that they own.” For example, Microsoft owns Bing, and LiveJournal; if the content is “relevant enough” Bing will be biased towards LiveJournal to increase the chances of advertising click through on their ad network. In our analysis of Google, Bing and Yahoo! we found a 46% bias on the same search strings to deliver search providers ecosystem relevant content. We’re just sayin’.
In the end, we’re saying that doing the odd Google or Yahoo! search and not finding anything about yourself or your business is a dangerous way to approach understanding your reputation or leveraging a reputation management service. Food for thought. What do you think?
(Author: Giles Crouch, Managing Director)
We’re often asked by a client “can you ghost write for me, cause we a) don’t have the time or b) no one here is a good writer.” Our answer is that we’re happy to do some writing, but never as a “ghost.” It would certainly be easy to do so, we’ve seen it done. We’ve also seen how it can bite back. Hard.
There are several ramifications to ghost writing for a company blog. Some of these we note are;
- Legal: As a ‘ghost” writer you are “representative” of the clients “voice” and there are potential legal hazards that could lead to trouble for the writer and the client. This should be discussed with the client and indemnification written into a contract if this avenue is pursued.
- Consistency: if you’re ghost writing for a blog, how long will the client want you to write for? There may be issues around the consistency of tone & manner, length and detail. Once you stop, and a client may not have the patience required for a blog to become effective, there can be consistency issues.
- Honesty & Reputation: Social Media is about emotion (see a good post on Collective Thoughts on this issue) and as such, when people read a blog and discover it was a ghost writer, especially for a business, they may feel “spun” and you may subsequently be coaching a client through a Social Media crisis situation. This perhaps, is the most important point, for reputation is everything and this is compounded in Social Media.
In our case, we are open about who we are when writing on a blog for a client, and why we’re doing the writing. We engage in the discussion and if the client is just engaging in Social Media it puts a more human face on the client, avoiding the One Way communication syndrome pre-Web 2.0 days.
What might you add to this list? Do you disagree? What is your experience?
(Author: Giles Crouch, Managing Partner)
