Are Your Ears Burning? Check Out Your Online Reputation
Back in the old days, marketing was simple. Outside of a nasty story in an editorial section of the newspaper (and you had to be real bad), the reputation of a company was developed by it’s marketing department through press releases and advertising campaigns.
Nowadays you have to deal with bloggers, social media, reviews on ecommerce sites, message boards, and more. Your company’s name might be as good as mud, and you have no idea. Let’s give an example scenario:
You work in the ecommerce marketing department for Home Depot. Things are going great. You have no idea that right now on Digg you are being called out for having bogus reviews on your site. There have been 563 diggs coming from a post on this blog. Add to that 62 comments on Digg.com, 7 users blogging about it after digging it, and 57 comments on the originating website. All of this in a week or so. What if the accusations are not true? Wouldn’t you want to defend your company from a potential loss in business?
Now the Home Depot may not be the best example, as I’m sure they could handle a situation like this rather easily. But what about your business? Are you prepared to suffer a huge online reputation hit without ever knowing? Are you prepared to see a slowdown in sales or leads without a clear explanation?
There is now a site available that can help the discovery process. ACS has release Serph.com out of beta. From their website, here is how Serph works:
When you type a query into Serph, it goes out and searches online social media to find the latest buzz. After it gathers the results, they are sorted and organized so the most recent buzz appears first. Serph gathers these results from blog search engines, social media websites, social news websites and social bookmarking websites. This allows Serph to show you exactly what people are saying on the web right now.
Entering “Home Depot” in the search box yields 8 pages of results for the previous day. In this case, the digg.com story is not included since serph was still in beta. But with the number of diggs, blog posts, and comments that are attached to this one story, I guarantee you that your online reputation is taking a hit.
Now how are you going to attack this? If it’s true, then you have to remedy the problem. Take down the fake reviews. If it causes damage, maybe issue a press release clarifying the issue. Hell, blame it on a renegade employee trying to be too ambitious. But if it’s not true, you need go on the offensive, clearly explaining the situation wherever your can. You never know, you may win over some of the diggers of the original story.
Home Depot is big enough that they probably have staff already available that can deal with issues like these. But is your business ready?
Friday, March 30th, 2007
September 12th, 2007 at 11:06 am
You are so right, there was a case not too long ago with bloggers blasting Starbucks and it was coming on first page of Google and t seems there nothing they could do about it.
I heard of another company called InTouch Media that to guard the negative effects of any such campaigns.
December 8th, 2007 at 5:48 pm
You never know what people are saying about you. On the Internet, you have no control over the hits. Thanks for pointing this out to those of us who need to hear it and do something about it.
March 7th, 2008 at 2:59 pm
This Serph stuff is really cool, what a nice way to keep tab on what people are saying about your business anywhere. It would really hurt to have such scenario described above going on behind your back without your knowing.
May 14th, 2008 at 5:14 pm
Nice tool. Great blog!
June 18th, 2008 at 9:29 am
Serph seems to work as a Swiss watch… Great tool indeed for who ever needs it.