November 12th, 2009
Online Reputation Management is a major issue for Fortune 100 – Reputation Managers Study Shows
ReputationManagers.com, an online reputation management firm located in Southern California, created this report to highlight the dangers of brand management in search engines. Since 75% of people do their research on one of the major 3 search engines, how your brand is reflected on those search engines translates to how your brand will be viewed by all of those search engine visitors.
In this report, we took the 2009 Fortune 100 list and searched their main brand keyword in Google to track two key items:
1. Sentiment of results – whether each of the first 10 listings were positive, negative or neutral in nature.
2. How many properties were owned (at least by visual terms) by the company, and not at the mercy of the public to dictate what appears on these pages. For example, a public forum that mentions or talks about a brand, but is not owned by that brand, could be deemed a potential threat now or in the future if the conversation changes based off of news headlines.
Our study was done with as little bias as possible. Here are our results for the Fortune 100 brands. When searching for their brands in Google, we came up with the following data:
1. Only 9% had control of their brands, meaning, they owned a majority of the properties in the top 10. All other websites were news sites, bloggers, etc. that could easily become a threat if bad press was reported on the company.
2. 23% had bad or negative press on page 1 of the search results.
3. 11% had bad press on the first fold (top 5 results), which 80% of searchers will see and process.
4. Only 8% had 100% good web pages listed.
5. 16% had a severely bad reputation management issue on the first page of Google.
6. 24% of the bad items found seem to be opinions of a single person, versus fact or standard public knowledge.
Admittedly, we were quite surprised at the lack of brand control these large Fortune 100 companies have over their own brands. Most of the issues can easily be averted with standard Online Reputation management practices. There seems to be a progressive movement called “PR 2.0″ that is taking more steps in controlling how brands are perceived online.
Posted in Corporate Reputation Management | No Comments »
November 5th, 2009
One of the biggest issues the web faces is who is going to regulate slander online? Search engines, blogs and review sites like yelp are all hiding behind the argument that they are simply providing a forum for people to communicate. The problem is, hard core Internet people have turrets syndrome when it comes to speaking their mind on the web. Companies are being ruined with one or two bad reviews. I have seen it happen.
People need to start taking more precaution before going online to make a statement. In many cases, like comments on blogs, rip off report, etc. these things cannot be removed and website operators wont help. It is Rip Off Reports policy not to remove a thing, even if the complainer decides that they were in the wrong. It is there, forever.
Policing online slander will be a near impossible job. It is too easy and takes less than a minute to let people know how you feel online. You can remain anonymous, you can hide behind a false identity. No one can stop you. There is no body of regulation that can stop it. It is going to be up to the public to refrain from publicly humiliating whatever bothers them.
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November 3rd, 2009
It looks like Google is starting to understand the importance of managing your online reputation. The funny thing is, it is because of Google’s powerful indexing technology that we all have to worry about our reputations. While I don’t blame Google as the culprit here, it is the sites that they index that don’t verify information that are hurting businesses.
I did a quick assessment of their tips. The basic strategy is a good one, but certainly not enough to defend against bad press or protect yourself from a future attack. I do believe that you should be doing these things at the very least however.
Go check it out: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/managing-your-reputation-through-search.html
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November 2nd, 2009
I just ran across this new study done by BizReport about how important Reputation and Brand Management is. Here is a direct quote from the article:
“Around 84% of consumers surveyed by Brand Reputation said that, compared with one year ago, they were more likely to search the Internet for reviews before making a purchase.”
When one consumer can destroy your entire reputation with a couple of hours of free time, it is more important than ever to control the first few pages of Google for your Brand and Product key phrases.
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October 27th, 2009
Websites are akin to newspapers in the early 1900’s. You could post anything you wanted to about anyone you wanted to. Newspapers and Magazines now are very much regulated and often get sued (and lose) when they post something that turns out to be proven false. For some reason, websites like rip off report, complaints board and the like are not held to the same standard. They hide behind whay my lawyer calls a 230 defense strategy. It is only a matter of time that websites will be held responsible for what its users say.
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