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.