Search and Leverage: Manage Your Brand’s Reputation Online

Politics in general and the upcoming presidential election in particular currently dominate both headlines and watercooler conversations. For marketers, there’s much more to all that chatter than just remembering to get out and vote.

As the primaries roll along, I can’t help but compare Hillary Rodham Clinton to a Chevy Malibu, Barack Obama to a Cuisinart and John McCain to an iPhone. It’s not that these candidates have much (or anything) in common with these products. But the whole political process takes on new meaning marketers if you think about these people as brands rather than candidates.

Chief marketers, whether they oversee political or product-centric campaigns, want to understand and positively influence their brand’s reputation among customers or constituents. The Web has had a huge impact on both the amount of chatter and the avenues through which marketers can listen to, understand and/or influence this dialogue. Natural search optimization offers marketers a very cost effective method of controlling talk online, and plenty of other automated search tools exist to help keep tabs on the buzz.

A critical part of managing a brand’s reputation is monitoring for negative publicity online—and not just for the brand name itself. In politics, that might include important groups of constituents, favorable (or troubling) issues or any other public discussion they deem important to track. The equivalent for marketers includes product names, domain names, competitors, and more.

At the bare minimum, marketers should monitor page-one search results in Google, Yahoo, Ask.com, etc. for the appropriate keywords. Natural search can play a role here. Since a given domain can only receive one or two listings, marketers should develop alternate sources of positive, or at least neutral, results. To increase the real estate a brand controls on the page, consider having your search teams:

• Leverage alternate domains: optimize any sibling sites, such as corporate information sites, charitable foundations, etc.
• Create links to sites with good listings that appear on page two or three (affiliate sites, positive reviews, or even neutral results); linking from your site may improve the ranking of these results.
• Create and optimize new pages on social media sites like MySpace, Wikipedia, YouTube and Flickr. Over time, this content may displace other potentially negative results on page one.
• Optimize all press releases.

Beyond natural search, a variety of tools are available to automate monitoring. Better yet, many are free. With the use of keyword searches from the sources described above, you can use an RSS reader to create feeds and compile results from the following:

• Google Alerts, Yahoo. Alerts, etc
• Google News (for mainstream)
• Technorati (for social media)
• Keotag.com (monitors across the social media universe)
• Blogpulse.com (for hot topics that jump from blog to blog)
• BoardTracker.com (for forums)
• Copernic.com (any other site, including competitors)

Various paid services are also available to conduct monitoring and provide a dashboard of results, including Radian 6 and Buzz Logic.

Marketers should have strategies in place for handling reputation issues as they arise. They should do more than simply lay out messages to be used in crisis management situations.

Our presidential candidates, for example, can be in front of just about any issue by optimizing their Web sites. These practices should only be reactive as a last resort. Brand managers and CMOs should determine the most important issues for their brand to be associated with and put a methodical natural search optimization effort in place to create associations and capitalize.

Stuart Larkins is vice president of search at DoubleClick Performics. Contact him at [email protected].