Managing reputation online

Now it has become a practice for the people to search for a brand which they want to purchase on offline and online.  Whenever I want to purchase a certain item I always refer Google to get  the exact specs and the  brands that are being presently marketed.  Recently when I wanted  to purchased a laptop I searched a number of Sri Lanka sites to get the names of the companies who are marketing the particular brand which I wanted to buy.  This helped me find the company which marketed the exact brand I preferred to purchase and I must say I really succeeded in buying one to my satisfaction.

In Sri Lanka online business is not a big hassle because only few companies provide online service.  Also I would  like to point out that very rarely customers in our country search for information o n online.  In order to promote a brand it is always important to get the opinion of the customers regarding the product which they have purchased online or offline.  Although it is difficult for an organization to have a track on offline purchases word of mouth,  it is easy to have a track on online buzz about the brand.  It is possible to get the views of the customers through online but there is also danger in same as well.  For e.g. if there are more negative results posted by unsatisfied customers regarding a particular brand, the company tends to lose 70% of the business made online.  In order to overcome this, the company should have a proper strategy to manage the online reputation.

As a marketing manager of a company you will be happy to view positive comments regarding the products marketed by your company, but at the same time you will be very much disappointed when negative results in Google search results.  If you come across a situation like this, you can implement the following tactics in order to overcome this problem and in the long term this will give you good results.

1 – If you have a site try creating some of the subdomain to get listed in the search results. Make sure you do some link building activities in order to increase the popularity of the sub domains. Remember search engines will list only two URL from your domain.

2 – Create other domains that  represents your brand name. Eg- If your brand name is genuine.com then think of registering other domain pointers like genuine.net, genuine.org, genuine.info and add some valuable content.

If the .com site is transactional then .info to tell something about your brand such as new releases , new features, press room, corporate information etc.

3 – Create blogs and optimize it related to your brand name. According to my experience a well written wordpress.com blog is well picked up by the search engines. Eg- genuine.wordpress.com. Add some good content and update it regularly. So once the search engines identified your blog as a useful one it will show  up  your brand keyword. You also can try the same for blogger.

After creating blogs representing your brand name now submit it to blog communities. Blogged.com, mybloglog.com, blogcatalog.com are some of the good communities where  you can submit. Make sure you create the usernames represent the brand name.

Eg – http://www.blogged.com/profile/yourbrandname

4 – Try creating social networking profile to represent your name. Facebook, Myspace, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, Dailymotion are some of the good sites. Try to avoid using nicknames instead use your brand name.

5 – Create company profiles in Linkdin, which will also highly valued content by search engines. Don’t you have a company profile in Linkdin, What you can do is create an employee profile and then add your company name. Once one entry is added you can see a page created for your brand. In Naymz you can also claim your company identity.

6 – Create a sample site in Webnode. It is a free web site creation tool but high search engine friendly. The inbuilt options give you the way to set up site maps, optimize the site. You can have some related content in the site and have some bookmarking.

7 – If there are blog, forum sites contains your negative comments, request them nicely to remove the posts. Just explain them the situation that you are in. In general sites wont remove those because it can be a breach of independent opinion. But you can have a try.

8 – If you see some good result in the second page try to get those pages up by doing some optimization activities.

9 – Do press leases and find out good PR sites to distribute it. These will be crawled quickly and get listed.

10 – If you can create widgets use widgetbox.com to create and submit. This will be also get listed quickly in search results.

11- Do some bookmarking as well

Just do the above by having an action plan. It will get you positive results after few months and you will realize most of the negative results gone down. For your brand keywords if the search results are not competitive then your job will be more easy. You can see the results very quickly.

Year 2010 – Role of search marketing

I could not find the time to update my blog for the past one month.   Yesterday when I was going through articles and research findings I came across some important facts which I thought of sharing with you.

It looks like that  in the  year 2010 search engines are going to play a major role than  before.  Influence of search results is the major part of the purchase decision cycle. Based on research it was found that 68.3% of search was related to the consideration stage and almost  42.6% search came for decision stage.



When looking at the above graph it is also clear in the  recent past the money spent on online had taken high and had exceeded the other mediums. Also in the travel industry search engines are the game deciders. In year 2009 so far it has been noted that 66% of the travelers use internet to plan their travel arrangements, 56% made online reservation and 34% of the travelers visit search engines first when considering destinations. The trend looks amazing and it shows search engine marketing is going to be the high prominent marketing strategy for travel firms. (This is not only for tranvel but for other industries as well)

In the search engine market still Google remains as the market leader. Please see below the graph

But there are threats for Google as well because of the rise of Bing. Google has already lost its 1% market share and Bing starting to grow . Within just a 3 months it has gained the 0.4% market share which has high  travel technology as well. So in future it can be turned out as a major travel search engine. Let’s see what happens.

Now its time for e-marketers to look at the new search display trends. You need not consider just building web links. Now its time to think of videos, news articles, blog posts, images etc. Google algorithm also has changed accordingly. In simple it means SEO is not going to be the just tweaking the site. It is all about creating and optimizing whatever forms of content make sense for the business  industry. Now Google has changed the algorithm, which values the video content much as well. Also according to research, video marketing is the number one tactics that US marketers are focusing in 2009. Please see below the e-market source

So what are the recent changes in Google? It has recently announced (Oct 7, 2009) the search results now feature an option allowing users to view formatted PDFs from within the browser. Also Google introduced the new feature on Sep 23, 2009, to the Gooel toolbar that  allows anyone to leave comments about pages as they surf the web site. The more comments you have for your site the more value is  increased.

Google’s searchwiki, a major addition to its user interface that allows users to edit search results. When using searchwiki you can re-order, remove or add web pages to search results for any query. You can add any number of comments you want, but there are few criteria Google consider. The quality of the entry, the author and user contributed signals such as voting and flagging. But one thing I have noticed the old SEO mantra remains the same. Meta tags, title header, alt tags and content are the kings anyway.

Few travel insights

Social media integration like videos , photos , blogging and tweets are going to play a major part. In simple I can see that the role of Social media effort is to directly influence social communities  so that the social media pages show up in the search results.

Using the social media effectively is going to be the major factor in future. Measuring the ROI and taking proper actions are going to be critical. Based on e-marketer research 84% of Social Media Programs don’t measure ROI. They just do everything without having proper mechanism,

Please find below some measuirememnt of ROI you can use.

ROI is a function of the goals may not always be monetary, but people have to consider ROO(return on objectives) such as branding, awareness relationship and engagement.

Here are some cool tools I found when getting contents for my post.

Post Rank – Allows to enter a feed URL and returns statistics about its posts, including which are the most popular based on how many times they are shared on variety of social networking sites.

Xinu – Is a handy website where you can type in a URL and receive a load of useful statistics ranging from SEO to social bookmarking and more.

Google Trends – People can compare the world largest interest in favorite topics.

Also use Google analytics and feedburner, quancast and copmeptecom If you are running a small site you can use Clicky instead of analytics.

Although off line marketing trend is stronger now,   but it is time for every business circle to think of online marketing much stronger than before.

Winners are not born, they are made

I read many people biography including Warren Buffett,Anthony Robbins, Richard Brandson etc. But the one I  read today was so impressive. It was written by Adam Khoo a young entrepreneur and a millionaire. The ideas, experience mentioned in the document are so good for people those who are continuously failing in life and seeking motivation to succeed.

“You have ALL the resources you need to become the success you deserve to be. And there is really NO EXCUSE for you not to succeed, if that’s what you truly desire”- Adam says.

It is worth reading it. Click here to download and read

Audi – new shine to the four interlocked rings

Audi disclosed an updated logo that gave a new shine to the four interlocked rings. The new four interlocked rings  look more sophisticated and subtle. But i think it won’t give a high impact on the brand map.But i’m not happy with the change in the letter work. I doubt whether this logo will get positioned well in the Audi brand lovers mind set. Lets have a look at it below.