This session will look at methods for monitoring, managing, and influencing your reputation within the blogosphere and press. If you are not talking with your customer base, your customer base will be talking about you.
Moderator: Todd Friesen
Speakers:
Jessica Berlin, Social Media Manager, Cirque du Soleil
Andy Beal, Internet Marketing Consultant, Marketing Pilgrim LLC
Lee Odden, CEO, TopRank Online Marketing
First up is Lee Odden.
Why is online reputation management (ORM) important?
Your customers, prospects, and competitors are online. People pissed at you are online. The future of your company is online. There are comments, blogs, reviews, and more -- you need to be aware of this.
How important is knowing about dissatisfied customers, brand de-vangelists, brand champions and evangelists? You should know about these people -- brand evangelists can be armed with tools to talk more about you in a positive light.
How is it that your online reputation is influenced? One is through search. ORM is about "search engine results". Another influence is social media - you can ask people for advice and feedback about a particular location, business, or whatever. There's also mainstream media - are you getting press coverage that's positive and negative? Do you have a handle on the top people in these channels?
Search engines = reputation engines.
Lee shows several examples of PayPal, Walmart, and Target.
What's going on and how can you monitor your ORM?
- Free: Google Alerts, TweetBeep
- Small Biz: Trackur
- Enterprise: Radian6, BuzzLogic
Short term ORM: SEO and social media displace SERPs
- Make brand optimization a process in the organization
- Brand optimize all digital assets: text, images, audio, and video
- Optimize aross departments: PR, Marketing, HR, investor
- Result is more branded SERPs
Long term: identify, qualify, and engage dissenters
- Is there merit to the issue?
- If not, offer facts and ask for correction
- If yes, offer to discuss
- Be ready to respond via the blog
- Results can be loyal brand fans
Tactics:
- SEO
- Social media - listen to channels
- Encourage media relations results to get your company written about; online PR
Push messaging out - outreach via wire service, networking, pitching, RSS
Pull messaging - optimized via press release, newsroom, social media, and media coverage
91% of people use Google.com to get updates for subject matter experts. They also use social media.
Who is doing it right? eBay and Dell. Look at their results -- very clean. They're doing it with subdomains; blogs, Wikipedia, etc
Takeaways:
- Be proactive. Don't wait until it's too late. Monitor conversations, optimize content, do digital asset promotion, and watch analytics
"What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas
...until somebody writes about it on Twitter."
Andy Beal is up next.
There are many components of reputation management and most people are concerned about what shows up on Google. Even if you're not ready to engage, you should monitor of what's being said about you so that you can build a reputation to fix product flaws and be ahead of the competition.
He wrote "Radically Transparent," an awesome book on ORM.
Why monitor? Product ideas, keywords for your campaign, news, articles, blog sentiment, product recalls, scandals, client opportunities, industry trends, customer comments
What to monitor: company name, product name, executive names, CEO, competitors, partners, industry, news, product launches, stocks, patents, services, customers, press releases, reviews
List of tools:
Industry news: moreover.com/categories/category_list_rss.html, Yahoo news
Mainstream news: news.google.com
News Buzz: digg.com
Upcoming news: google.com/trends
Blog posts: Technorati.com, blogsearch.google.com
Blog comments: backtype.com
Blog conversations: blogpulse.com/conversation - note: if you see people talk about you, follow that blog and the conversation as well.
Blog trends: blogpulse.com/trends
Bookmarks: delicious.com/popular
Photos: flickr.com
Videos: video.google.com
Tags: keotag.com
Forum posts: boardtracker.com
Twitter: search.twitter.com
Changing information: wikipedia.org
Customer reviews: epinions.com
Email updates: google.com/alerts
The untrackable: compernic.com, $50/year
One stop shop: trackur.com, $18/month
Last up is Jessica Berlin who works with Cirque de Soleil. They are always listening to customer discussion. Cirque was founded in 1984 by street performers. The mission statement is to evoke the imagination, to evoke the senses, and to evoke the emotions of people. There are 40k employees from 40 countries, 17 shows around the world. 80 million people have seen the show and close to 10m of those saw it last year. In Vegas, there are 6 production shows.
Customers talk a lot about the show - from the purchase of tickets until they leave the theatre.
What are they looking for online? People writing about the experience -- it could be anything (ticket purchase, concession stands, etc.) What do they like, dislike, and is the information accurate? Who are the evangelists and influencers? What else do fans want -- how can they remain connected to the brand?
Influence ripples: bloggers who write can get blogged about again - mainstream media can pick it up.
Regular monitoring: Google Alerts, Trends, TEchnorati, blogpulse, trendpedia, wikio, twing, twitter search, tweetstats, buzzlogic, youtube, and social networking sites
They just launched Criss Angel: in 2.5 years, they realized that things are completely different. People start writing about the show instantaneously. One local paper came out with an article about people who hated the show. They employed deiworldwide to generate buzz about the show and to spread information about the ticket purchases.
Shifting PR practices: things have changed. Beforehand, embargoes were honored for critics/journalists. But now, they don't use embargoes - everyone is a content producer. Bloggers are treated like members of regular press. They have a smaller readership, but it's a targeted readership.
They have social media releases. Make it easy for people to share information, builds community by allowing feedbakc, and SEO is link building.
A two way conversation build trust.
Newsworthy things are happening daily: Twitter, Facebook, etc.
EAsing of PR guidelines
Brings us closer to the journalist
Trust in employees - they are brand ambassadors and can spread news.
How fans can help: there are fan sites. Beforehand, they were afraid of these fan sites. Not anymore.
MySpace works very well. Artists have fan pages with 30k friends. They work with the people who run the page and give them information - having those accounts building the reputation for Cirque.
Encourage conversation: they give journlists, blogers, and consumers tools they can use. There are also exclusive content on branded channels (Twitter, YouTube, Facebook). They also have quizzes, widgets, and games (for example, getcirqued.com/quiz - how do you know which show you want to see?)
Build a good reputation:
- Transparency: customers appreciate when brands are open and hnest
- The better the relationship is, the easier it is to communicate problems/handle a crisis
- Listening improves communication
