according to the Pew Center, 91 percent of reporters say they use search engines to research stories. Further, research firm Jupiter says 90 percent of Internet users use search engines to find product and company information before they make a purchase. With more than 4 billion searches conducted a month, search engines have become a critically important new form of media that can make -- or break -- a company�s reputation...
Negative and inaccurate information -- from articles to product reviews to grassroots sites created by disgruntled customers or employees -- is often ranked prominently under company-branded keyword searches, making this information highly visible and accessible to important company constituents. In a networked environment, where good -- and bad -- news can be passed on virally in an instant, it can also be deadly to corporate and brand reputations.
Here's an example. As of this writing, the estimated 1.6 million a month people who search Google for “Delta Airlines” are exposed to the No. 5 listing, BoycottDelta.org and its tagline, “Less leg room, no privacy.” This means that every month, more than 1.6 million of Delta Airline’s key constituents -- consumers, employees, journalists, regulators, investors and business partners -- are exposed to damaging information about the company. And this does not include viral pass along.
Delta is far from alone. A recent top-line survey revealed that protest sites are actively undermining the reputation of many leading companies, including AOL, Home Depot, Citibank, American Airlines, Ford, Merrill Lynch, Allstate, Microsoft, McDonald’s, Monsanto, Altria, United Airlines, Ford and Nike, among many others.
Some leading companies are quietly implementing an innovative and cost-effective approach called search engine reputation management, or SERMA for short. This approach fuses the best of reputation management skills with search engine optimization. It is founded on a simple premise: According to Jupiter, 75 percent of search engine users never scroll beyond the first page of results. And it is very rare for a user to scroll past the top 30 (three pages) of search results listings. The critical battleground for reputation management then is for who owns the top 30 listings -- or the digital front pages -- under relevant company searches.
By utilizing advanced search engine optimization strategies, together with reputation management approaches that fully leverage a company’s partnerships and create compelling content, companies can ensure ownership of the top listings under their corporate and product names. The benefits are two-fold: It provides a highly visible forum to provide accurate information about a company to counteract some of the negative and false information being disseminated. Second, and perhaps most importantly, it pushes negative listings off the visibility cliff.
While the approach may sound simple enough, accomplishing it requires a nuanced understanding of search marketing and reputation management. It must also bridge a company’s marketing groups -- Web marketing, corporate communications, content development, IT -- that often work in silos with distinct objectives and goals.
Keep in mind, too, that optimized content must be diverse enough to meet search engine terms-of-service, which rightly frowns upon spam-dexing, or the technique of optimizing essentially the same content over and over.
A global human resources company recently found a highly-negative listing ranking No. 5 under its brand name in Google. The company, which advertised aggressively, was finding potential candidates were searching for references for the company online and finding this negative -- and false -- information planted by former, disgruntled employees. Sales dropped precipitously. After a 90-day implementation utilizing an array of primary and third-party content, the negative listing was pushed out of the top 30 listings. Sales rebounded."
posted by Jen @ 8:12 AM
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