Should companies bet on social media marketing?

Companies are mulling over the pros and cons of social media marketing – the top dollar invested in Facebook and Twitter to be precise. As an active tweeter I’d be the first to admit that paid tweets and tie-ups with NBC for Olympic tweets etc, sure seems a cop-out in Twitter’s free open platform format objective. However, let’s discard my indignant views aside for a moment and look upon the situation from a company’s point of view; and yes there’s more incensed thoughts there…

You pay to get ‘paid tweets’ – top billing, and yet there’s no end to the negative comments and trolls. And as for the actual revenue gained from these promoted tweets or Facebook Ads its anybody’s guess; in fact, its as mysterious as how Joseph Gorden-Lewitt’s character “just knows” Bruce Wayne is Batman in ‘The Dark Knight Rises’. Twitter has marginally overtaken Facebook as the marketing channel to be in, in the wake of Facebook going public and the haziness as to how much the ads work for companies. It does not help that Facebook, as recently revealed, has more than 80 million fake users!! Read the rest of this entry »

Google auto-complete reputation woes!

Google algorithm and the auto-complete function has landed the search engine giant back in court again. This time it is a man from Japan who alleges that he lost his job with the auto complete bringing up criminal acts when his name is typed into the search box. The man demands that the defaming words be removed and that he gets compensated for all the embarrassment he has had to go through.

Clearly a case of  reputation damage and though the court has ruled that the offending words be removed Google has towed the ‘not subject to Japanese law’ line. However, the present case is about compensation and yet again Google defence points out that such cases are rare and the algorithm decides things on what is already available online.

A man from Italy won a case against Google for similar reasons and so did a Frenchman who had to deal with words like ‘rapist’ being suggested with his name. Google does screen for pornography, profanity etc, so can easily oblige if  a court sees it as having caused reputation damage to a plaintiff.

However, with Google claiming to have more and more requests from governments to remove content all this could well eat into the brand losing its sheen of being impartial based on its algorithm, which gets tweaked every so often to weed out spam and information of low value among other things. So will Google pay up??

Appco Group Services

New online web design company Appco Group Services, launched last week to help companies improve their presence online.  They offer full online solutions from web design to marketing including SEO.  Design and content are so important today, so getting the right advice is critical.

To find out more about what they off visit http://www.appcogroupservices.co.uk/

Reputation management for Hotels – ‘Home away from Home’

It is a general notion that whatever ranks on Google is true and can be trusted; imagine someone running a hotel and receiving nothing but BAD reviews on a popular and trusted travel-website like ‘TripAdvisor that ranks high on Google.

If a hotel is trashed in reviews by a couple of users on TripAdvisor, then it is more than enough to bring its reputation down.

It won’t be easy to remove or block all negative comments about hotels, but one can always push them down by bringing good content up thereby making it rank on the first-pages of Google.

Top tips for Hotel Reputation Management:

  • Monitor social-networking sites, and other online media to check what people talk in general about your business
  • Respond to user comments, suggestions, feedback, complaints, and reviews, without fail
  • Regular communication and more of interaction with web-users on a daily basis helps, and can help one tap new business opportunities from nowhere
  • Actively communicate and interact with people/online users on some of these popular sites: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn
  • Submit relevant theme-based audio-video, and textual files more, to keep the users engaged
  • Creating/joining different online communities and groups, for chat and discussion forums always help, to know minds of people
  • Update your website daily/often with new stories about the business, post blogs, news articles about events and conferences etc. to keep the users well-informed about the company
  • Holiday deals, discounts and offers, contests and giveaways can help in keeping the online users grooved to the business
  • Incorporate reputation management in the ERP system to automate the business activities, and to streamline the process
  • One can even seek experts and consultants for business reputation management strategies

Finally, outsourcing online reputation management to Reputation Management Companies can be a better choice for the service industry as a whole!

Reputation Management Online Through Right Response!

Researches prove that the right response to positive comments or negative complaints from customers can bring one’s lost good reputation back, online.

This new finding communicates a message to all those who strive hard to maintain a good reputation online. Brands/companies/celebrities, while having a good exposure to major social media channels always need to make use of this utility to communicate with their potential customers/clients/fans, which in reality they fail. It is surprising to find that most of the customers/fans/clients want the brands/companies/celebrities to have their attention. Customers/fans/clients make a positive feedback or pass a negative comment through major social media channels like twitter or Facebook, they expect a reply. Feedback is rated as something they would love you to do. Read the rest of this entry »

Kingfisher Airlines gullibility banking on SBI

Coincidence: Joanna Newsom’s Kingfisher song so apt to our subject:

 Whose is the hand that I will hold?
Whose is the face I will see?
Whose is the name that I will call?

India’s Kingfisher Airlines’ bailout saga highlights the sorry state of Indian Businesses and its crony-centric policies. This shows the poor corporate administration, poor regularization, banking inexperience and absolute lack of accountability. Read the rest of this entry »

Pfizer pill recall – botched up reputation in wrong pack

If there’s one thing women trust, it’s that the sun will rise in the East, you have to pay taxes, and that birth control pills will keep you away from unwanted worries.

Pfizer, the major birth control pill makers seem to have shaken that trust. The company had to recall million packs of these pills, which were wrongly packed. The company announced this flaw, before any woman could possibly become pregnant. Read the rest of this entry »

Twitter to lose its reputation as a free speech platform?

Twitter is in a Catch 22 situation; it is stuck between local country laws and the freedom of speech of the Internet users and has opened its doors to censorship.

To abide with the law of the land in different countries, the microblogging site has decided it MAY ‘reactively withhold’ offensive tweets on a country-by-country basis. Well, so much for being the free-speech platform that it was all this time!  Twitter has even cited reference of ‘pro-Nazi’ contents for users in Germany and France, to substantiate its move in its blog.

In a world comprised of different people with different ideas, this move from Twitter has been welcomed by few though the large chunk of Twiterati is wary and complaining.  Read the rest of this entry »

IIPM worried about Google Suggest, why is it so?

Google’s most popular feature with searches is ‘suggestions’. The suggestions sometimes appear much before you have finished typing. Many wonder how Google knows what you are exactly looking for.

After a court in Italy held search engines responsible for suggesting offensive terms, Google had elucidated that “search suggestion service suggests words potentially connected to the words that users type on the Google search field”. Read the rest of this entry »

Reputation Management Tip for 2012: Brands need to tap into social media search!

If in the past, we’d turn to our family or friends circles for recommendations, advice, opinions or answers, it then turned towards “www.com” ever since it appeared on the virtual scene. Today, we are once again back to asking friends and family circles with the help of this World Wide Web. The 3 W’s have given birth to several new generation virtualities, especially the ‘social media’. Now, ‘social media’ is the best source of recommendations for nearly everything including the reputation of your brand.

Social media has emerged itself into a vast number of siblings such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Flickr, Linkedin, Google Plus and so on and on the list goes. Social media and search are converging because search engines are incorporating social signals. Google, Bing and Yahoo have incorporated Facebook likes and Twitter’s tweets into their organic search results. Now, searchers see results in different formats based on activity within their social networks. Read the rest of this entry »