- Appco Group Services
- Reputation management for Hotels – ‘Home away from Home’
- Reputation Management Online Through Right Response!
- Kingfisher Airlines gullibility banking on SBI
- Pfizer pill recall – botched up reputation in wrong pack
- Twitter to lose its reputation as a free speech platform?
- IIPM worried about Google Suggest, why is it so?
- Reputation Management Tip for 2012: Brands need to tap into social media search!
- Facebook Timeline and Reputation Management
- Apple Siri gender bias or glitch?
Archive for December 2009
Buying a company, how’s it’s reputation
December 7, 2009 | 
Author Recently we’ve been contacted by people asking about how much it would cost to clean up a companies reputation if they bought the company? Here is a great article about what a reputation is worth to a company www.businessweek.com
What is the first thing any potential savvy investor or buyer going to do before they buy a company, is do some research. Where is the easiest place to start? That’s right, they Google It!!! An investor will Google not only the company name but also the directors and the CEO, so taking measures to make sure your reputation is positive on the net is critical. Not only are investors opinions important but also the public in general especially if you have shares to sell.
Often a company will make the mistake and monitor how their site is doing for keywords and forget about what people are saying about their actual company. Customer service is more crucial than ever before and having terrible sales guys can hurt you in more ways than one. You only have to see what’s happening with DotComChrome and how many people are complaining about their aggressive sales tactics. It’s so bad there sales guys ask you to type in their company website in the URL bar rather than just Google dotcomchrome as their is so much negative stuff about them.
So if you are selling shares or looking to get investors make sure you check your online reputation first, if you don’t, it could cost you a fortune!!!
Financial Reputations
There’s something very odd about the world that financiers live in. Unlike the rest of us they don’t seem to really care what everybody else thinks about them. Take the question of bonuses; uniquely they feel that whatever they do or have done, they deserve a bonus. Take Lloyds Bank of Scotland boss Daniels who’s decision to merge the two banks must be one of the most catastrophic destruction of shareholder value hasn’t stopped him from being offered an eight hundred thousand bonus for “integration” of the two banks. Wasn’t that his job anyway?
Only last year Richard Snook, senior economist at the Centre for Economics and Business Research, said: ‘It is just not politically feasible that any British clearing bank is going to pay out large bonuses.’ That’s what he thought and many people think now (December 2009) but bankers feel very differently and see them as their due.
In reputation management terms, the financial world seems to have very little to manage their reputation properly. The furious commentary from the public and the seeming lack of strategy from banks and their communications agencies is puzzling.
The bonuses will almost certainly lead to more political flak and more political oversight in the longer term. The banks may be able to afford lobbyists, but they certainly have very few friends.
Posted in Bank Reputations, Company Reputation, Reputation Management | 
Tags: Eric Daniels, Lloyds HBOS | 
No Comments »
How Do Negative Search Results Hurt You
Quite often a company will only find out if there is negative pages or comments on the Internet when a customer remarks on it or says they have decided to go else where because of what they have read on the net.
It’s humans nature to write about a negative experience, it allows you to get it off your chest when they feel hard done by. The bigger problem is, customers who have had a fantastic experience very rarely write about it. Because of this the Internet can become very one sided towards the negative end not because of what you have done, but because of how human nature is.
More often than not, businesses don’t know how much negative results appearing in the search engines is costing them, they can only take a stab at the losses. Reputation Management is best seen as an investment that will pay back dividends. Towns in previous centuries would build a defence wall to protect themselves rather than wait until they were attacked Reputation Management is exactly the same.
So you can spend a small fortune on SEO, only to be totally undermined by having negative results for your company name. So for example lets say my company name is BB Widgets Suppliers and I sell blue widgets, I’ve focused my SEO on ranking highly for the keywords Blue Widgets. Now that the customer has found me if they don’t bookmark my site then they are likely to google BB Widgets Suppliers as they now know your company name. It is at this point that if negative content is ranking highly for your company name then all that SEO work has gone out the window.
Tiger Woods What Next?
Tiger Woods is really stuck between a hard place and a rock, no matter what he does now people will have a different opinion of the golfing superstar. His reputation has been tested and how he responds over the next few weeks will be critical for hi public image.
Of course the difference between bad press in the newspaper and online is it tends to die away after a while, however on the net it just stays there and quite often attracts more responses and comments. We don’t mind Tiger having an issue at home, actually it’s quite refreshing to know everyone goes through rough patches, but how you deal with it is important.
He should have just been honest from the start and owned up to it all, no one would attack him for that. Don’t try and spin it or hide from it, it just makes people more curious and delve deeper, worst of all people will loose there trust in Tiger.
Now there is talk he won’t be golfing till 2010, not sure that’s the best approach either, he should just pick yourself up and get on with what he’s good at. This will inspire people again and show truly how good a sports player he really is.
Twitter Zeitgeist
Research showing the lack of correlation between twitter hot words and Google or Yahoo zeitgeist demonstrates a key difference between the two and is important for reputation management companies to grasp.
Google zeitgeist reveals what words are being most searched for, but not which are being most discussed online. This is where Twitter is interesting: heavily tweeted and retweeted posts show that this is the real zeitgeist for the internet.
As commentators pointed out, search terms tend to be media driven. So Tiger Woods car crash is a media driven event and people want to know more. Twitter users tend to be less media driven and more discurssive in their approach to the Net.
If you want to get ahead of the trend: then follow twitter closer than you do Google.
Posted in Reputation Management, Reputation Online, Social Network Sites | Tags: Google Zeitgeist, Search Trends, twitter | No Comments »
Reputation Management Don’t Leave Till It Hits The Fan
Over the last 12 months we have been focused on reputation management and are often contacted by companies and individuals who have an issue with negative content showing in the search results. Often by this time it’s to late and the damage is done. It’s much more difficult to bury a web page once it has gained momentum and reached the first page of Google. It’s a bit like cancer, if you catch it early enough or do the things that will help reduce the chances of getting it in the first place like not smoking then you have a much greater chance of stopping or preventing it. However leave it and ignore the symptoms and you could have a major issue that in some cases can be fatal.
So reputation management is often seen as a luxury rather than a necessity until of course it’s to late and they have been hit by some negative content that’s effecting their sales. This could not be further from the truth, by thinking and adapting your business to take in reputation management as part of the marketing mix cannot only help prevent negative content rising to the top of search engines but also help throw a bigger net out to catch more customers and create more sales.
Another great positive outcome of reputation management is as you start to monitor what’s being said about your company or product through the web, blogs, social sites like twitter, you can soon get feedback of what customers think about you or your product. Sites like Twitter allow you to search keywords in peoples tweets, Google Alerts is another great tool to spot any potential issues, there is also quite a few products out there to help monitor the internet as a whole and spot potential issues.
Here are a couple of our main Dos and Don’t s to help get you on your way:
- Do sign up to as many social network sites using your company name as the user name, even if you don’t use all the sites, it stops other people from pretending to be you.
- Do control comments on 3rd party sites, if you a prone to getting negative remark, either turn off remarks or allow only remarks once they have been approved.
- Do keep blogs and main social sites like facebook and twitter up to date, it shows that you are an active company. Make sure to also link to these resources from your site and email signature, this will help with the ranking of these 3rd party sites for your company name.
- Don’t try and fight a thread publicly on a forum, more often than not you will attract more negative comments back and also encourage google to rank the thread higher. If thread is untrue and libellous contact the site owner and ask for the thread to be removed.
- Don’t ignore negative content, the attitude from PR companies reference damage limitation is to ignore it, as more often than not the bad press will go away after a few days. This is the complete opposite with the net, if you leave it, it can gain momentum and become a bigger issue. Unlike a paper that is thrown away the following day, on the net it’s there 24 hours, 7 days a week. The only way to deal with such content is to either have it removed (very difficult and time consuming) or bury it.
In the old days celebrities read about themselves in newspapers and magazines, today celebrity stories abound across the web and some of the most popular searches in search engines are for celebrity names. Indeed, some of the fastest moving stories arise around celebrity misdemeanour’s and misadventures. Every trip and slip of a celebrity is analysed and commented on by an army of consumer reviewers, fans and critics. It is an on going piece of work to make sure that your reputation is protected by continuing putting out positive content out there.
The simplest way to explain how to combat negative content is if you have 1 website then you can only possibly control maybe two spots on the first page of the search results. The other 8 or 9 spots are therefore open to anybody else who wants to write about you. By creating blogs, more websites, sub domains and social network pages then you have more opportunity to control the first page.
One last bit of advice we have gained this year, if you are starting a business or launching a product take time to research a name. If you don’t want a big presence on the net then choose a company name that is very generic for example Direct Shoes. This will stop negative content coming up about your business as the keywords are far to general. However if you do want to be found on the net then use a more specific name like AZA Direct Shoes (hope that company does not exist or they need some SEO help), but be aware it also means that anything negative about your business could also rise to the top of the results a lot easier.