Posts Tagged ‘Google’

Apple iPhone, which was originally launched in 2007 is still grappling with many issues – legal and otherwise. If it were the connectivity issues and  deficient functions and features in its earlier days; now it is  the patents and copy right issues that are plaguing the Apple smart phone.

Apple is grappling with copy right issues with HTC and has taken legal action against the Taiwan based phone maker HTC, alleging that it has infringed as many as 20 patents owned by Apple that are used in the iPhone.

HTC is famous for its many sleek handsets including Nexus One, the first handset to be branded by Google apart from many other  handsets that employ Google’s Android operating system. With Google  defending its mobile handset partner of HTC, it is going to be a tussle between the giants. Though Google is not a party to the law suit, it has decided to throw its weight behind HTC, its partner in developing the Android technology. Google chief Eric Schmidt had resigned last year from the Apple board of directors alleging conflict of interest in the wake of increasing competition between  Google and Apple in Android Vs iPhone competition to wrestle the market share.

At least some industry watchers are rather skeptical of the timing of the law suit of Apple, which surprisingly coincided with the launch of the Android phones and many feel that it could be a delaying tactic of Apple to  slow down the Android market before Google edges them out in the race.  By targetting  HTC, which manufactures a range of Android and Windows Mobile devices, Apple may be trying to put the entire industry on notice and to  ensure its monopoly in this technology. With speculations gathering momentum, the  need of the hour for Apple is to  clear the apprehensions of  atleast some consumers who have started thinking that Apple has gone overboard by clipping others in the fray in marketing its product.

We at Reputation Management For.com feel that  a sound  PR policy will not just protect the domain and the technology of Apple but also can clear the air before the customers start wondering who has stolen whose technology? The need of the hour for Apple is to safeguard the trust and the goodwill reposed in this world famous brand by the millions of apple fans all over the world.

• Apple’s iPad or iSad?
• Apple iPad-How good is the experience
• Buying Kindle after a review

Last week, I was considering whether to move the company’s email services from our own server to Google professional applications; was, until I considered whether I would trust Google’s customer service to support me effectively. Instead I am moving to Rackspace that offers 24 hour phone support. I bring this up as a preface to a review of Google’s problems with customer service for the Nexus One handset.

Two weeks after launch and online forums are filled with complaints about technical issues with the Nexus One such as spotty 3G connectivity and the lack of support from Google.  (see Google’s own customer support forums) The Nexus One like the iPhone is already attracting “fanboy” status with owners decrying vehemently any critics, but with sales of 20,000 (supposedly) and the forums containing 1000s of questions, it does look like there are some problems.

There are two tactical issues for Google to address:

• what the change in business model means for the business as a whole
• how they will address their new requirement for consumer customer service support.

and one wider strategic question:

• what impact this will have on their brand and reputation.

There seem to be two divergent views on the impact of the challenges on Google:

“Google tends to have a bit of a Teflon coating,” says Golvin. [Forrester Research] “People tend to cut them a lot more slack — as they do with Apple — than they do with their mobile operator.”

“It may be unfair to predict doom for a handset that came to market just two weeks ago, but it’s becoming clear that taking on the role of mobile retailer was a mistake for Google. It’s too early to predict that Google will kill the Nexus One, but it’s not too early to wonder whether it should.” [GigaOm website]

Although Google has been a consumer brand for a long time, they don’t strictly speaking have consumers as their paying customers. It has had a business to business model based around advertising, like many media companies. As such it has had modest customer service issues to manage and has developed sophisticated tools to support those businesses via Adwords accounts. Now with the Nexus One they are selling directly to consumers but they do not seem to have developed the same sophisticated tools to identify or support those handset users.

Consumers are tough cookies when it comes to demanding support for their idiocy and expect a voice at the end of the line, something Google does not do and something Google seems to have an antipathy for. So, if Google does not want to customer service, maybe they should not do retail at all. For the first time they can directly damage their relationship with vocal consumers who will begin to see Google as a whole in a different light. It is somewhat similar issue to Virgin: if your trains don’t run on time, what does it say about your bank or your airline?

Google does have a great opportunity by going direct as a retailer, but it will need to use its formidable brainpower to develop a customer service algorithm every bit as sophisticated as its search engine if it is to make a success of it!

While Google and China battle it out with threats and innuendos after the great Google hack in China, we now have the weakest link of ‘em all in this murky affair unveiled – Microsoft and its browser IE!

Microsoft has now admitted this and has even come out with a warning about the critical unpatched vulnerability in the IE.  Mike Reavey, director of Microsoft’s Security Response Center (MSRC) had this to say:

“We have determined that Internet Explorer was one of the vectors used in targeted and sophisticated attacks against Google and possibly other corporate networks”

For Microsoft, admitting this is the first step in damage control and they have gone on record with a security warning which Computer World reported as shown below:

 The security advisory said that the only version of IE not containing the critical flaw was IE 5.01 running on Windows 2000. All other versions, including IE6, IE7 and IE8 on Windows 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista, Server 2008, Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 are vulnerable to attack.

A patch for the vulnerability may miraculously arrive any minute now  as part of crisis mangement from Microsoft. After all Google’s threat is keenly watched the world over and for an Internet giant like Microsoft there’s nothing as big as a security flaw in terms of reputation mangement.

In other Microsoft news today, Steve Ballmer has announced that Microsoft intends to continue to stay in China and obey the country’s rules. (yawn)

The interesting question now is -Will Google really pull out of China after China has scoffed at Google’s threat saying that they are going to continue filtering Google content come what may?

Google and China - the tussle continues and further developments on this front may just take the heat off of Microsoft for now.

Recently we have been contacted by companies being hit hard by Google Query Suggestions. If you are not sure what these are, when you start typing words into Google, it will come back with suggestions as you type. See example below:

So sounds harmless enough?  I am sure it was intended to be,  if you check out Google’s Query Suggestion page

Why it’s helpful

• Rest your fingers.
  Need to do a big search on a tiny keyboard? Suggestions come in real-time, so typing [ great w ] and clicking ‘great wall of china’ is faster and easier than typing it out.
• Catch a mistake.
  Did you mean: Melbourne Australia? Start searching for [ melborn ], say, and Google Suggest will offer more common spellings for what you might be trying to find.
• Skip a page; save some time.
  If Google detects that a specific site is relevant to the search you’re typing, we’ll provide a link straight to it, so you don’t have to wait for the search results page. If a link is to a site in our adversiter network, it’ll appear in a colored box labeled ‘Sponsored Link.’
• Repeat a favourite search.
  If you’re signed in to your Google Account and have Web History enabled, we may show some suggestions based on searches you’ve done in the past. You can tell a suggestion is from your history if it has a Remove link next to it.

Splitting the atom, scientists at first looked at this as a way to generate power efficiently, of course it didn’t take long for some people to look at how they can use it for weapons of mass destruction.   Guess what?  Some people are now looking at query suggestions as a weapon of mass destruction to a company’s reputation.

So how can this very innocent feature that google introduced become a company killer?  The search query is set off when when people start searching for specific keyword terms, so for example people searching for Olympics will start adding specific years.  Google picks up on this and starts to offer it as suggestions.

If you have a large number of customers and some of them have had a bad experience, then they may start looking for a way to complain and start searching terms like “Your Company Name + Complaints”, enough people start doing it and it can soon become a Google suggested query.   Even worse is someone could add a few negative comments about your company in a forum and before you know it not only is Google now making negative suggestions but also the negative forums are now showing up for your company name or brand quite often above your own site.  Look what happened to Tiger Woods in a very short time.

So it won’t take long for unscrupulous competitors to catching on to this and start seeding such search quires.   Once it takes hold it will be very difficult and costly to fix in both time and effort.

Another issues that can cause you problems is your business model, if you ask for money upfront people are incredibly suspicious.  We have had several companies approach us about this exact problem, a potential customer will type search terms like “Company Name + Scam” or “Company Name + Hoax” again it does not take many of the same searches to trigger Google’s suggested query and now you have a massive online reputation problem.  Follow this up with a few negative comments in a forum or a site like scam.com and it could cost you your business.

Make sure you are on top of you customer complaints procedure before issues get out of hand.  If you product is not up to scratch don’t be surprised if it does not take long for Google to pick up on this.  We have managed to help companies reputation online by introducing certain procedures to reduce and water down the impact once negative suggested queries started to effect their business.

Taking a proactive approach will help defend your company name, brands and reputation online, make sure you listen to customers and remember to show that you have.  A journalist cannot follow a story if you have shown you heard the problems and are addressing them.  If you bury your head in the sand then it will be a very costly exercise.

Google’s behaviour in China has always been something of a reputation menace for them. Are they colluding in censorship? How can they square their business objective of organising the world’s information with the censorship requirements of China’s state? They might not need to any more after effectively accusing the Chinese government of sponsoring a sophisticated hack of their systems.

One side is the Chinese government who insist that  “Internet companies and all sorts of websites must recognise their social responsibilities and further strengthen their internet security. They must voluntarily submit to the supervision and guidance of government departments.”  ”Must voluntarily submit” is nice totalitarian touch from the government spokesman. On the other side is Google trying to square their “do no evil” with their fraught relationship with China’s government and its censoring approach to internet activities.

Shareholders have already come out in support of Google’s stance, demonstrating that this is likely to be a PR win for the US company. Now Yahoo and Bing will have to consider their own response to the Chinese government. Do they try to exploit the situation commercially at Google’s expense which could be an expensive strategy in the longer reputational terms or do they follow Google’s lead.

For the Chinese government this could not have come at a worse time for their reputation as a place you can do business. As one commentator succinctly put it: “This is a very politically charged environment. Multinationals have been complaining about ‘Buy China’ policies, unfair restrictions and hacking… and this is going to be very damaging if there isn’t a solution. There’s a feeling that China is emboldened and that they don’t need to have the same sort of dialogue. This is the mismatch – people here think no one can do without China, and I think now some companies are thinking no one can deal with China.”

Google has long recognised that government relations is a long term threat to their dominance of their markets. In too many markets they are verging close to monopoly strength. Where the 90s was the decade of Microsoft bashing, it could be the 10s is a decade for Google bashing. Avoiding questionable business practices could be the first part in a more flexible and visible response to working with questionable governments around the world.

Google’s real time search integration into searches is for the time being giving its 6 minutes of fame to anyone who is active on Twitter. Go out there blog about anything topical and before you know BAM you’re in the first five on Google news searches.

The good thing about this is that you can really get a lot of people reading what you want them to read. So if you’re a Tiger Woods you should be out there with expert reputation management guys telling the world that you messed up big time, that you’re seeing a top shrink to handle your “addiction” and that you plan to be back on top of the game in 2010.

The bad thing about this real-time search integration that Google has begun is that, if you have a disgruntled customer, employee, spouse, agent, patient or fan you could be in a blitz of bad press within minutes. Scary? Definitely!

The call for reputation management has just turned into a shout. You need to have daily PR out there as defenders with positive news and content. It’s a minefield out there, more so now.

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.

How Do Negative Search Results Hurt You

Weapons of mass destruction to your company’s reputation…  so often we talk about the doom and gloom of reputation management and how sites like scam.com, ripoffreport.com, facebook.com to name a few can be used to attack your brand, company or individual’s name.  We have to talk about the negative side of not taking action all the time because businesses and celebrities just don’t get it.  Even if they do they quite often don’t allocate resources or funding to help prevent attacks on-line until its to late and the damage has been done.  You only have to look at what happened after the France – Ireland game with Thierry Henry’s hand ball, people are already saying they will boycott Gillette products on facebook and twitter, one profile has already generated over 50,000 followers in less than 24 hours, amazing.

So being Friday, thanks giving and also a new moon, I thought I should talk about all the positives of reputation management and how it can help drive traffic to your site.

So by developing a reputation management strategy, what you’re really doing is taking advantage of all the different sites and channels out there.  Sites like the BBC.co.uk are great example of taking advantage of technology, they were one of the first to take advantage of blogging and podcasts.  Putting out lots of positive content across all the available mediums not only helps prevent negative content but also allows you to attract more potential customers when they see positive customer feedback and stories.

Social network sites are a fantastic way to get news out quickly and effectively, many developers have been quick to take advantage and build applications for almost everything from your laptop to your iphone.  One of our clients next week is going to the RSNA  which is the largest conference in the world, the sales guys can walk around taking photos, interviews and general feedback instantly.   Anyone can become a journalist nowadays.

Creating pages on Facebook and allowing people to become a member is another great way to build a following of your product or service.  Cool applications that allow you to twitter can then be publish to your site and facebook at the same time.  There are 1000’s of great widgets and applications to choose from.  Blogs are also another great tool, again providers like wordpress have tools you can download to your phone so when you are sitting in the airport bored and feeling like you are wasting time you can bang up a post.

In today’s world where customers expect things to be instant its critical you keep your on-line presence up to date.  What’s almost as bad of course is if you don’t keep content up to date, I know I have to really get into a strict routine each morning to make sure I keep my blogs, twitter etc up to date.  If a customer finds a blog that has not been touched for 6 months, it can send out a negative message, is the company still running?  Do they not care about keeping information up to date? And so on.

The internet is becoming a really noisy place, so it’s important you use every tool possible to shout the loudest, much of the work we provide for our clients is daily posting and writing news articles and so on, the benefit of this is just how much traffic this can generate to your site.  You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand the more nets you throw out the more fish you will catch.

Using on-line PR sites is another fantastic way to also get stories to the top of search engines, often these types of services offer links to your own site, so more often or not if it’s an interesting enough story you can also get traffic.  If your really lucky and people start to Digg it, reddit, tweet it etc then it can really take off and generate a lot of traffic.

It’s very easy now quickly to generate over 50 plus urls all promoting your company and publishing articles and press releases you have written, ultimately you have more control and more of a chance at keep positive stories at the top of the search results as well as attracting more traffic and ultimately generating more sales.

Reputation management in my eyes is advanced search engine optimisation (SEO), its about developing a online presence which attracts more customers and at the same time control the content.  In very simplistic terms when ever you type in a search result there is always at least 10 results on the first page of Google, if you only have one website (and assuming it is optimised) then when someone searches your business you have absolutely no control what the other 9 results will show.  It’s a bit like owning a shop front but only using 1 tenth of the window and allowing anybody else to use the rest of the window for what ever they like.

Reputation management must be part of a companies strategy going forward the old ways or going out the door no longer can you rely on the traditional PR ways and damage limitation solutions, of course they have a part to play, but a shrinking part.

I saw a news article on the BBC about the top 100 brands in the world and thought it would be interesting to see how their rankings were reflected on the Internet in terms of Reputation Management.  I got the list off Interbrand which runs a report each year.  All the main brands have a http://en.wikipedia.org page but I decided not to list every Wiki page, you can easily find them yourself. The results are from the searches I did on Google.com

1. Coca Cola – Number one in the report, it looks like they have about 4 websites on the first page but this massive giant still has a negative result number 7 http://www.inminds.co.uk/boycott-coca-cola.html
2. IBM – One negative from the same site as Coca Cola http://www.inminds.co.uk/boycott-ibm.html Number 5, International Brotherhood of Magicians number 8, so as long as you don’t annoy one of these magical guys you should be OK
3. Microsoft – They pretty much dominate the first page through all the sites they run from bing to xbox,  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft being the main issue
4. GE – So far is doing very well like Microsoft however they also have negatives about them on the Wiki page
5. Nokia – Have done a great job with their reputation online dominating pretty much the first page, again a wiki page with negative content is still available.
6. Macdonalds – falls into the category of having a name with a lots of other people (Scots) and businesses helping drown out negative content.  Of course there is a wiki page but on one of those rare occasions the page is about Kevin B. MacDonald so well done Macdonalds the only company so far not to have anything negative on the first page in google.com
7. Google – Guess what there is not one negative piece of content about Google not even a wiki page, I wonder how they manage that
8. Toyota – At the time I did this research Toyota had a couple of negative news stories, wiki page and this one http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-10353116-54.html number 10
9. Intel – Intel have a clear bill of health apart from Wiki page
10. Disney – Have done very well, even the wiki page was number 9 in the results, a few negative news stories but not directed at them, well done!!!

I will look at the following 90 brands over the course of the week and give feedback on any that really stand out.  What is amazing is how much weight Google gives to Wiki pages.  Many of these wiki pages include previous law suits of the companies involved (many years out of date), I have no real understanding why they add such information, or even why they list companies in the first place.  It is the easiest way for someone to get negative content up the search results by adding a page to Wiki.   I thought encyclopedia’s were about how fast a Cheater can run or the Roman Wall, not how a company has had previous law suits against it.