Posts Tagged ‘Internet Marketing’

What’s reputation management got to do with a guy who rarely goes out of his house, you may wonder. But, then like all great ideas that go ka-ching ka-ching and rakes in the money, this one is  so simple that you’re going to kick yourself for not having thought about it first.

Drum-rolls for Jason Sadler, a guy who wears T-shirts for a living and has made $85,000 this year doing just that. Jason wears T-shirts for all kinds of people – people like you and me, celebrities who have a new line of products to promote and even companies looking to get the word out about their products. He blogs about it, Tweets about it and even does live video streaming wearing the T-shirt with logos his clients have paid him to wear on YouTube.

Talk about having a light bulb moment and even as you say “why didn’t I think of that” Jason labours on for his clients who can get him to wear a T-shirt for $1 on Jan 1 and $2 for Jan 2 and so on till Dec 31 he gets paid $365. He is so busy that he plans to recruit an assistant in 2010 and expand to Europe and South America and is going to charge $2 for Jan 1 and $4 for Jan 2 and so on in 2010 with the – “two dudes in your shirt” marketing tag as he calls it.

Here’s a guy who will Tweet your grandmother’s birthday wishes wearing a T-shirt or inform the public of new line of products or even get your online reputation given a quick boost like Bill Cosby did with Jason’s help. 

Online reputation management has found for itself a new dude in Jason Sadler and his quirky idea and he works hard for his clients on Twitter, Facebook and Youtube. I give a thumbs up for this great idea.

SEO Online Marketing

So often when a company is looking to hire somebody for the intenet to help with marketing they will hand it over as an IT issue rather than a marketing issue.  This is often because companies still don’t get and understand how the Internet can help or hinder a company.  When you talk about advertising in a newspaper they get what quarter of a page looks like, SEO on the other hand is very subtle and often not obvious.

So many times I’ve heard in the past people saying I am getting my cousin, brother, friend to do our website, or our graphics designer is building our new site and so on.  One thing runs true no matter whether we are talking about online or ofline business, Location, Location, Location.  If I ran a large department store, would I build it on some little housing estate on the outskirts of town, or would I build it in the the prime shopping areas where the footfall would be 1000′s of times greater.

So taking that same attitude, would you get someone who has never ran a successful website online to help you with your online marketing, build your website and ultimately control you reputation online?  I hope your answer would be no.

When do you start your online marketing?

Again one of the biggest mistakes is to wait until your product or business launch and wonder why nothing is coming through your website.  We like to plan at least 6 months ahead to get the ball rolling, work on our marketing strategies,  start our SEO campaign and build good quality content.  Don’t leave it till the day you open for business as you will be dissapointed.  Of course you can also use Adwords to get the ball rolling but rlying on just this form of marketing can be costly.

Make sure to leave a budget for your online marketing, I remember talking with a developer who had built 200 serviced apartments to rent out as holiday lets.  They had spent £30,000 on towels and allocated £1,000 for online marketing and website….  Need i say more.

SEO and Reputation Management has to be part of your marketing strategy, there is only 10 places available on the first page, make sure you are planning to take one of those spots.

What’s amazing is how big companies still have no real understanding of reputation management on-line and how it effects them.  Here are some examples.

KFC

The Google search shows kentuckyfriedcruelty.com these kinds of search results can effect not only business reputation with customers but also shareholders.

Apple’s Iphones

This result is number 4 in Google could certainly put people off buying the Iphones.  The issue with negative results showing for your product is you never know how much it’s hurting and costing the comapny.

negative content results about iphones

Holiday Inn New York

Many hotels around the world suffer from sites like tripadvisor which normally have way more negative comments than positive ones.

Holiday Inn Hotel Reputation Online

So these are just a few quick examples of household brands who have not fully understood the need for managing the content on the first page results of search engines.  It’s no easy task and requires commitment from the company as well as the online reputation company.  Some industries naturally have a tougher job than others, take hotels for example, because of the nature of the industry they encourage 3 rd party websites to have content on them so they can make commission of bookings.  These 3rd party sites learnt very early on that customer feedback creates lots of fresh original content.  The problem created by this approach of course is more often than not people will write remarks when they have had a bad experience rather than a good one, so more often than not the content is normally negative rather than positive.

So how do you protect your brand and company reputation?

There is no quick solution to this, it’s really about creating good quality content  and keeping on top of the social network sites.  When we are creating content we put it into categories:

1. Top quality – this content is written for the main website and any press releases.
2. Middle quality – this content maybe out sourced and used for social net work sites and micro sites.
3. Lesser quality – this is used to fill the Internet with positive stories and helps push and support the top quality content.

Although we offer SEO services much of our work is creating positive content for clients and managing the whole online presence.  It is an ongoing battle making sure you keep on top of the online world, 1 or 2 articles a week just won’t do it if you have a global brand and you are going against 1000′s of people writing about you.