Posts Tagged ‘PR’

Flyglobespan, British Airways, where does it stop, the tourist industry has been hammered with negative news and press.   On the BBC last night they were talking about the average staff’s wages, the average BA cabin crew gets almost double what they get at Virgin.  Either BA is paying way to much or Virgin is under paying either way there are no winners when figures like these are released.

The tourism industry as a whole is under attack with hotels reputation being tested with negative feedback on sites like Tripadvisor putting potential customers off.  This latest news about Flyglobespan certainly will not help the industry, who wants to go abroad and worry about not getting back.  The hotels miss out big time on all the destinations that Flyglobespan flew to.  The knock on effect is massive, restaurants, shops, taxi drivers, the list goes on.

The Internet can be very one sided, hotels, air carriers, tour operators by the very nature of what they do have tens of 1000’s of customers.  It is totally down to the laws of average that no matter what you do or how fantastic your customer service, you will have someone, somewhere not happy about the service.  Obviously having a bad customer service and ignoring issues can compound negative press online.  In the good old days word of mouth was normally the only place annoyed customers would vent their frustrations.  With the dawn of the Internet came along blogs, social network site, forums and other avenues for people to write about a bad experience they might have had with a hotel, restaurant etc.  Now the whole world can listen rather than just friends and family.

Customers who have had a very good experience do not often tell people about it unless asked, and they certainly don’t write about it, so because of this the Internet can become a company’s worst enemy rather than best friend.

Fixing this could be easier than you’d think, yes it does take time, resource and require systems in place, but done correctly it can not only help manage your reputation online but even attract more customers.  Having for example a facility to capture customer feedback and publish them to the web is a good example.

The big lesson with PR and reputation management is don’t leave it until it becomes a crisis and you are loosing business, make sure you are take a proactive approach and protect your businesses reputation.

It’s amazing to see a whole industry melt down in such a short time, with the credit crunch and now the recession many house builders have gone belly up.  This is not helped by the fact that many have forgotten or never had to market themselves.  In the good old days you just built a house and bingo 2 days later it was sold.  Actually many were sold before they were even built.  It’s not just builders whole countries also got it wrong, you only have to see places like Dubai who have had to been bailed out.

The result is many builders just don’t know how to market themselves, today its now more critical than ever to do it right.  With a few buyers out there you have to fight to get their attention and ultimately their business.  More often a builder will spend more on grass than they will on marketing their properties.

Question, if you have an estate to sell worth say, 10 million, how much would you spend on marketing your homes?   Topsider Homes and Perthshire Builders are great examples of companies who do understand the importance of marketing.   Never has it been easier to communicate with customers than today with twitter, blogs and other social network sites.

Should a builder just rely on a estate agent will they do the best they can? or do they have so many properties on the books they just don’t have the luxury of putting you at the top.  The only person the builder  can rely on to market it’s business is the builder itself.  Embracing online PR, SEO and search engine marketing could be the difference between a builder making it through these tough times and the one that does not.

Bad press, damage limitation, PR, crisis management, brand protection, call it what you like, the minute you put online in front of any of these phrases changes the requirements of a company who can help.  So who do you need to help mange your reputation on the net?

When you find you have negative content appearing in the search engines where do you go?   Sure negative comments can be a positive thing if you have had a serious issue and have shown to have dealt with it after listening to your customers.  More often than not however it can be an ex employer, competition or customer who has taken a particular disliking for the company and very difficult to show you have dealt with the complaint.

Reputation Management is about showing your company in the correct light and create understanding.  It is unlike advertising, whose main goal and focus is to generate sales and awareness.  Like PR, reputation management should be a planned exercise, with the goal of making the public, customers and suppliers see that the company understands the needs and wants of all parties involved.  You can’t do this if there is only negative content showing on the first page of the search engines.

How you go about producing this positive content must be done honestly and in a manageable structure, otherwise you could take the wrong path.  See this example from the NY Times

Lifestyle Lift, a cosmetic surgery company, has reached a settlement with the State of New York over its attempts to fake positive consumer reviews on the Web, the New York attorney general’s office said Tuesday.  The company had ordered employees to pretend they were satisfied customers and write glowing reviews of its face-lift procedure on Web sites, according to the attorney general’s statement. Lifestyle Lift also created its own sites of face-lift reviews to appear as independent sources.

One e-mail message, discovered by the attorney general’s office, told employees to “devote the day to doing more postings on the Web as a satisfied client.”

So it’s important that you get the right advice, having an online reputation management strategy can save you a lot of time, effort and money.  Leaving it till its a big issue can sometimes hurt you and damage your reputation beyond repair.

The problem with the Internet is quite often stories in newspaper and PR in the traditional sense is forgotten about days, weeks or months after it was published.  The Internet is an altogether a different beast, it remains there, it stalks you, it follows you and like a snowball can form into a full scale avalanche.  Now this can be good if the news or story is positive, however this can be a nightmare if its negative.

What feeds this avalanche quite simply is the same as how a rumour will start in an office or at school.  “did you hear what such and such got up to at the weekend, John told me he last night, apparently Steve told him” and so on.  Where the Internet plays a much bigger roll in this, is someone can pick up on an article, blog of comment in a forum and write a blog about it and link back to the actual source.  If the story is interesting enough then it doesn’t take long for many people to follow suit and start linking back to the source and the 2nd and 3rd placed posts on other blogs who are also talking about it.

Google’s main factor for deciding how high to rank a page in the search results is how many links it has pointing to it, they are a bit like votes, the more links, the more likely Google will see the post as a relevant article and start to rank it highly.  If you leave the article at the top of the search results then it attracts even more links and stays up their creating momentum and becoming more difficult to budge when you do decide to address it.

So burying your head in the sand and hope negative or bad press online is going to disappear is the worst PR you could do.  That is why reputation management is critical to start straight away, there is nothing better than hearing a client saying “see no negative things are being said our business”, it just means we are doing our job right!

If you are a CEO the last thing you want is your kids reading personal negative things about you (that may or may not be true), quite often we have to not only protect a company name, but also the main drivers behind a corporation.  If these types of comments get on to some of the mainstream forums, then people can be quite brutal and vulgar about what they are saying about you.

Protect your company using reputation management (PR Online) to stop things getting to the top is much easier than trying to bury it later on.   Check out our prices for standard packages – Reputation Management Prices

In business and in life, reputation is everything. So it goes on the web as well. Your web site is considered one of the representations of your reputation of your business. You and your business together forms your web site. When disatisfied customers complain about your company in discussion forums, and chat rooms around the web, that is another representation of your reputation.

You are what people are saying about you. The blogs convey the public thoughts and moods to express good or bad points and emotions. To minimize damages due to inflammatory websites and weblogs launched by consumers, some use the same reactive tactics. Given the increasing popularity and development of search engines, these tactics have become more important than ever.

In the years ahead, reputation will become even more important on the web. To be successful, you will need to manage your reputation on and off your web site. Software services are emerging nowadays that measure and record reputation in quantitative and qualitative ways. Search Engine Reputation Management tactics are often employed by companies and increasingly by individuals who seek to proactively shield their reputations or brands from damaging contents.
These tactics have become more important than ever due to the increasing popularity and development of search engines. We can help your company develop a reputation management strategy by assessing high-level analysis of the business, industry, competition, and customers. That is the analysis of the key phrases, web site visitors,source of prospective customers and competitiveness of the search results for those phrases.

I wrote a post back in 2007 called PR – Be Careful which was my first real insight into how pr companies work.  A few years on and a bit more experience, has shown me how PR, SEO and Reputation Management should be a combined strategy.

I have seen the best and the worst of PR so here are some healthy tips going forward:

1. PR companies would normally take 2 different stances when it come to damage limitation either respond positively to the story or ignore it and hope it goes away.   Both can be a dangerous game on the Internet, if you react to a story or someone’s comments on a forum directly then quite often than not it will attract more negative comments.  If you ignore it, then again it can attract even more negative comments if it appears high in the search results.
2. Using a PR company to create press releases is a great way to get positive stories out there, make sure you use online channels as well.
3. SEO, make sure your own website and or blogs can be found, a customer should be able to find your site easily and quickly so ranking number one for your own site is critical.
4. Reputation  management is a combination of content, SEO and PR by filling the net with positive stories that rank highly for your company is how best to protect your reputation online.

SEO (search engine optimisation) , PR and Reputation Management services all play a significant roll to protect you name, company or brand.  We have built a working relationship with many of these types of companies over the years and have achieved great success with it.

We do provide a article and content service, but do find it very useful if clients can also provide content which we can use to fill the Internet with positive stories and feedback, customer reviews are also a great source for stories.

Celebrity Damage Limitation

Shows like the X Factor always bring it home when things are not preempted, especially when it comes to damage limitation and reputation management online.  The contestants are thrown into the light and the public which is fuelled by the press can be very cruel indeed.  You only have to see the blogs, social network sites going after contestants like John and Edward and Danyl Johnson.

Any celebrity will attract good and bad reviews, but the difference is when it starts to get nasty.  A Celebrity’s name is everything, its their brand, their product and their reputation and therefore protecting it and making sure you have damage limitation both off line and online is crucial.

People perception of a celebrity is everything, especially when it comes to advertisers looking for someone to represent them.  The two biggest issues with the Internet are one, because things are written then people assume it to be correct even when it is not (look at wikipedia to see examples of that) and the second reason is because any negative content stays on the Internet 24 / 7.  Papers and magazines have a shelf life 1 day to 1 month, however the Internet is different, it’s on all the time.  Quite often the advise from the experts in PR and damage limitation is just to ignore negative publications and it will go away.  The Internet is completely different, if you ignore negative content it can get momentum and start becoming much more of an issue.  How you deal with online negative content is crucial because you also don’t want to deal with it in the wrong way as it can also be like poring fuel on a fire.

We specialise in celebrity damage control and reputation management online, if you want to protect your name or need help with negative results appearing in the search results then please get in touch with us confidentially.

Call: UK +44(0)845 862 1893

Call: USA +1 646 723 3965

Companies often focus their brand efforts on customers and potential customers, ignoring other potential stakeholders who can be equally vociferous in their criticisms.

Brand promises need to apply equally: consumers, employees, suppliers and business partners. In fact depending on your industry there could be many stakeholders to consider. If you are an oil company or mineral producer, local enviromental communities can have a major impact upon your reputation. Witness the recent connection between Shell and their operations in Nigeria.

If you have a product recall, consumers will complain, but a sacked employee or unpaid supplier can be even more vehement attacking your reputation.

The problem all companies face is that stakeholder access to channels for complaint is proliferating fast – blogs, forums, social networks, twitter, and personal web projects. In the past stakeholders had to engage with journalists and persuade news organisations to cover their story. Today, they publish and you are damned.

What can you do?

• Monitor
• Work on your management processes: if you always pay your suppliers late then you are simply inviting criticism. If you sack employees unfairly, they have every right to complain.
• Investigate complaints so you can demonstrate that you are serious about being a good organisation.

With social sites it’s so easy now to set up an account pretending to be company or person and write anything.  We have seen clients brands used without their knowledge and then start to wonder why the enquiries coming from the website have dropped.  When we search on line we discover result 3 and 4 contain negative content often which is incorrect or unjustified.

The problem with network sites is many of them carry a lot of weight in the search results so it’s quite easy to rank well for a company or persons name as they tend not to be very competitive search terms.

As part of our online reputation management service we register you with all the main social network sites not only to help with your branding but also to stop hoax accounts being set up.