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Winning reputation wars online

Filed under: all articles
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By: NMK Created on: March 23rd, 2005
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In the era of blogs and consumer-driven message boards, protecting your brand is a more complicated process. Mark Rogers gives some advice on how to minimise brand risk and outmarket the detractors...

In the era of blogs and decentralised consumer-driven message boards, protecting your brand is a more complicated process. Mark Rogers gives some advice on how to minimise brand risk and outmarket the detractors...

By Mark Rogers

[Register and post your own comments on this article below...]

Three true stories:

You are a head of group communications for a FTSE 100 company. A senior executive calls you in a rage because he has learnt he – along with hundreds of his colleagues - is being sacked. The source: a message board.

Arnold Clark cars is one of the largest private companies in the UK with 6,000 employees. A Google search on its name brings up as result number two "Arnold Clark sucks" – a site devoted to a vitriolic attack on the company.

The US bike lock company Kryptonite issues a blanket denial of a blog story that its “unbreakable” locks can be picked with a Bic biro. Days later – another blog posts a video, showing how it can be done in less than 30 seconds. Kryptonite recall their product at a cost of $10m.

Sausan Hachicho of German brand consultants Schiller confirms: “The Internet has increased the risks for Brands.” Steve Leach observes that when a blue chip company approaches his company Brand Intelligence for a brand audit, he typically finds “hundreds of issues, ranging from cyber-squatting, copyright infringement, counterfeiting, unauthorised Google bids on the brand name, to serious fraud.”

But how do you measure the effect of these assaults on your brand? Frederick Reichheld of Bain and Co suggests that the simplest indicator is to ask the question: "Would you recommend this company to a friend?" If the answer is yes, the person is a "promoter", if no a "detractor". The number of promoters is, in his words, "the one number you need to grow". Daniel Letts at identity specialists Wolff Olins has been using this "Net promoters" index, to look at the supermarket sector and is delighted with the results. "It is a very reliable leading indicator for successful companies."

My own company Market Sentinel, which specialises in live web monitoring and rapid response, produces a BuzzMap, showing what consumers are saying about your brand or product. The results show how many promoters you have and how many detractors across a variety of key issues.

Recommendors vs. detractors

The reason that reputation wars are being fought online is that public perception of brands is increasingly driven by online media. Blog aggregator Technorati recently demonstrated that the unconventional media is catching up the "MSM" (mainstream media) and that sites like Fox News and Reuters are already being outpointed, judged by the number of incoming links to their content. 15 of their top 37 news sources are blogs.

But are the companies worried enough? Brand risk expert Martin Langford thinks not: "many companies tend to take a head-in-the sand position with Internet issues. The typical communications head is at least 45, and this is the generation that is the least internet-aware. If your boss doesn’t take the threat from the internet seriously, then you don’t either."

The result of this can be serious damage to the bottom line. Pharmaceutical companies in particular have become very vulnerable to single issue attacks in relation to the side effects of drugs. “And when you get a class action how do the lawyers find their plaintiffs?” Martin Langford asks. “Online.”

Nor do conventional responses always work against these kinds of threats.

"You can take the troublemakers to court," Leach of Brand Intelligence says, "but that can often backfire in PR terms. In most cases it’s better to out-market them."

Engaging online communities

What does outmarketing mean? "It can be as simple as search optimisation," Leach says. "Making sure that the nasty remark, or the negative site is on page 50 of Google’s algorithmic search, rather than page 1."

The same logic extends to blogs. Here it helps to have a corporate blog, and at least make sure your press releases are available in the newsfeed format which lets Google News and MSN pick them up. Yet how many brand owners do this? Of the FTSE 100 companies, only one has RSS-enabled its news releases: BT. This means however good and thoughtful the PR response on an issue, it is essentially invisible. A newsfeed is easy to build from any content management system, or by using an automatic feed-creation service such as Market Sentinel’s myWebFeeds.

Some see the freedom to criticise big companies as a positive thing. "The Internet has empowered the little man," comments Joshua Blackburn of the public sector branding consultancy Provokateur. "Big corporations can’t dismiss criticisms out of hand. They should invest in corporate social responsibility. You can see it in what McDonald’s are doing at the moment. They want to be seen as healthy, responsible, socially aware. People may be cynical about this approach, but it makes it harder to land the punches."

Related links:

www.schiller.de
www.brandintelligence.com
www.marketsentinel.com
www.technorati.com
www.sifry.com
www.kissmannlangford.com
www.wolff-olins.com
www.mywebfeeds.com
www.provokateur.com

About the Author:

Mark Rogers, CEO Market Sentinel, was a co-founding commissioning editor of BBC Online and co-founder of the voice-activated shopping service Amazon.com Anywhere. Market Sentinel automatically turns web content into headlines and short summaries, making it simple to browse and understand. The Market Sentinel team is uniquely qualified to create news syndication from static webpages because the service is provided by the team which co-authored XML syndication standards. The team ran myRSS, the popular automated RSS service, which served up to 100,000 headlines a day between 2001 and 2004. Ian Davis, Market Sentinel CTO and co-founder of Calaba (now Surf Kitchen), pioneered and co-wrote XML news syndication standards. www.marketsentinel.com

Comments

toxi said:

uphill struggle? <p>re: corporate blogging - companies better get their strategy right and understand the implications of having a blog before they start one. running a blog primarily to increase google ranking is naive and short sighted. companies like Sun or Macromedia are successfully using blogs as communication medium amongst employees and of course their customers. blogs can seriously improve the relationship with your customers, though there are big issues and risks associated with leaking sensitive information, personal views of employees, but also link spamming and the danger of defamatory comments, which would then be directly present on the company's (blog) website. obviously there are defenses against all that, but these extra administrative tasks introduce further additional costs. <br/> <br/>IMHO there usually are valid reasons if customers are complaining against a company and spending money to further mislead or even sue those users is money ill spent and not much unlike opening a can of worms. that same money could and should instead be used to remedy the actual problem internally: i.e. improve a product (rather than the way it's advertised), improve customer services etc. <br/> <br/>it seems to me, this article and its mentality totally ignores the 1st golden rule: &quot;the customer is always right.&quot; customer satisfaction is still key to marketing success. <br/> <br/>furthermore online users are becoming increasingly reliant on their own webs of trust, especially when it comes to e-commerce. systems like e-bay are actively encouraging this behaviour with their reviewing process of sellers and buyers alike. i find it mildly funny suggesting that publishing company PR information in a new format is sold in here as remedy for a damaged public image. i'm not sure how cynical marketing people have become already to believe in solutions like that. this &quot;article&quot; itself is not much more than info-tisement for the marketsentinel software. in contrast to this product, there're numerous open source solutions available which can do the very same thing for free. <br/> <br/>an RSS feed of news releases is not much different to an opt-in email newsletter. users still have to subscribe to them. sure there's a growing number of aggregation web services/sites (i.e. technorati) which potentially increases reach, but that still doesn't solve the trust issue. e.g. i myself can't say i like McD more now that it is offering salads (which incidentally contain more calories than their cheeseburgers [http://www.healthypages.net/newspage.asp?newsid=4113]) <br/> <br/>as final note and suitably fitting to my points above, you might find this very comment is exactly the bad reputation issue you wanted to avoid, but just like blog comments our two very conflicting opinions are now joined on the very same web page... qed. <br/></p>

MarkRogers said:

First fix the problem <p>Toxi - The thing about the web is that you are visible and accountable 24/7. Brands are just getting used to that. Of course the way to get positive PR is to fix the problem. If you are selling fatty, sugary foods that are killing people, diversity into healthier ones. But in the short term, you can make friends by engaging with your detractors - finding out what they want from you, seeing if you can't give it to them. You can't mislead them. Look at what happened to Kryptonite. <br/> <br/>Corporate blogs should be all about that engagement. I would like to see PR getting senior execs to comments on blogs in the same way that they comment on press stories. Look at what Jeff Bezos did when Amazon got all the flack about patenting 1-click. He put himself about on message boards. It worked. The moral is that you have to get your hands dirty. It is not just about RSS-enabling your website - although I would argue that that is a start - it is about blogifying your approach to PR. And engaging in dialogues like this one!<br/></p>

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