Manager, Natural Search Optimization
Chris Keating
Managing Your Reputation with NSO

During this holiday season, a significant amount of media attention has been given to the toy recalls. In a recent survey conducted by DoubleClick Performics, 58 percent of consumers indicated that they would turn to online research to eliminate dangerous products from their shopping lists. With that in mind, it seems like the perfect opportunity to discuss reputation management.

A critical part of managing your brand's reputation is monitoring for negative publicity that can be easily found on the Web.  But it's not just the brand name itself, it's also product names, the domain name, the industry, competitors, and publicly known figures associated with the brand (e.g. Bill Gates, Richard Branson).

The first step is to monitor the page one search results in Google, Yahoo!, Ask.com, etc. for the appropriate keywords.  Natural search optimization has a role to play in managing these results.  Because a given domain can only receive one or two listings, you need to have alternate sources of positive, or at least neutral, results.  To help stake out more real estate on the page, use these techniques:

• Leverage alternate domains: optimize any sibling sites you control, such as corporate information sites, charitable foundations, etc.
• Create links to sites with good listings that appear on page two or three (affiliate sites, positive reviews, or even neutral results).  By linking from your site, you may be able to improve the ranking of these results.
• Create (and optimize) new pages on trusted social media sites such as MySpace, Wikipedia, YouTube, and Flickr.  Over time, this content may displace other potentially negative results on page one.
• Optimize all press releases.

Beyond natural search, a variety of tools are available to automate monitoring. With the use of keyword searches from the sources described above, you can use an RSS reader to create feeds and compile results from the following:

• Google Alerts, Yahoo! Alerts, etc
  
• Google News (for mainstream)
  
• Technorati (for social media)
• Keotag.com (monitors across the social media universe)
• Blogpulse.com (for hot topics that jump from blog to blog)
  
• BoardTracker.com (for forums)
  
• Copernic.com (any other site, including competitors)

Various paid services are also available which conduct all the monitoring and provide a dashboard of results, including Radian 6 and Buzz Logic.

It’s critical to have strategies in place for handling reputation issues as they arise; toy manufacturers and retailers, for example, can be in front of the recall story by optimizing their Web sites to highlight their safe products. These practices, however, are not just reactive. Regularly monitoring and natural search best practices can put you in front of trends and issues helping you to ensure the safety of your brand’s reputation.

DOUBLECLICK PERFORMICS NATURAL SEARCH OPTIMIZATION