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REPUTATION MANAGEMENT – or what the funk do I do now?May 6,2008

Ged Carroll

DIGITAL PRACTICE

It’s a World of Change, Isn’t It?

Some things haven’t changed:• The tenets of strategy are the same as they have been for the past 5,000 years• Clients are still ultimately measured on the performance of their business• We still communicate with people ultimately in mind to be influenced• Channels and media may change but the need for good PR remains constant

Some things have changed• It has never been cheaper or easier to produce content• Clients can disintermediate the media and communicate directly with their audiences• Audiences can easily communicate with each other on a large scale• We have new media vehicles• The news cycle lasts longer – online news sources act like an echo chamber

We have analogues for all this things based on past experiences because ultimately its how people chose to use them that we need to most understand

Levels of Online PR Engagement

• Monitoring: no engagement but active listening to what is being said about the organisation and its peers – any related issues

• Low-level engagement: as Monitoring plus response-led online presence

• High-level engagement: as low level engagement, but proactive approach, integration with other marketing and customer services activities

WEX PULSE: MONITORING ONLINE – SILVER BULLET 4

• Vibrant dashboard for optimal view of media coverage / buzz and measurement

• Automated media monitoring for any size business

• Secure integrated platform for improved collaboration

• Clear snapshots of share of voice and buzz trends

• Streamlined interface for easier navigation

Measurement Silver Bullet (Or Not) 5

• Cision

• Attentio

• Market Sentinel

• BuzzMetrix

• Cymfony

• Biz360

• Factiva

• Brandimensions

Measurement

• It all goes back to objectives, but….– Google

• SERP• PageRank

– Google alerts:• Ongoing monitoring

– Technorati:• RSS-fed buzz with authority meter

– Yahoo! Site Explorer:• Inbound links

– Website analytics

Working Out Where You Should Be

• Ask peers, colleagues and particularly sales staff

• Look at influencers cited in the mainstream media

• Look at back-links into existing web properties and competitor sites

• Examine data from measurement tools• Google blog search• Look at their authority• ‘Found’ influencers’ blogrolls

Getting Favourable Coverage

• Values:– Honest– Open – Transparent– Available

• Have great content• Provide a provocative standpoint• Real news or a great story• Narrowcast rather than broadcast

Dealing with Unfavourable Coverage

• Acknowledge salient points within the coverage• Offer to engage the author in person• Provide data points and external references for

any rebuttal• Plan ahead to push unfavourable content down

off the first 100 results on the SERPs and keep it off

IP Issues

• Give online users the opportunity to use your IP where relevant in a legitimate manner

• Image resource library and licence • Outline what ‘fair use’ means• Be clear in plain language what your

trademarks are• Be polite and unthreatening in your

communications with offenders• If you are still struggling with compliance go

direct to the ISP or platform owner• Don’t put anything in writing that you

wouldn’t want to see published

Business Blogs

• Don’t start a blog without a commitment to maintaining it

• Update at a regular pace• Do have an understanding of the target audience

and how they interact online• Think about the tone of voice: no marketing speak• Companies are made of people: let their

personalities and passion shine through

Podcasts & Video

Tends to be one-way rather than two-way communications

Dynamic delivery

Audio is portable and flexible to consume

Video requires captive attention – need to be respectful of the audiences time

Content needs to be: original, interesting, humourous

Two’s company – have a sidekick

Succinct

Internal communications

Education

Product walkthroughs

Direct-to-customer communication

Crisis management

Providing context on news stories

Social Networks

The best known forms of social software• Think about your target group:

– Their motivations– Their location– Where they are in their life– Be respectful of their personal space– Think about how you can add value– How do you engage beyond becoming a friend

• A source of breaking news

Micro media

• Is what it says it is• Not all communications needs to be long form:

SMS • Address cards• Short messages

Virtual Worlds

• Virtual worlds, like all communities, have rules• Activities within the community need to respect the

rules• Pick a community that your brand will fit in with

and work with in the long term• The most important thing is to think about

engagement rather than generating coverage• Not that much use in reputation management

Search and Reputation Management

Stakeholders (human & machine)

• Search as the gateway to the web

• A reputation engine and long-term memory

• Stakeholders:– General public– Shareholders– Peers– Prospective clients– Prospective employees– Regulators– Pressure groups and NGOs

How Algorithmic Search Works

1. Content acquisition– Visits webpage, reads it, and

crawls links to other pages up to 4 layers deep within the website

– Consumes RSS feeds that highlight new content and links

– Crawls a site map (sitemap.xml)– Directories (DMOZ, Yahoo!

Directory)

2. Index web pages– Everything the spider finds is

saved in the search engine’s index

3. Algorithmic categorisation: sorts through the Index and returns results based on mathematical calculations – Spam scoring– Relevance– freshness– Topological relationship to other

sites – Appropriate for vertical search?

Searching the Long Tail

Google, Live.com, Yahoo! and Ask algorithmic search

Social Search

Bookmarking Services

Q&A services

Trusted web

Local searchMaps

Yellow PagesMobile searchComparison

shopping

Mainstream Esoteric

Vertical search(Google Scholar, Krugle, Scirus etc)

Recommendations(Last.fm, Yahoo! Music)

TRANSACTIONAL

Specialists

SEM/SEO

•Traditional direct-response online marketing work•Direct response•Highly measurable•Very quantitative•Specialist field

•Content: relevance, freshness and quality•Provision for trusted web services• (digg, del.icio.us)•SEO for corporate and product •websites through collection of inlinks

BRAND

Content creation /BookmarkingSEO

REPUTATION

Trusted advisor

SEMContent creation

SEO

•Purchase ad spots to drive consumers to company site to communicate clients’ side of the story•Create content to flush ‘bad coverage’ off the first search page•SEO to maintain position

PR Agency

PR And Search

Three Scenarios for Search and PR

RESULTS

Within 20 days WE… •Targeted more than 343 influentials via three digital press releases•Incorporated aggressive SEO that increased impressions and clicks by 20 percent•Conducted blogger outreach that resulted in at least 338 blog posts•Executed a Twitter viral campaign that created 25,000 followers•Contacted 290, 400 people via LinkedIn•Garnered more than 9, 500 views on YouTube and UStream.TV

NEEDThe United Nations (UN) engaged Waggener Edstrom Worldwide (WE) to provide global digital strategy, social media counsel and public relations consultancy in support of the UN Millennium Campaign's "Stand Up and Speak Out" event on October 16-17, 2007.

The UN needed to create awareness and generate interest for an event designed to highlight and reinforce the pledge made by governments from 189 countries to the Millennium Development Goals, specifically to work toward the eradication of poverty worldwide by 2015.

APPROACHGlobal scope demanded an innovative approach to unifying audiences across the world via their individual Internet engagement points. Given the variety of mediums and 30-day timeline, WE drafted an integrated communications plan, vested in top social media opportunities, that was strategically and quickly executed.

THE UNITED NATIONS: STAND UP AGAINST POVERTY

O’Reilly Publishing & Web 2.0

• CMP Media with the knowledge and approval of O’Reilly Media legaled NFP IT@Cork

• Hue and cry break outs in the blogosphere over the course of 3 days

• O’Reilly Media step in and pick up the phone to Tom Rafferty and agree that Rafferty can use the web 2.0 descriptor

Any Questions?

http://e-consultancy.com | http://www.waggeneredstrom.co.uk/

http://renaissancechambara.jp

Online Inspiration & Useful Links

• The Cluetrain Manifesto• Wikinomics website which is based on and extends the book of the same

name by Don Tapscott and Anthony D Williams• Collected papers and essays by danah boyd• Notre Dame University:

Fifteen-minutes of fame: The Dynamics of Information Access on The Web (May 13, 2005) by Z. Dezso, E Almaas, A Lukacs, B Racz, I Szakadat and A Barabasi

• OECD whitepaper on user-generated content• Digital Natives Programme by Berkman Center for Internet & Society at

Harvard Law School• Some suggested blogs and online sources to read sorted by subject area• How to read RSS feeds in Outlook:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HA011750001033.aspx

• Pane-style readers: http://www.pageflakes.com http://www.netvibes.com/

• Online readers: http://www.bloglines.com/ http://www.newsgator.com/

• A regularly-updated RSS reader resource: http://blogspace.com/rss/readers

GED CARROLL

Waggener EdstromTower House10 Southampton StreetLondon, WC2E 7AH, UK

t-gcarroll@waggeneredstrom.com+44 (0)20 7632 3800www.waggeneredstrom.co.uk /http://renaissancechambara.jp

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