Continuing the live coverage of Search Engine Strategies San Jose 2007…

This is the last session of the last day, the topic is buzz monitoring, and the moderator is Chris Sherman.

The first presenter is Rob Key. Social Media is rapidly gaining SERP predominance, especially with blended / universal search. Search and social media have become fully intertwined.

The result is that you no longer own your brand, your brand is now a conversation. To understand the conversation, look below the waterline (the waterlne is the top 20-30 search results) . Look to Enterprise Generated Media, Mainstream Media, and User Generated Media. Below the waterline is blogs, newsgroups, podcasts, and other forms of CGM - this is ‘gold dust’ to companies.

Ask the key questions:

• Who is talking
• What are they saying
• Are you resonating with customers
• What’s the volume of the conversation, and who’s being impacted

What are core business uses?

• Reputation Management
• Customer Service
• New product launch
• Marketing Effectiveness
• Brand Management
• Sales & acquisition - look for affiliates / partners

What to mine?

• 70+ million blogs
• 90 million+ newsgroups
• Social networks
• Podcasts
• Q&A venues
• Other emerging CGM

Key mining dimensions

• WOM incidences
• Source
• Sentiment
• Topics
• Subtopics
• Tone
• Influence
• Depth of Understanding
• Existing versus ‘new’ voices

Look at the Conversation Leads - the influencers

Look at trending - trending provides greatest insights. Sentiment and perception change can be evaluated.

What is your reputation within search engine results for the most popular results?

Make it actionable:

Have a communication strategy to proactively and ethically in CGM

• Minimize competitors & determined detractors
• Engage the persuadable core audience
• Mobilize evangelists

Next up was Andy Beal.

Why should you track?

• Product ideas
• Product recalls
• Scandals
• Sentiment
• Trends
• News articles
• Competitive intelligence

What should you track?

• Anything related to your company from the company name to the executives.
• Track industry trends - moreover.com
• Most recent news - news.google.com
• News buzz - Digg
• Upcoming News - labs.digg.com/bigspy
• Blog posts - Technorati
• More blog posts - blogsearch.google.com
• Blog Comments - co.mments.com
• Blog Conversations - blogpulse.com/conversation
• Blog Trends - blogpulse.com/trend
• Bookmarks - del.icio.us/popular
• Photos - Flickr.com
• Videos - video.google.com
• Tags - keotag.com
• Forum posts - boardtracker.com
• Changing information - wikipedia.org - subscribe to the rss feed for a page
• Job Listings - Oodle
• SEC filings - google.brand.edgar-online.com
• Patents - google.com/patents
• Events - upcoming.yahoo.com
• New Products - amazon.com/tag/iphone
• Search queries
• Keyword referals - searchanalytics.compete.com
• Email updates - google.com/alerts
• The Untrackable - copernic.com
• Anything you want - pipes.yahoo.com

The last presenter of the conference is Jonathan Ashton, talking about reputation management, and how to defend your brand.

Search engines magnify the impact of a single voice. Millions invested in branding can vanish in an instance with one loud voice.

Buzz management= brand management

Look at ripoff report, my3cents.com, BBB.com, complaints.com, thesqueakywheel.com, consumeraffair.com. Brands need to monitor these sites.

The blog is really te soapbox of the new millenium.

Complaints to government agencies or litigation shows in SERPs.

Read te business book - Co-opetition - Brandenburger - helps those who are not harming your brand to place above the detractors.

Pay more for sponsor listings to push complaints below the fold (get a 3rd paid listing at the top of the page if you pay enough)

Optimize your contact page or customer care page- maximize your own site to run interference.

Help corporate siblings & cousins - send link popularity their way.

Co-opt job sites - make sure job postings are optimized, and pass link love to the job sites - Monster, etc

Maximize your PR - properly optimize your press releases and news stories. They will help to fill the space

Use wikipedia, that will usually show in the top 10…

Help accidental tourists, send link love to unrelated sites that can aid your space (do a bit of work for them, won’t detract from your brand, ad will again push the detractors below the fold)

You can’t put the genie back in the bottle, but you can reduce the impact of negative buzz with creative thinking and co-opetition.

Filed under: Education and Training, Reputation Management, Social Marketing on Thursday, August 23rd, 2007 by Simon Heseltine |
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