Somerfield is a chain of medium sized supermarkets in the UK. Back in June I mentioned them when I talked about self inflicted reputation management issues. I thought it was time to revisit them, and see how things are going…

The first mention of the Easter debacle is now way down at 40, which is good for them. However, there are now a few other troubling issues that they need to look at and address. In 19th position, there’s a listing about Boots (the Chemists) and Somerfield being environmentally unsound and trashing forests. In 12th, a listing from the Food Standards Authority, about the recall of their own brand Jaffa Cakes due to mislabeling (they forgot to include the milk, not a problem unless you’re lactose intolerant). The big concern that I have is with the result in 7th position. It’s a YouTube video. The video is of workers in a Somerfield Warehouse walking around in the rafters acting silly, exploding eggs in the company microwave, etc. Not really a problem you may think. Well, the last person that commented on the video didn’t comment about the video, instead they wrote about their experiences working there…

somerfield is an awful company to work for, I was there for 6 years, knocked my pan in every day for them and got treated like sh*t for my trouble. It’s also the worst run business I’ve ever worked for. I’m sure Homer Simpson was making the decisions there. “lets spend 1 million quid coverting a store and shut it 6 months later and leave ALL the shelves and equipment in there to rust instead of moving it to another store or selling it.

This is now the default text that displays under that video.

A quick fix for Somerfield is to go in there and add a new comment, replacing that text with something neutral. What this demonstrates though is that even though Somerfield had issues with their online reputation earlier this year, they’re still not even doing something as basic as monitoring the SERPs for their brand, which will allow them to work on correcting any issues that they find.

Make sure you’re not making that same mistake, and watch this space for a lot more on Reputation Management in the upcoming months, which will include a White Paper that we’ll be releasing in the new year.

Filed under: Reputation Management on Wednesday, November 7th, 2007 by Simon Heseltine | No Comments
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