Dr. Mathew McDougall赵马修博士

    赵马修博士（Dr Mathew McDougall）是全球知名的在线广告和在线营销分析专家。在意识到中国市场对数字一体化广告解决方案的需求后，赵马修博士在中国北京成立了SinoTech Group（赛美特集团）。与中国很多大型网站和在线发布商建立了合作关系后，赵马修博士决定专注在互联网广告主和发布商领域，倾力打造在线广告整体解决方案，以便有利于双方更进一步探索新的效果营销技术以及有效的品牌管理方案。赵马修博士经常被邀请对互联网技术和行业发表专业性意见和建议，而且是很多互联网行业论坛的嘉宾发言人。

Search engine marketing for reputation management

See how brands are putting search reputation management strategy to good use and displacing offensive search listings about their company with what they want you to read.

 

In the recent context of protests around the world involving China , there is growing concern among some global companies about their brand and image being drawn into a political dispute. Within China , there are calls for of a French supermarket, French auto makers and some other high-profile US companies that have ties to Olympic sponsorship.

 

Recently, marketing departments within these companies and their PR firms are using the term "reputation management" more commonly, and putting strategies in place to combat any negativity relating to recent events. Interestingly, more sophisticated PR firms are turning to search marketing companies to use search in an intelligent way to gauge and measure the online search behaviours of netizens. Search Engine Reputation Management (SERM) involves using both search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimisation (SEO).

 

Monitoring search results for terms involving company brand or trademarked words is intuitive. Therefore, if users find a protest site in the organic search results for the brand, they may click the link, and believe what they read. Any company is at risk of unhappy consumers, political groups, competitors and disgruntled employees who may have an interest in posting negative information about their company. Worse, this negative information may impact on a customer"s buying choice when trying to make purchase considerations or research a product online.

 

Reputation damaged. Revenue and customers lost

Protest websites are often designed to seem credible, even when a complaint is frivolous or unfounded. A site owner may or may not be willing to speak with you to resolve the matter. With regard to these sites, it is more about sites promoting a link between an issue and the corporation.

 

Moreover, websites may offer complaint blogs. These sites can quickly gather momentum within a social group and start generating large amounts of indexed search pages. These blog comments are indexed and can show up in search results, sometimes near your listings, or on broader, category-defining keyword phrases where you"re not found at all.

 

Search results are like an online voice speaking directly to your prospective customers. Corporates are now more at risk of negative messages, a poor corporate image or being associated with unpopular political or environmental issues.

 

A Google search for "Carrefour" and "China" returns a selection of listings Carrefour would surely prefer consumers didn"t see, including this one in position two (at publication time):

 

Search reputation management -- optimization strategy
Although it is valuable to understand the importance and nuances of reputation management, ability and experience in attaining a higher ranking than an offensive site must be the primary consideration. Our search reputation management strategy is simple: Displace the offending search listings with favorable ones and with your own content.

 

The most positive messages about the company come from the company"s own website. Often, a site has an abundance of non-optimised pages that can be leveraged, ranging from press releases to product specs, that can quickly rank higher in results than a protest site. Optimising partner, affiliate, or other content sources (with the partner"s cooperation) will also help promote positive messages within the organic search results. These higher ranking pages will over time push the negative listing down and hopefully past the third and fourth pages where the searchers typically don"t view.

 

Search reputation management -- marketing strategy
Apart from SEO, a search marketing company needs to quickly neutralise all offending content. The quickest way to do this is to use sophisticated SEM techniques. This strategy is singularly the most important area necessary to produce the desired result promptly.

 

Firstly, data mining processes need to be employed to monitor (in real-time) large numbers of search behaviours and search trends. Once the search technology has identified trends or patterns in keyword searches that highlight negativity campaigns, a reputation protocol must be rapidly adopted to start combating this. It is important to note that offending content is often found on keywords used by shoppers earlier in the buying cycle than those found on a branded search. Complaints can sour customers before they even discover your brand has a desired offering.

 

Once the keywords have been identified, bid maximising tools should be used to monitor, report and purchase pay-per-click (PPC) search ads in an automated fashion. PPC ads change by time of day. Some keywords disappear as budgets expire. PPC ads from your competitors or trademark infringers tend to disappear on weekends or evenings, and reappear during business hours. The purpose of using technology in a reputation management strategy is to ensure that timeliness and effectiveness are central to this strategy; also ROI can be easily determined.

 

To summarise, search reputation management involves three primary components:

·    Prompt identification of negativity trends and pattern in keyword searches.

·    The use of SEO to try and displace information found in organic search results.

·    An immediate action to counter offending content by using SEM to display positive information or to drive traffic to sites (micro) that counter the negative messages.

 

Remember, finding the negative campaigns is only part of the solution, using sophisticated search marketing techniques is a core component in combating this increasingly frequent problem.

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