Electronic Retailer - January 2012 - 27

Today’s unhappy customers can blast negative comments using online review sites, rally virtual mobs of cohorts via Facebook and Twitter, and cause product sales to tumble. Consider Netflix. When the company announced in July that it would increase its rates by nearly $6 a month, a flurry of unhappy Netflix customers started tweeting and posting comments on the company’s Facebook wall. These unhappy people caught the attention of customers who otherwise would have paid little attention to the rate change. Within hours, throngs of customers were attacking Netflix’s decision publicly. Soon, Netflix’s rate change received major national media coverage. Netflix did not embark on an online reputation management campaign, and in just a little more than three months (July 13 to October 25, 2011), Netflix stock dropped from $300 a share to $77.37. ABC News reported that Netflix lost 810,000 customers during this time frame. Netflix learned an important lesson: Today, companies, brands, products and executives are vulnerable and on display. Businesses – particularly those with a heavy online presence – cannot afford to overlook the importance of managing their online reputations. Yet too many businesses do not understand how to harness the power of online reputation management tools, and the results can be devastating. For instance, when a long- or shortform infomercial or spot appears on television, measurement tools such as Google Insights and Google Analytics show that more than half of viewers will google the product’s name before making a buying decision. The Google Heat Map shows that if a negative review appears in the first or second spot of a search result, about 50 percent of potential customers may decide not to buy the product. If the negative review appears in the top half of page one, sales can erode by about 30 percent. When a negative mention is pushed to spot eight, companies may lose only about 10 percent of sales. And since only a small percentage of people ever visit page two of a search result, the problem is virtually eliminated if

the first page is “clean,” meaning it is free of negative information. Some speculation exists in these statistics, but we know one thing for sure: Sales start to crumble fast if page one of a search result isn’t pristine. Unfortunately, a competitor, rogue affiliate or upset customer can easily cause serious harm. Because complaint and review sites like Ripoff Report and Yelp have high page rankings and are optimized to catch a search engine’s attention, they tend to dominate search results. These reviews appear high on the page unless a company has intentionally fought back with an online reputation management campaign. A properly structured campaign allows a company to monitor and manage a product or brand both proactively and reactively. Let’s take a look at two real examples. A direct response marketer was losing deals because an FTC lawsuit surfaced on page one when his name was googled by inventors and potential business partners. The marketer reacted by flooding the internet with positive mentions of his name. Within about five months, the FTC press release was pushed all the way back to page four. He accomplished this by generating online content, bookmarking positive mentions of the company, optimizing all content so that it was search-engine friendly, building links to positive mentions of his name, deploying a blog and microsite, and accepting all opportunities for media coverage. Managing an online reputation is important from a proactive perspective, as well. Another direct response marketing company was thrilled when its short-form commercial tested well, but it knew that consumer complaints and rogue affiliates would soon appear high up on search engine results for the product name. Knowing the company needed to act swiftly, the marketer engaged in an aggressive proactive reputation management campaign to combat any negative mentions that might surface. The content domination approach prevented page-one complaints, which could have eroded sales. Today, the product is being sold at Walgreens, Target, CVS and other

prominent retailers. Pages one and two of Google, Yahoo and Bing are clean. So what should you do to manage your online reputation? Here are five things every company can do to dominate page one of search results.

1. Leverage the power of social media.
Contrary to popular belief, social media is not limited to social networking sites. Though social media does include Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, it also includes YouTube, blogs of all variety, social bookmarking sites, review sites and business directories. These channels are powerful because the algorithm that determines search ranking puts social media at the top of the food chain. When a consumer googles a product, brand, person or company, some form of social media appears on the first page of the results 90 to 100 percent of the time. Companies can leverage the power of social media to promote their company by: • Building social networking profiles on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. • Regularly updating, monitoring and filtering these profiles. • Creating incentives for customers to write positive reviews on sites such as Yelp. • Sending samples of products to bloggers; asking them for reviews; conducting blog giveaways and contests. • Creating blogs that disseminate information about a product’s features. • Produci ng /ed it i ng v ideos for YouTube; conducting video contests. • Creating a CEO or company blog. Of course, any information disseminated on the internet must also be optimized to catch the attention of search engines. You can build and distribute all the content you want, but no one will see it unless it is keyword-rich and search-engine optimized.

2. Engage in online public relations to build content and dominate search results.
Media outlets update their content regularly, and media websites attract a lot of traffic, so they are considered 27

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Electronic Retailer - January 2012

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