Today through up a great example of the new issues facing public relations organisations in the 21st century. A random tweet from the official Vodafone UK account through up this gem

Whilst many organisations are used to dealing with the dillemas of offline media but there are more and more examples of organisations having to make the transition to online media – and having to make that transition quickly

Its another case of what can happen when social media goes wrong and looking at my Twitter stream at the moment, it looks like it could be a long afternoon for Vodafone

Online brand reputation is big business, something many companies are investing significant time and money into, some more than others.

For those of you who have not already heard, where have you been. The last 24 hours or so has been abuzz with Ryanair, to start off with their customer service (or lack of it) with Jason Roe (an Irish based blogger), and more recently with some ill-advised comments regarding bloggers and the blogosphere (or should that be blog sphere).

The comments from Steve McNamara (spokesman (allegedly Head of Communications) from Ryanair) read as follows:

“Ryanair can confirm that a Ryanair staff member did engage in a blog discussion.
“It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy corresponding with idiot bloggers and Ryanair can confirm that it won’t be happening again.
“Lunatic bloggers can have the blog sphere all to themselves as our people are far too busy driving down the cost of air travel”.

One has to say, ill-advised or not aside one can’t help thinking that Mr McNamara has not considered the knock on effects. Lets consider some of the facts

1. Much of RyanAirs custom is online
2. Many of those customers use the search engines to find the website
3. Many of those search engine users use Google to find it (given much of their customer base is UK and Western European.

It is therefore interesting to see the impact this is already having on UK SERPs

Ryanair Natural Search results UK

It should already be noted references to Mr McNamaras response can already be found at postions 4,8 and 45 (this after only 24 hours). Given the number of high profile sites picking up on the story, one can’t help feeling there may be a number more entering the fray in the coming weeks. It should also be noted that given the considerable noise generated by Ryanair – a mixture of both good and bad, that this does to a certain extent provide the brand some level of protection – however one can only assume that the level of coverage will increase as this story rumbles over the next couple of days.

Whilst in terms of traditional PR, this is certainly generating the column inches, one can’t help thinking that it is a bit naive (let alone a number of other adjectives I could use) of Mr McNamara with his use of words. In the last 24 hours there have been 1465 references to Ryanair, of which I would suggest the vast majority are on this subject.

I for one will be watching this with interest, as one can’t help think this isn’t the last of the story….

I did  a post a while back on 10 UK Search Marketers you should be following, and given its been over a month since that post was written, I thought it would be interesting to see the effects of new followers in terms of some of those people included within the piece (as a follow up I guess to Dixon Jones (@receptional – and highly worth following for those that aren’t) piece – A Blog Link is worth 5X a Comment Link.

Using TwitterCounter, I have revisisted some of those profiled to see what impact it had, firstly Jon Myers – and one not originally included – but who followed up on the post very well (Dixon mentioned above). I would explain at this point, that Photoshop and me do not get on very well together and thus the lack of arrows on this is due to that – however I would draw your attention to the 6th January and the following are apparent

• Significant spike in followers round the date of the post and subsequent days
• Spike followed by plateaux. This was the case in nearly all profiles – PatrickAltofts excluded – which just seems to have a constant spike on it.
• Strangely – despite being heavily involved in the initial ‘promotion’ (Kevin Gibson @SEOptimise sphunn the post – and was one of the first to read), followers to @KevGibbo seems to take longer than those of other ‘participants’
• Higher follower increases seem to have been experienced to those at the top of the post, reducing for those at the bottom (similar profile I would suggest to SERP behaviour). This was one of the points highlighted in Dixons earlier post.

Increases in followers - @JonMyers and @receptional

Patrick Altoft (@patrickaltoft), Kevin Gibson (@KevGibbo) and Andrew Girdwood (@AndrewGirdwood) follower profile

Dave Naylor (@davenaylor), Ciaran Norris (@ciaranj) and Lisa Ditlefsen (@lisaditlefsen)

It should be noted there was one user, possibly most people wouldn’t have heard of – and it was interesting to see the effect of followers for him. Dan Alderson (@pinje) was added to see what sort of effect such a post would have (I will be honest – I in no way expected the response it got) – however it was interesting to see the knock on effects of the post on his follower profile below.

@pinje visitor profile

It would be interesting therefore to further explore this moving forward, certainly in terms of how this affects the increasing numbers of brands entering the Twitter arena, with the likes of Thomas Cook, Dell to name a few who are already in the Twitter domain.

Over the course of the last couple of months, I have unfortunately become quite addicted to micro-blogging site Twitter. I am constantly suprised by Twitter, not just in terms of its uptake, but also in terms of its functionality and usability,  not just in a pure financial sense but also in terms of context.

Last night was just such a night. Whilst a lot of noise has been made of Twitter from a networking perspective, Twitter from a thought leadership perspective, it was last night that I saw Twitter as a citizen journalist tool. Its not the first time to be honest. When the plane recently went into the Hudson River, there was a post on Twitter within minutes of it happening.

Last night was similar. In the early hours of Friday morning (UK wise anyhow), a story started doing the rounds regarding Martin Schaedel (@martin), a well respected person within the Silicon Valley community had died in a plane crash in Santa Monica. People like @btabke (Brett Tabke) @Jenstar Jennifer Slegg)( and @DannySullivan (Danny Sullivan) posted a number of comments relating to the crash over the course of a three hour period or so, keeping many people in the loop as to proceedings. A live stream of condolenses has been building within Twitter, many from prominent internet and search marketing individuals.

Whilst in the grand scheme of things this was a fairly small incident, from a personal perspective it has opened my eyes as to the power of Twitter from this sort of perspective, particularly when you combine services such as Twitpic to the whole Twitter mix. All of the sudden you have a real-time, interactive overview of breaking news in some cases from a 1st person perspective. How many other communication channels can do that….

It was alleged on Friday that Belkin, the developers of IT hardware were involved in a fake blog review scheme using Mechanical Turk -  a side business of Amazon. Mechanical Turk is a site where users can go and get paid to do things that computers can’t do in exchange for small contributions – generally a couple of pennies to a couple of pounds

Mechanical Turk Homepage

According to the article, a number of requests were posted for people to post ‘positive reviews’ for Belkin products as follows

Arlen Parsa from ‘The Daily Background’ goes on to say

That’s a request from somebody named Mike Bayard to review a product and “give [it] a 100% rating (as high as possible).” It doesn’t matter if the reviewer doesn’t own the product or has never tried it– the requester has helpfully written, “Write as if you own the product and are using it.” It even goes a step further, asking the Mechanical Turk user to “Mark any other negative reviews as “not helpful” once you post yours.”

Users are paid 65 cents for every positive review they leave. There are dozens of these requests from this Mike Bayard guy on Mechanical Turk.

So who is Mike Bayard. Mike Bayard just happens to be a Business Development Representative from …. you guessed it… Belkin, and his activity appears not just to be limited to Mechanical Turk – other posts have been identified on both Buy.com and NewEgg.

Now this activity – known as ‘Astroturfing’ is not just unethical and against Amazons terms and conditions, if it were taking place over here (UK)  it would also be illegal. Astroturfing is a word in American English describing formal political, advertising, or public relations campaigns seeking to create the impression of being spontaneous “grassroots” behavior, ie fake grass = AstroTurf. It is not the first high profile example of Astroturfing, back in 2006 Wal-mart was found to have developed a couple of blogs which were later discovered to work undertaken by Edelman – their PR agency – however it is an activity that has become less common over the last couple of years.

To their credit, Belkin have been quick to respond. In correspondance printed over at CrunchGear, Mark Reynoso, President at Belkin announced he was unaware of the activity and that they would be taking action

Belkin has always held itself to the highest standards of corporate ethics and its employees to the highest standards of personal integrity. Similarly, we support our online user community in discussion and reviews of our products, whether the commentary is good or bad. So, it was with great surprise and dismay when we discovered that one of our employees may have posted a number of queries on the Amazon Mechanical Turk website inviting users to post positive reviews of Belkin products in exchange for payment.

Belkin does not participate in, nor does it endorse, unethical practices like this. We know that people look to online user reviews for unbiased opinions from fellow users and instances like this challenge the implicit trust that is placed in this interaction. We regard our responsibility to our user community as sacred, and we are extremely sorry that this happened.

We want to stress that this is an isolated incident and to re-instill trust with you, we have taken the following courses of action:

- We’ve acted swiftly to remove all associated postings from the Mechanical Turk system.

- We’re working closely with our online channel partners to ensure that any reviews that may have been placed due to these postings have been removed.

It’s also important to recognize that our retail partners had no knowledge of, or participation in, these postings.

Once again, we apologize for this occurrence, and we will work earnestly to regain the trust we have lost.

Sincerely,

Mark Reynoso

President, Belkin

This does highlight one important thing to any person or people representing commercial ventures online. Nearly everything you do online is accountable and nearly everything you do has a trail.

I guess the lessons here should be two fold

1. Just because you can do it online, doesn’t mean you should
2. If you wouldn’t do it offline, don’t do it online.

Twitter has been one of the tools I have been most into during 2008, something which has given me the opportunity to interact with some people I have only had a fleeting chance to meet during speaking engagements, industry events or attendance of conferences. This has included the likes of Kevin Ryan, Dave Naylor and various people from agencies such as Latitude  and BigMouthmedia.

For people not familiar with Twitter, Twitter is a microblogging service which allows a maximum of 140 characters, something which allows for a service which in my opinion ends up midway between an instant messsenger and a blog.

Twitter

There are a number of reasons however I may choose or not choose to connect with someone on Twitter – for example:

• No Introduction – Always nice to know a little about you before I choose to follow (or not as the case may be)
• No link to website – If your description doesn’t suffice, then a link is always good, so I can find out more about you.
• What you say – Probably one of the more important factors here. There are an awful lot of people who have over 18000 comments. No offence you either have
  1) Too much time
  2) Write a lot of rubbish. I am one of those that would rather have 500 interesting posts than 18000 telling me that you are in Puerto Banus or the like
  3) Swearing and the like. On personal level I am not one of those that wants to read a load of cussing when looking at Twitter. That combined with 2 is a definite nono.
• Kan jy Engels praat – In english – do you speak English. Unless your Dutch or Afrikaans there is not a good chance of me understanding you so in practical terms there is little or no point me following you.
• Have you written anything. I often receive a number of ‘follows’ from people with no comments. What is the point of me following you – if you don’t say anything?
• Are you a brand – Not a keen follower of brands unless I really like you (@starbucks for example)
• Frequency of tweets – One tweet every four months is not that interesting – unless its worth waiting for (and lets face it 140 characters really is difficult to write something knockout in – although I will stop short of impossible)
• Self Promotion – Shameless self promotion is a definite turn-off. People don’t use twitter for pure business purposes (if you want that LinkedIn or Ecademy is great for you. I tend to find people like to get to know you more ‘personally’ rather than your corporate persona.
• Are you in an industry I am interested in. For obvious reasons, SEO, Paid Search and other online marketing professionals are always an easy win – although Andy Murray (Tennis Player) and MCHammer (Remember him) have somehow made their way onto the list

If you are on Twitter, feel free to drop us a line – twitter.com/peteyoung, if you aren’t give it a try (and forget about your social life – at least without Twitter)

Over the last year or so, there have been a number of posts declaring the so-called death of blogging citing reducing blog volumes, lack of uniqueness and a number of other metrics. I would however suggest, that it is not so much that blogging is dying, more that is has matured.

In particular it was the recent announcement by Hewlett Packard (HP) , highlighting an 85% increase in sales – as a result of a targeted campaign using blogs. In an environment were hyper sales increases are becoming less and less common – such figures are all the more suprising, and even more so – when it is considered that this has been mainly attributed to activity focussed primarily online.

The figures primarily centre around the HP Dragon, a range of laptops whose sales were mediocre to say the least, a laptop whose specs should not be frowned at – sporting a 20.1 inch screen, 500GB disk space, and weighing in at a mere 15 pounds.

Following a social media campaign, aptly named ‘31 days of the dragon‘, in which 31 prominent blogs (based on influence andpower (links, rank and recommednations)  were targeted and given the chance to offer 31 laptops as prizes in 31 days – effectively a months worth of competitions where the blogs made up their own competitions with their own rules – but agreed to promote the contests of everyone else in the group.

The result was that the first five pages of Google results for searches on HP and HP Dragon were blog posts about the contest. At the last count HP they had over 380,000 links to the 31 sites discussing the contest. Bloggers got over 25,000 contest entries and an average 150% increase in traffic.

The sites included were:

02 May – 09 May www.absolutevista.com
03 May – 10 May www.arstechnica.com
04 May – 11 May www.osnn.net
05 May – 12 May www.jkontherun.com
06 May – 13 May digitalmediaphile.wordpress.com
07 May – 14 May www.bostonpocketpc.com and www.techronical.com
08 May – 15 May www.the-gadgeteer.com
09 May – 16 May www.thedigitallifestyle.com
10 May – 17 May www.digitalhomethoughts.com
11 May – 18 May www.windows-now.com
12 May – 19 May www.windowsconnected.com
13 May – 20 May www.geekstogo.com
14 May – 21 May bink.nu
15 May – 22 May www.mediablab.com
16 May – 23 May www.last100.com
17 May – 24 May www.labnol.org
18 May – 25 May www.notebooks.com
19 May – 26 May www.slashdotreview.com
20 May – 27 May www.neowin.net
21 May – 28 May www.geek.com
22 May – 29 Mau www.lockergnome.com
23 May – 30 May www.planetx64.com
24 May – 31 May www.thegreenbutton.com
25 May – 01 Jun www.istartedsomething.com
26 May – 02 Jun www.bleepingcomputer.com
27 May – 03 Jun www.hardwaregeeks.com
28 May – 04 Jun www.geeknewscentral.com
29 May – 05 Jun www.geekzone.co.nz
30 May – 06 Jun www.thetabletpc.net
31 May – 07 Jun www.gearlive.com
01 Jun – 08 Jun www.gottabemobile.com

The Result: An almost 85% increase in sales of a computer that was released over nine months ago.

Startling, and even more impressive if you consider the ongoing benefits

• The amount of positive brand coverage relating to the brand is immense – with the knock on effect – that many of these sites have significant followings – and thus considerable influence
• The increase in natural buzz is significantly better, given both the nature of the sites targeted, and the natural syndication from there. Certainly stats such as those released above are all the more likely to increase the awareness of both the product and brand itself

Certainly a significant argument that blogs are not dead. In my opinion what we are starting to see is a maturity in the channel – don’t get me wrong – there is certainly room for manouvre and improvement. For those that remember some of the posts that were released following Jason Calacanis retirement announcement – and the insuing blogging is dead posts , I would suggest that the above data highlights the power and influence that blogs have and how they have matured, and that blogs are likely to be around for a while yet, because:

1. Many blogs are now established resources – one look at my – and many other peoples RSS readers will display a plethora of blogs amongst their regular online haunts. Many of these blogs have become media properties in their own right – and have built up followings and fanbases.
2. Blogs are evolving – new sites such as Twitter and Tumblr are providing innovative new ways of interacting with audiences
3. Social Media Hybrids – Sites such as Facebook allow you to interface your blog with your social media profile – thus creating a hybrid of technologies
4. Blogs are interactive – Many blogs don’t just contain content – they are  a mix of video, content and imagery.
5. Many businesses have not embraced blogging let alone social media

Certainly the opportunity gap is shortening – however from a commercial perspective I would suggest there is still room at the table…..

Brand Reputation is becoming a big word in marketing circles. Warfare is taken place on the search engine results pages for many brands, and is becoming an important part of the Search Marketing professionals armoury. However what should you have in your brand reputation toolkit.

1) Know where you stand

It is very difficult to understand how and where to react to an issue if you do not know what is being said about you, and there is really no reason why you shouldn’t be able to setup even the simplest of monitoring tools without spending hundreds or thousands of pounds on brand reputation software.

Simply implementing a Google Alert on your brand will give you some sort of idea of who, what and where your brand is being talked about. I would add however there are some fantastic brand reputation monitoring tools out there that do pick up a wide variety of content, across a range of different channels, and if you are considering some of these tools some of the better ones are:

• Magpie Brandwatch
• Radian 6
• Market Sentinel
• Sentiment Metrics
• Asomo
• and even Trackur from Andy Beal.

2) Dominate your brand search.

Thomas Cook - Dominating brand

There are various ways of doing this, however it is imperative you make it as difficult for a potential brand detractor to influence any searcher, by reducing visibility below the fold. The example above shows an organisation that does this very well by utilising a mixture of subdomains and domains to dominate the top 10 of searches for ‘Thomas Cook’.

3) Use your paid search tactically

Often a lot of brand reputation issues will arise in public forums such as blogs and forums. A large proportion of these sites will carry various forms of online advertising such as Google Adsense advertising, or other forms of online advertising as a way of monetising their sites.

Use of sponsored search for brand reputation

Where particular issues may arise on a suitable site, it is possible to tailor adverts to particular sites – such as Google Adwords – site placement. These ads may carry creative developed particularly for a particular issue advising browsers of where they may be able to find more applicable factual data.

4) Use your offline channels online

Modern day search pages allow search marketeers to influence a far greater proportion of the search engine results page than ever before including

• Video
• PR
• Product Feeds
• Local Listings
• and Images

Blended search allows greater brand infiltration than ever before

Using the example above, for the iPhone, advertisers are able to use a variety of channels to attract potential custom, including

• the traditional organic listings – where Apple (as you would expect dominate)
• the Paid Listings – allowing advertisers such as Carphone Warehouse and Vodaphone to advertise on these terms

but also

• PR – Taken from Google trusted news sources
• Products – taken from advertisers who have submitted Google Base Feeds.

All these channels allow a far wider variety of usage outside of pure search results, for example the video used above is obviously pulled from Youtube – and has already received nearly 6 million views since it went live.

They also tend to dominate key areas of the page, for example

• Google Products – often visible between positions 1-4 (above the fold of the screen)
• Local – Generally the first result – and highly prominent in terms of eye catchment
• PR – Often within positions 1-5
• Video – Depends but normally anywhere between 1-10

They are in many cases ‘eyeline breakers’, often breaking the natural browse of a results page, and meaning users spend more time on search pages – something Enquiro looked into recently.

5) Use Your affiliates

This is obviously going to be more pertinant to some advertisers more than others, however it is worth noting how much real estate can be taken up by affiliates. Whilst this may be a more expensive way of taking up search page real estate, it can result in some significant coverage, all of which is likely (as long as you treat them right) to result in good brand (and sales focussed) coverage.

The role of affiliates on brand searches

And more:

• Use social media (Will cover this in a later post)
• Is Wikipedia relevant – WHilst you aren’t likely to get any link juice – this does take up valuable real estate
• Create a Squidoo lens

One thing is for sure – don’t just ignore the problem. There are a number of high profile examples out there in, that highlight what happens if things are simply left to fester. Certainly people like Dell have developed a brand reputation response learned from the ‘Dell Hell’ days.