reputation - Internet Marketing News and Blogs

Tears, drama, sob stories and pantomime, singing seems to take a back seat on ITV’s The X Factor.

It’s clear from blogs and message boards that backstage antics, feuds between the judges and gossip about contestants have more water cooler value than Leona Lewis belting out a Snow Patrol classic.

Has Nokia bee n a victim of brand sabotage or agency heavy-handedness? Because something is very amiss in the way it is conducting its social media / SEO strategy.

“Glass, china and reputation are easily cracked and never mended well”.

Benjamin Franklin’s words are particularly appropriate in these turbulent times, when it’s more important than ever for companies to consider every opportunity to protect and manage their hard won reputation and brand value.

But as Paul Mead writes, it is interesting to see that one of the largest media channels - online - is more often than not completely neglected from a communications point of view in times of strife. 

Online reputation monitoring is a growing market and there are a number of companies offering such solutions.

Yet some are overkill for most businesses and many firms simply can't justify the costs.

It always staggers me when I receive a badly-written press release or PR pitch, simply because there’s so much advice out there on how to do it right.

But if there’s one thing that I just can’t understand, it is when PR people ask you to do their job for them.

You can tell a PR has strayed out of their traditional comfort zone when you see this kind of demand in a press release: “Please contact me if you place any of the following information on your site.”

E-consultancy’s latest addition to its research, the Online Reputation and Buzz Monitoring Buyer’s Guide, reveals that this sector will grow by 30% in 2008, to an estimated value of £60 million.

The addition of this guide not only demonstrates the accelarated growth of this rapidly developing market, but also shows how the industry has moved on, from a rather fluffy approach to online PR, to quantitative measurement that incorporates analytics, monitoring tools and tangible metrics.

There are a number of key services that are hot in the industry at the moment (and no, we aren’t talking Twitter or social media services here), but online reputation management must be one of the hottest.

While it is enjoying somewhat of a boom in popularity, it is something that has been talked about within the industry for quite a while. However, it is one of those unfortunate services that sits as a hybrid.

Over the last few months more companies have started to experiment with a whole host of new media channels, including social networking sites and microblogs.

When planned adequately, social media can provide an effective means of reaching new customer segments, forming closer relationships, and building online reputation.

However, it was clear from E-consultancy's Social Media: Measurement, Managing Reputation and Monetisation event last week that marketers face a range of different challenges as the social media landscape continues to evolve and grow. 

When talking about reputation management, many companies will explain the importance of utilising SEO to ensure that negative comments do not rank highly for searches against a brand.

But when dealing with negative PR, it's important to consider multimedia & paid search as well.