When I'm rubber and your glue doesn't work....

April 29, 2009 6:59 AM

Boss wants me to find an online reputation monitor.

It turns out that a couple bloggers have posts some not nice things about his business. He heard of companies being able to push these blogs back and told me to investigate them. I used some google fu but the results are overwhelming. There are tons of them and no real way of knowing which ones are goods. Does anyone here have any personal experiences in this area?

posted by Mastercheddaar to computers & internet (17 comments total)

How do you define "push these blocks back" exactly? It sounds like your boss doesn't really understand the nature of the internet.
posted by odinsdream at 7:09 AM on April 29

blocks = blogs.
posted by odinsdream at 7:24 AM on April 29

The easiest thing to do is to try and make things right with these customers and convince the bloggers to either update their posts or delete them.

I'm sure there are third parties out there that will do this for you, but direct contact from the business will work better every time.
posted by bshort at 7:35 AM on April 29

I have had a personal experience in backslashing a company which behave in a terrible way handling a defective product. Do write and take contact with users who complain and do it systematically and soon enough. This will avoid (in most cases) the google effect, where fellow readers pick up the complaint and build link bashing.

By doing it systematically you'll also detect failures in your organization, embrace the true nature of the internet, and learn how to recognize exploiters (those that complain in order to get free rides of whatever) from real disgruntled and unhappy customers.

On a major scale, take a hint from operations such as My Starbucks Idea or Dell's Ideastorm. There, customers self policy themselves and help companies respond better to user reviews and needs.

Last (or first), don't jus thire a Internet P.R. firm to monitor the sentiment on your products or brand, but start a contact, maybe through a blog or a more transparent approach.

While this might not be an exact answer (such as: hire this XXX firm), and not pretending to be the book of marketing/customer service/CRM/whatever, it has worked for all the clients I have applied it in the past.
posted by pecus at 7:45 AM on April 29 [2 favorites has favorites]

"It sounds like your boss doesn't really understand the nature of the internet."

Yeah he does not. I'm not too sure about these rep things either. He saw something on TV about it and sent me on a snip hunt. I have been looking at them all morning and they seem to do two things:

1 - They will monitor the web for certain keywords and give you updates.

2 - They will push certain negative pages off of the first page search results and have them show up on the 2nd/3rd pages. How they do this... I don't know.

Again I do not know which ones are good to use. They all seem to do the same thing.
posted by Mastercheddaar at 7:46 AM on April 29

On point 1, this sounds like a plausible business service, albeit not something I'd advise paying for, since you could just put it on your calendar to check the major search engines for your business name or product names once a month or so.

On point 2, this is obviously a scam/snake-oil. Search results cannot be manipulated like that.
posted by odinsdream at 8:17 AM on April 29

The only way to push "certain negative pages" off of Google's results is to write your own content that is ranked higher. In fact, to write a lot of content that is all ranked higher. Which is going to be really hard. Google does not like people trying to game it, and will react poorly to these attempts; the idea of pushing an undesirable blog entirely off the first page is almost absurd. If you actually succeeded, you'd probably get some extremely unpleasant coverage on sites like The Consumerist, which no force in the world is going to knock off the front of Google, and now you have even worse PR than before!
posted by Tomorrowful at 8:18 AM on April 29

2 - They will push certain negative pages off of the first page search results and have them show up on the 2nd/3rd pages. How they do this... I don't know.

DANGER, DANGER, AWOOGA.

Ugly black-hat SEO techniques, like attempts to ballot-stuff Google with fake sites, are the only real way to do that. They are either lying about their ability to 'push results down' or they'll do even more damage to your reputation among those who would be likely to listen to a blogger griping.

Seriously.

Contacting them and trying to figure out how the situation can be made right is going to be cheaper and better in the long term. Probably the short term, too. Do not let your boss base your company's online strategy on late night TV commercials.
posted by verb at 8:19 AM on April 29

I think your boss is thinking of Reputation Defender. He should know that they are not 100% effective.
posted by Alison at 8:33 AM on April 29

I don't know if your boss would be open to the suggestions that pecus mentioned above, but he's right on it. The best way to do reputation management is to actually respond to the criticism and see it as an opportunity for better customer service.

In terms of monitoring, you could set up some Google alerts and work on a keyword strategy to discover what people are saying about the company in general. A great google search for you in this area is buzz monitoring services. As verb mentioned, services that promise to knock bad reviews off of your search results are almost assuredly shady.
posted by Kimberly at 8:50 AM on April 29

Thank hive mind for all of the advice! A lot of the monitoring could easily be done by myself. As for knocking sites down the more I look at it the more it seems optimizing our own site and better customer service would be a cheaper and better way of accomplishing this.
posted by Mastercheddaar at 8:59 AM on April 29 [1 favorite has favorites]

maybe also Google Trends and Google Insight
posted by yoHighness at 10:26 AM on April 29

There are a few articles on the Internet written by technology journalists about this very topic. Perhaps they can lead you in the right direction and give you some additional ideas. I can't link to link to any since I, uh, wrote one of the more prominent ones, but I recommend searching for how-to articles on the subject and read ideas from several different authors. They offer some really great advice.
posted by _Mona_ at 11:17 AM on April 29

_Mona_, I think a self-link in this context (where your work/project/article is directly relevant to the question posed by he original poster) is totally kosher. I'd be really interested to read your piece.
posted by verb at 11:42 AM on April 29

Hi Mona,

If you wish you can PM me your link....

On a totally unrelated topic... I'll make sure to post anything interesting I might happen to read on the subject.
posted by Mastercheddaar at 1:29 PM on April 29

This fits in the bucket of "online brand management" and if your boss want to spend the money, you might looks at Nielsen's BuzzMetrics service or the services provided by Visible Technologies (part owned by WPP, the world's largest conglomerate of ad agencies).

And if your boss doesn't want to spend the money, hopefully this will make you look super saavy ;-)
posted by donovan at 2:40 PM on April 29

Verb, Mastercheddar - here's the link. (Mods: As clicks or traffic to this site do nothing for me, I've been paid by this client so there's nothing even remotely promotional in it for me, but I'll understand if you pull it.)

Here are some other good articles to check out, too. One of them suggests going on the counter-offensive by plugging in to social media. Excellent idea.
posted by _Mona_ at 5:36 PM on April 29