Omar Kattan

Archive for the ‘Online Marketing’ Category

Blogger Outreach is the process of connecting with bloggers for the purpose of  promoting a brand and increasing it’s visibility to a niche audience.  There are also SEO benefits from a well executed blogger outreach programme.  These lie primarily in the fact that when bloggers talk about your brand, they will most likely link to it.  These valuable links from trusted relevant sources improve the authority level of the site and reflect positively on the rankings.

So how do you go about planning and executing a blogger outreach programme?  Here are the steps to get you going:

 1)  Buzz monitoring:  You start by listening to the buzz around your brand and identifying the source of this buzz.  However not all buzz is equal.  Some sites are more influential than others.  You need to identify the influential sites that speak about your brand and keep a list.

 2) Contact.  Before you contact the bloggers, you need to have a story to tell.  What is your proposition?  Why should the said bloggers cooperate with you?  The best type of approach is one where you provide the blogger something in return for them writing about you.  For instance, if you have a new product launch, send a free sample to the blogger before launch and ask them to review it.

3) Monitor.  Once you’ve established the relationship with the bloggers, monitor the traffic you receive from each of them.  Delve deep into the analytics stats to try and get a feel about which bloggers have sent the most targeted traffic.  Once you have that piece of information, focus on these bloggers and build relationships with new ones. 

 Here are some more resources on blogger outreach:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/18793026/Blogger-Outreach-101

http://www.prblogger.com/2008/03/the-seo-benefits-of-blogger-outreach/

http://moblogsmoproblems.blogspot.com/2007/09/how-to-launch-successful-blogger.html

http://www.crayonville.com/blog/?p=345

http://www.socialmediatoday.com/SMC/116560

With more and more people using search engines to research brands and products, it is becoming increasingly important to ensure that your brand has a positive reputation online.  

The internet has become a vehicle for disgruntled customers/clients/employees to air their views about negative experiences they’ve had with a brand. While this is a good thing for the democratisation of e-commerce, it can be a very dangerous weapon in the hands of internet users with bad experiences with or even intentions towards your brand.

Online reputation management or ORM as its otherwise called is an art and a science in the sense that you have to be creative in how you improve your image online as well as have the optimisation skills to ensure that this startegy is executed in the most efficient manner.

So how do you go about managing your reputation online?  Here are a few basic steps to follow:

1. Conduct a search for you brand term in Google (other search engines have less of an effect as Google has the lion share of searches)

2. Analyse the top 10 results and take note of the general sentiment surrounding your brand.

3. Devise a strategy to address/supress negative publicity and maximise positive publicity.

4. Most likely the number one position on Google for your brand name is your own site (if its not then you have bigger challenges to address and should check to see if your site is banned by Google)

5. The second, third, fourth etc. results are crucial.  Look who’s ranking for your brand name in these results.  If you’re a big brand you would probably see a mixture of resutls such as Wikipedia, news results, YouTube

Point #3 is really crucial.   How do you go about supressing negative publicity?  There are a few steps you can take to address negative publicity, some quick wins, other not so quick but require a more strategic solution that is more long term.  

1. Create subdomains.  Subdomains are considered as semi-stand alone sites by Search engines and therefore if you have sufficient content to place under a subdomain (eg news.brand.com) then that subdomain will have a very high probability of ranking for your brand name (below your main site) 

2. Create Social Media Profiles and link to them.  Examples of social media sites that rank highly in search results include Facebook, Twitter, Technorati, Linkedin, and Flickr.  Creating these social network profiles not only allows your brand to get closer to today’s consumer but also has the secondary benefit increasing the probability that one of “your digital assets” appear in the top 10 results of search engines.

3. Participate in Forums, Blogs, and online discussions. This is a sensitive one.  It is more difficult for bigger brands to directly participate in online discussions but its not entirely out of the question. An example of a big brand that does participate in discussion is Google who are often seen participating in Webmaster communities across the net including WebmasterWorld and SEOMz.

4. Take legal action.  If you spot forum/blog posts that are flat out spreading lies and rumours about you brand, send a strongly worded email to the owner and ask them to remove this libellous information (seize and desist).  If they don’t you can follow it with legal  action.

5. Optimise your News Releases.  Make sure that your press release are optimised for your brand name and/or other industry keywords you’re targeting (brand generic).

6. Optimise non-text based content such as images, videos, pdf’s etc.  Search engine results pages no longer only serve traditional text-based results but also serve images, videos, pdfs, news releases, blog posts, etc.  Therefore optimising all your digital assets has become paramount.

7. Brief you PR agency to produce press releases that address the negative sentiment about your brand.   This is a no-brainer and a good way of addressing negative pr without actually participating in discussions.  If you find a recurring negative PR theme, brief your PR agency and ask them to adress it in future press releases.

The above are basic steps.  There is much more to ORM but the above steps are a good place to start if you’ve not thought about your Brand’s Online reputation.  

Do you monitor and manage  your company’s reputation online?  If you don’t then this post is a good place to start. 

Long are the days when companies were in control of their brands reputation by controling what messages their consumers are exposed  to.  The internet has changed all that, and today, with the internet penetrating more and more homes,  the tides have turned in favour of the consumer.

Today, internet users can  “virtually” go to a number of forums, blogs and social networks and speak freely about their experiences with your brand or service.  In an ideal world you’d like them to speak positively about your brand but are you really in control of that? Well no.  This is where reputation management plays a very important role.

So how do you go about managing your reputation?  Follow these three simple step:

1) Define Scope

Before you begin monitoring your brand’s online reputation, you will need to know what you’re monitoring.  I suggest you brainstorm the various areas of your business and categorise them.  Examples of reputation management categories can include:

• Brands/Services:

• Competitors

• Industry

• Employees (current and ex)

2) Research

There are a number of free and commercial online tools and sites available to you as a brand owner, these include:

• technorati

• blogpulse

• Subscribe to the Google, Yahoo and MSN News RSS feeds for the keywords you want to monitor.

• Create Yahoo Pipes using keywords you want to monitor

3) Manage & Engage

Once you’ve begun monitoring your brand, its time to create a strategy to counter the negative effects of bad publicity and to capitalise on the effects of positive publicity.   Below are examples of ways to fend off negative publicity:

• Create a company blog that allows users to interact with your brand as opposed to going elsewhere to do the same

• If you provide news, make sure you’re indexed in the news section of the search engines.  There is a detailed process of how to do this for Google can be found in this official guide for google news inclusion

Hopefully your brand only gets good publicity but if it doesn’t I hope the above tips are enough of an inspiration to set you off on the highly important task of manging your brands reputation. Good luck!