If you decide to accept the risks inherent in a given project, the assumption is that those risks have been addressed with a plan should they ever materialize as jeopardy or loss.

A corporation’s reluctance to pursue a blog marketing strategy derives from a valid concern over viable damage control should an unhappy employee or customer begin a critical or caustic online campaign.

If such commentary appears on the corporate blog or on other blogs and message boards, it ultimately will surface in search engine results. Thus “search engine reputation management” becomes a means of handling that particular risk.

Lee Oden of Online Marketing Blog elaborates on “three fundamental concepts to master when dealing with search engine reputation management - Monitor, Optimize and Engage.”

You’ll monitor‘your good name’ by using Google and Yahoo alerts,tags and RSS feeds. You’ll be looking for mention of your company’s key personnel and product names used in conjunction with such descriptors as “sucks” “scam” “kudos”.

Preemptively optimizing all of your digital content serves as a pro-active, preventative measure.

“…companies need to implement holistic brand content optimization as a best practice. The more branded content in the search results, the more diluted any negative brand content will be.”

Engage is the final process, and one,if handled adroitly, can garner as much good PR as the precipitating criticism did bad, offsetting any brand negativity.

• Research the situation – is there merit?
• If not, provide the facts and ask for corrections
• If yes, then offer to discuss
• Be ready to respond with your own blog
• Be honest, be transparent and LISTEN”

Tags: Blog Marketing, branded_content, marketing_strategy, oden, reputation_management, search_engine_results

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 28th, 2007 at 6:00 pm and is filed under Blog Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.