(No Ratings Yet)
Loading ...There is no way to control online message at all. The best way to effectively control the message is to make sure that the message you’re combating never has an opportunity to become the most visible or the most prominent conversation online. Negative conversation online is usually ephemeral if it is just one voice amongst many.
The trouble is with most new brands is that there isn’t a lot of either noise or static already existent in the mediasphere and reputation-sphere. Names like Shel Holtz and Joseph Jaffe are more unique than Gary Cohen or Mark Harrison. Mark Harrison can be a complete ass online and loads and loads of people can hate him completely and the Internet probably will never register that thousands and thousands of people hate Mark Harrison. The Mark Harrison passion chamber is buzzing with Mark Harrisons.
There is only one Shel Holtz but Shel owns the space. If one wanted to defame Shel, it would take lots and lots of high-profile blogs and sites, pushing in a concerted effort to break into the top 100 returns. Not only does Shel own his own reputation unto the third or fourth page of Google, he also has a posse. This posse of bloggers have saturated the top-ten pages, 100 returns, with love, support, reverence, thanks, and a little neutral-tone conversation.
If you have a unique brand or a unique name, you are a single man in an empty room and you had better control your brand, your reputation, and your listings on Yahoo!, Google, Live.com, MSN, Technorati, Ask.com, and the rest of them. Who am I kidding, it’s only Google.
Unlike the staid nature of a nationally-syndicated magazine, a blog actually gets better the more open and honest the participants are. It is also an amazing way to allow the members of your company or team, the marketing team, us, them, and anyone else, to participate in the process of creating and building your brand.
Blog search engines such as Technorati, Feedster, and BlogPulse only care about the last word. If you can reply to a negative, hurtful brand hit, then you can dominate the conversation and win the debate in most cases.
Google cares about everything, but the latest word isn’t always indexed yet. In the world of Google, the better indexed site always wins. Maximize your knowledge about SEO and Google Sitemaps if you want to compete here.
You can’t control online conversation unless you participate. To quote Sernovitz, “you’ll never be able to control the blogosphere conversation. Don’t even try. you’ll never be able to manage your blog coverage like you manage the press. Don’t even try. But what you can do is participate, earn respect, and tell your story.
Jump in, join the conversation, and be a part of it.” The only way to get indexed by Google or to show up on Technorati, Feedster, and BlogPulse is to be an online opinion leader who has a site that has made it out of Technorati, Feedster, BlogPulse, Yahoo!, MSN, and Google’s sandbox, and has a SEO and a Blog Search Engine strategy.
You have to initiate membership, become part of the conversation, build street cred, have an SEO and blog strategy, and become a respected online opinion leader before something goes awry. It is important that you begin establishing yourself as soon as you begin building your company. Visibility and influence online takes time, so it’s best to start building early, so that when your product or service is ready for launch, you won’t have to wait another six months to become visible.
Therefore, trying to ask someone to bring something awful or defamatory is close to impossible and often does more harm than good as a blogger posts your lawyer’s cease-and-desist letter and then mocks you further. Most bloggers don’t have a pot to piss in and are looking for a fight; also, many web hosting companies are really shy about enforcing any sort of anti-defamation, freedom of speech, issues for two reasons: most web hosting companies and the sort of people who run them, are libertarians; also, if the word gets out that a web hosting company is bringing stuff down based on coercion or legal means, then their reputation is pretty screwed.
That said, getting humble and asking for what you need directly seems to work a lot more than you would thing. Reaching out to say hello, to request a voice, or to ask very nicely to have the article brought down, to offer your opinion, to generously offer corrections for misinformation, or to offer an interview or exclusive are way more effective ways of interacting with the blogosphere.
Filed under: Abraham Harrison LLC, Brand, Branding, Branding Online, Conversation Marketing, Crisis Management, Managing Conversation, Messaging Online, Online Participation
Loading ...
Leave a Reply