I think you should check out Michael Gray new article, Using Directories for Search Engine Reputation Management, because it is a very interesting article — essential reading — I have only excerpted a wee bit of it here because I think you need to go over there and spend some time with the article, which is really valuable and essential as a way of inoculating your brand in advance of anything going wrong.

Search engine reputation management (SERM) is a growing discipline under the larger umbrella of search engine optimization (SEO). If you deal with client services, and you don’t already have at least one reputation management client, chances are you will in the very near future. The more tools or options you have at your disposal for this type of project, the easier the task will be. In this article I’m going to look at one of those tools; directories. (via Marketing Pilgrim)

I think it is really important for me to start writing more on this topic.  I have written a few things on this topic: I, Online Reputation Manager, The Powerful SEO Benefits of Blogger PR Outreach, An El Al Jumbo Jets Chaffing and Flaring the Skies Analogy, Online Reputation Defense: Resistance is Futile, Online Reputation Management, and Online Reputation Management Needs to Be Proactive. Via Marketing Pilgrim and Chris Abraham.

I just received this newsletter from the gang over at WebProNews AU, Blogging To Better SEO, that puts into words a lot of what we do for our clients every day as part of our Social Media consultancy and even what we do incidentally for our Public Relations clients.

With all of our social media outreach, we at Abraham Harrison LLC work on providing earned media for our clients. As I wrote in The current crop of advertisement methods is too ephemeral, it is important to decide where you want to spend your limited resources. Do you want to spend it on contextual ads? Contextual ads can drive a lot of traffic immediately to your target, to be sure, but when you stop paying for your key words, everything comes to a halt. All that traffic goes away… and, even while you’re paying for the ads, the conversion might not be there — it might just be a waste of money, a budget burn.

When you put your time and budget into blogger outreach, social media outreach, and blogging, your results may be less immediate than they are with ads, but whatever coverage you get, whatever earned media — and it can be an astounding amount of coverage, too — never goes away. Never! It becomes permanent record on the Interwebs, stashed and findable on Google until the Internet collapses through some sort of evil DNS hack.

Blogging To Better SEO by Manoj Jasra

[...]

[Manoj]: Why kinds of benefits can an organization expect with the implementation of a blog (and some of the natural SEO benefits that come with a blog)

[Lee Odden]: When a blog publishes AND promotes useful content, the benefits include:

• More content to be spidered by search engines and an increased footprint of the brand via search
• More links from other sites to the blog and improved search engine visibility
• Non-search engine traffic from social media sites and direct links from other blogs
• Direct communication with customers and prospects via RSS
• Depending on the blog structure and content, increased contacts by journalists that want to use blog content or authors as subject matter experts
• Increased leads or sales as a result of blog content – direct or indirect

[...]

At Abraham Harrison, we’re exchanging ideas with NetVantage, a Michigan based SEM and analytics firm.  Adam Henige will be guest blogging here from time to time.  We’re honored to have him here.

If you are a marketer, you should inherently love data.  In my own customer experiences (as well as my professional experiences) I’ve come to realize that many market research and data collection initiatives are focused on asking the question “Why?”  This question is asked to understand the triggers that make people perform a given action which is then used to generate plans to capitalize on those insights by reaching more of that target market.

Unfortunately, traditional methodologies for obtaining this data can be time consuming and costly, and typically do not correlate well with the different shopping and/or brand experience of a company’s web presence.  So if you’ve spent a lot of money on a website, you’re likely doing some basic tracking to understand where your traffic is coming from (particularly if you’re doing paid search or other forms of online advertising) and how well your site is converting visitors to customers.  However, if your site’s not generating business, or if you would like it to generate more (and who doesn’t?), you need to be looking into ways to ask your customers “Why not?”

I recently began working with a client to provide paid search management, search engine optimization and web analytics for their recently launched web store.  For the client it was their first venture into online retail, and they had no idea what to expect.  Upon our initial engagement, I was extremely impressed with how intelligently they had approached this initiative.  They chose an experienced developer who had put together a site which was aesthetically strong, had a logical navigational structure, and a robust content management system.  Upon first glance it appeared I would simply have to drive some qualified traffic to the site and the cash register would start ringing.

Not long after the contract was signed we had our SEO and SEM initiatives underway.  Traffic increased by over 500%, average page views and time on site were strong for visitors reaching the site directly as well as through organic and paid search.  We had only one problem…no one was buying.  The question, of course, was “why not?”

I began scouring the data available to me.  All of the baseline website health metrics, aside from sales, looked good.  So what was the issue?  The answer was found in a scenario analysis of the site’s shopping cart system.  Using most web analytics software these days allows the administrator to set up scenarios, or funnels, of defined steps users take through a process whether it be through a series of product pages or the steps to purchase through a shopping cart. 

In this instance, there were six pages through the purchase process from adding a product to the shopping cart to the final step which was an order confirmation.  When we took a look at the funnel, we saw that a large percentage of visitors were successfully getting through the first three steps, but when users got to the billing information page, 100 percent of users were exiting.  So we quickly jumped into the purchase process on the site and when we reached the billing information page, we put ourselves in the users’ shoes, and found the data had led us to the reason users were not buying.  At this exact step users were being asked to input their billing info after they had already input their shipping information, with no ability to mirror that information (a simple radio button saying “check here if the same as shipping address” would have sufficed).  This was redundant and annoyed users enough to make them not purchase despite the fact that they were halfway through the buying process.  Immediately after we fixed that step in the shopping cart, sales started steadily increasing and over time the funnel has continued to improve dramatically.

So in this instance, we were able to utilize web analytics to take data and determine the answer to “Why not?”  However, in sites that have more ambiguous goals, it can sometimes be hard to statistically measure if users are having successful visits.  In these cases, you may literally need to ask the question of visitors on your site.  Companies like Foresee Results have had great success instituting in site surveys to gauge customer reaction and generate a constant flow of feedback (you will run into this on sites like bestbuy.com and many others) for a broad array of organizations.  These solutions have been well received by clients, but in many instances, a much less intensive (read: free) solution can provide enough information to gauge your website’s pulse, and its ability to ask your visitors “Why not?”

One such solution I have used in the past is iperceptions’ 4Q, an in site survey tool that allows you to gather qualitative data to supplement your quantitative analytics data and help you answer some nagging questions about your site’s performance.  The tool itself is very easy to install, and once installed, provides a handful of customization tools to select the frequency of visitors who will be presented with the option to take the survey, select alternate answer sets, etc.  The 4Q survey asks users five questions, asking them to rate their experience, define the purpose of their visit, whether they were able to complete that purpose, what they value most about the website, and whether or not they were able to complete the purpose of their visit (here’s where you’ll find your “Why not?”).   

At Netvantage we constantly trumpet the Internet’s ability to generate accountable marketing decisions, and this is a prime example of what we mean.  Through the fluid ability to collect and analyze both quantitative and qualitative data, you can ask non-converting prospects “Why not?”  With this information you can continuously optimize your site and your online marketing efforts to break down those barriers and convert more prospects into loyal customers.

Adam Henige is a Managing Partner of Netvantage Marketing, an Internet Marketing Consulting firm specializing in search engine optimization, search engine marketing and web analytics.

My guess is a tentative, temporary yes.

If you aren’t clued in yet, Yahoo! and Google have come to an agreement that allows Yahoo! to display Google paid search results on keyword queries on Yahoo! Yahoo! can now tap into Adsense and Adwords. The agreement is for 10 years and is not exclusive, meaning that Yahoo can create similar agreements with other parties.

There are pluses and minuses to this agreement. But for now, let’s focus on smaller agenices that serve smaller businesses and smaller businesses themselves.

The upside is that there could be less to learn and more reach for small advertisers. Using paid search can get you results on Yahoo! It may be unnecessary to do anything broad-based. That’s a good thing. It may make it easier to enter the arena of local search.

As AdAge points out:

When Google search ads are mixed in with Yahoo search ads for a particular search query, Google will almost always win the better placement, according to search marketers, because it has a better ad-matching and monetization engine. And if Google consistently wins, marketers may be less inclined to bother using the Yahoo system, instead choosing to put their optimization efforts toward a single system. In other words, less to learn, less to manage.

That’s the good part.

Now the down side. It could get more expensive to place search ads. Google’s system tends to be more expensive – and effective than Yahoo’s! That expensiveness will now be extended into the Yahoo! sphere, likely devaluing Yahoo’s! own paid search results.

My thoughts are that, at least initially, this will bode well for locals who are looking to add paid search to their mix. I’m thinking that because I’m guessing the biggest barrier is lack of knowledge on how start off effectively…as opposed to cost.

But that benefit may not last for long if competition becomes to intense for localized keyword searches. Because this does decrease paid search alternatives.

Eric Schonfeld of TechCrunch poses the question as to whether Google Trend result will be a good predictor of the 2008 presidential election. He points to past statistics that show a relative symmetry between searches for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and the results for the Democratic primary.

Blue = Barack Obama Red = John McCain

I think you can take all this with a grain of salt. Sure, there will be some relevance, but there are too many other factors involved that could skew the results. There are also a bunch of unrelated factors that can’t be prescribed to online search.

The electoral college is the deciding factor in elections and while you can break down searched by state, each state will have its own factors relating to voters and internet usage. And voters will vary as to how they get their political information. Evangelical voters will differ from young urban single people who will differ from Latinos who will differ from suburban housewives.

How thiis wold be helpful is to also measure terms such as health care, immigration, tax policy, and Iraq…and match them with each candidate. Better yet, match them by candidate and state. You’ll start to see what issues are important where.

Candidates then should create issue focused minisites that can directly address a candidates interests.

Hopefully, campaign advisors will look to do this as opposed to primarily run on slogans and attack ads that teach us very little.

Back in December, I made put forth my predictions for 2008, with #11 being “Conversion attribution will be a big bone of contention”. That’s about to happen. Only now, thanks to Microsoft, it’s called “Engagement Mapping”.

Conversion attribution and/or engagement mapping is basically this. When we buy something, it is often because we’ve been inluenced by several marketing messages from different channels. The online arena offers little measurable sense of exactly what made someone buy, but an (almost) exact sense of where someone came from (a search? a banner?). So, conversion attribution and/or engagement mapping is basically is the call for the revenue from an ecommerce transaction to be dispersed amongst the marketing channels according to some sort of formulaic attribution system of that tries to weigh the influence of each channel. In Microsoft’s version – I’ll stick with engagement mapping – only online channels are mentioned.

This seems to address a issue of real concern, but it fails to address the whole picture. As a result, we’re likely to see an upcoming battle of Titans.

The problem I have with it is that Microsoft will be trying to implement industry wide measurement metrics – more than likely specifically designed in its favor – to get inside our heads and measure the amount of influence all of these marketing channels had when we buy something. I’d rather see something like this worked out by a consortium of companies in the online advertising space.

In all honesty, the current system is a skewed. In the pay-for performance world, which is heavily slanted toward search, we never really know what factors led to that click. I’ve long believed in search, but have had a hard time thinking a small text ad worked wonders all by itself.

Controversy will rise up big time if this becomes standard because Micorsoft’s rival, Google, will stand to lose the most. And that loss could be huge. That’s because EM will be taking into account online display advertising such as banners and boxes and skyscrapers. They have been much derided with their low click thru rates, something that I’ve always have felt was unfair. To me, it’s never taken into account any branding aspects or simple enhancement of name recognition. While Microsoft obviously has a foothold in the search arena, they are players in display advertisng as well. This will be even more true if their attempts to buy Yahoo prove to be successful.

Now it will be Microsoft’s challenge to convince the ad industry to play along. Advertisers – angencies and internal marketing managers may go for EM because it could allegedly give them a more quantifiable measure of marketing ROI spend.

But this cuts right into Google’s business model. They’ll be losing money because yesterday, someone saw a banner ad for a product and today they’re on Google because they put in a industry related keyword and came up with a text ad. But there really is no telling how much weight each played in the purchase. At best, I don’t think we’re there yet.

Microsoft’s plan is short on detail. Look for a lot of headed discussion on this issue. I’ll be following it intensely.

Penny Crosman wrote a pretty good review of a book I hadn’t heard of,  Web Dragons, by Ian H. Witten, Marco Gori and Teresa Numerico, which seems like a pretty :

‘How do search engines work? Howare PageRanks calculated? WebDragons, by Ian H. Witten, Marco Gori and Teresa Numerico, takes a textbook approach to such questions using historical analogies. “In Oriental folklore, dragons not only enjoy awesome grace and beauty, they are endowed with immense wisdom,” the authors note. “But in the West, they are often portrayed as evil — St. George vanquishes a fearsome dragon.” Search engines, too, are large beasts and have the capacity for wisdom, good and evil.”In addition to celebrating the joy of being able to find stuff on the Web, we want to make you feel uneasy about how everyone has come to rely on search engines so utterly and completely.”‘ –Penny Crosman of Intelligent Enterprise

This morning I read two important posts written by Greg Sterling on his blog Screenwerk. One is Nielsen – WebVisible Data on Local Search. The other is New Findings on SMBs and User Reviews. It left me more and more convinced how local businesses must view the internet as a marketing and business development source, and as a customer relations and reputation management tool.

Now I’m combining the results of two surveys both taken on line, so bear with me but Greg teamed with Opus Research and AllBusiness.com to put forward a survey that netted them 1200 respondents. AllBusiness.com’s users and members are SMBs (small & medium businesses). Of those 1200, 55% said that they had a website. That figure is smaller that I would expect – which is a good sign. That’s because it means that it probably wasn’t heavily populated by web savvy or tech oriented companies.

Now the Nielsen-WebVisible survey found that 86% said that they had used the Internet to find a local business to actually shop at. And as far as usage, 78% responded that they use the internet more today to find a local business than they had done two years previously and that an additional 20% use it the same amount. Combined, that’s 98%. Wow.

What we’re seeing is that a significantly large (and getting larger) percentage of people – people who are looking to conduct some sort of business- use the internet to locate businesses within the category of the product and/or service of what they need…on a local basis.

This obviously underscores the tremendous need today for SMBs to have websites. Not having one is ludicrous. But it also points to the fact that, in today’s arena, it PAYS to develop an online marketing plan for one’s SMB. It should include SEO and SEM for most. Banners at times. Email marketing to current customers. Each business will have different needs and all of these methods may not apply, but we also find out from the Nielsen-WebVisible survey that 52% use telephone directories less now than they did two years ago. Disclosure: I still use mine and have no plans to use it less.

Now there’s going to be a gap here. And the gap is that many smaller businesses mistakenly view advertising as an expense. And they’ll go for the tried and true. Yellow pages and flyers. Or they’ll rely on something that is very effective, but may not be enough: word of mouth.

To be sure, in Greg’s survey, 60% of the repondents said that more than 50% of their business comes from referrals. And 30% said that more than 75% come from that same source. You won’t find me dissing WOM…

…so I’ll say this. I think a lot of business owners put too much stock in their product and/or service and rely on word-of-mouth…which while being very effective can be very slow. Which is why I think they’ll need to invest in some online strategies.

But going back to WOM, we see the internet is increasingly playing a major role. Greg also found out that 64% or respondents knew of online review sites and that 30% regularly check these reviews. About one-quarter of them said that these reviews led to new business.

So people are searching for and finding local business via the internet. They are then reading (or writing) online reviews. More evidence that developing an online strategy is becoming ever more important.

Close to 60% of respondents felt that customer reviews are “a good thing and help us improve our business”. Improve means that a business sort of has a free focus group online. And then it adds their favorite marketing tool…word-of-mouth.

Now a lot of Greg’s respondents not only recognize the importance of these reviews, they apparently understand that it’s important to address – no, wait, I’ll say that word – ENGAGE – their customers/reviewers because over 50% had contacted unhappy customers to address complaints. That’s a very smart thing to do.

This brings me to a final point. Online reputation management. Still today, with 45% of the respondents here without website, it shows that many SMBs are very much behind the eight ball. Because a company doesn’t have a website, or they have one that one of the officer’s nephews built four years ago, doens’t mean that they’re not being talked about online. And, if you are a business owner, you want to be the most prominent, the most central web presence out there.

I see a tremendous opportunity for not only local search, but local marketing, bizdev, and customer/business relation management that’s going on RIGHT NOW.

Check out the article in last Thursday’s Times, Dealing With the Damage From Online Critics, that addresses how to handle consumers who develop a personal vendetta against your company. Well, you could send lawyers but legal cease-and-desists generally just make the customer madder than hell and it isn’t hard to just start yet another attack site.

I hate to say it, sucking less always helps. Start with treating your customers better. Also, be sure to register lots of domain names and work on your online reputation aggressively before it becomes a problem.

Online, the best defense is a good offense and an ounce of online promotion is worth a pound of cure. Here are some great commented-by-me excerpts from the article, Dealing With the Damage From Online Critics, so you can get a gist:

As the power of the Internet grows, businesses small and large find themselves confounded by disenchanted employees, suppliers and competitors who seek fertile ground to air grievances online.

Armed with little more than a Web connection and a keyboard, these detractors can do everything from irritate, via a scathing review, to causing serious business problems by using message boards to reveal company secrets or spread rumors of unethical behavior. They may also start a gripe site or register a Web address in their target’s name.

There is not a lot you can do here so the best way to make sure you’re safe online is by making sure there is a whole lot of conversation about you, your brand, and your company well before anyone says anything, and they will, eventually.

It’s from Stat 101: the more data points there are the less any particular one point will effect the total. If you’re nowhere online, then one attack can demolish you. If, however, you’re ubiquitous, then any negative ad will probably not even cross your first few pages on Google anyway.

And, if it does, an appeasement policy does work: this person is not Hitler, this person just feels like he’s not being heard. I mean, I have done this sort of thing myself with Media Temple.

Their Director of Customer Support called me but his appeasement sucked because his gift wasn’t what I wanted, it is what he was authorized to give. Not enough. I just wanted to be appeased and so he never got the posts off of my blog and never will. I ended up leaving MT and will never recommend them ever again.

In fact, I am adamant that people stay away from Media Temple because I think Media Temple sucks (see what I just did there?)

Remedies vary by case and by state, but lawyers, Internet specialists and others counsel that the best course with may be to ignore irritating posts because trying to squelch a malcontent can have unintended consequences.

Beware of the unintended consequence, something we call blowback in DC. Reacting, responding, or arguing in a comment thread is basically engaging with a Tar Baby. There is no way you’re ever going to come out alive unless you come in very open, very sorry, and have a legitimate solution. Otherwise, if you’re ornery, you’ll have your ass handed to you.

“Your reaction often, if you’re a small business, is to get angry and to fire off a letter,” said Barry Werbin, an intellectual property lawyer at Herrick, Feinstein in New York. “Some big companies do it. More often than not, the person who posts the gripe site can’t wait to get that letter and post it.”

Sometimes, Mr. Werbin added, “it can worsen the damage because it just fuels the fire.”

This is super important — the best reason to hire a company like Abraham Harrison is because we know when not to react. As I always say, don’t respond, reply, react: message and counter-message!However, it is always smart to ask web hosts, web companies, the blogger, etc, very nicely to remove the content, especially after the issue has been resolved by you. Don’t get angry, don’t get even, get your “the customer is always right” hat on and start solving problems.

That the the owner of the gym in the article wouldn’t refund the $100 to the lady-in-question was just a seriously self-destructive rule. Katie Lambert is a moron. Now, she is known as a moron in the New York Times as well because this article makes her seam petty and cheap, surely prissy and pretty bad at customer service, that’s for sure.

Shit, if you own the company, “the rules” can always be ignored — rules are for dumb employees who have no authority so that spineless customers who don’t know their rights can tell their spouses that they tried and there was “nothing I could do.”

“New consumer opinion gets posted about every five seconds,” said Rob Crumpler, chief executive of Buzz Logic, which helps businesses identify influential bloggers.

Samantha DiGennaro, who runs her own strategic communications consulting firm in New York, says many companies either run scared from electronic media or fail to realize how quickly negative comments can jet around the Internet.

“People think, ‘It’s only on the Web. It’s not that important.’ But it’s almost more important than a newspaper or something in print,” she said. “Things live in perpetuity on the Web.”

Spoken words and even IM is “ephemeral,” meaning it is said and dissipates. When you post a blog entry or write a review, it goes on a permanent record. Since most companies have have websites that are essential “brochure-ware,” if there are enough negative reviews, these reviews can even place higher on Google than the company itself!

And, this “blog effect” even works for people who don’t have the Super Ninja SEO skills that I have just because Google favors deep sites, sites with lots of inbound and outbound links, sites with keyword-rich textual links, sites that are easy to “recognize” because they use predictable architecture, and also sites that are updated frequently. Google favors frequently-updated content above any other because Google is always afraid of missing something. Google wants to be first so Google will always index something fast and often if it is a site that is being constantly-updated — like a blog, a message board, or a review site! Ha!

Some large marketers may blog or respond anonymously. Ms. DiGennaro said appropriate responses were not one size fits all and must be tailored to the particular case. If something merits being addressed, she said, it can better be done in the name of the company rather than hiding behind anonymous postings.

Good lord, do not astroturf — it might seem like a great idea but it will give you nothing but pain!

Finally, Defensive Search Engine Optimization (Defensive SEO) works! It works! And here’s how, in a nutshell:

On the technical front, a search engine optimization expert can tweak a site so that it moves a positive posting higher in an Internet search, tending to bury the negative one. Shailen Lodhia, vice president for sales at Submit Express, an optimization firm in Burbank, Calif., estimated results could take three months to a year, and monthly retainers could exceed $3,000.

The best defense is a good offense. Useful practices include registering personalized e-mail addresses as well as gripe domain names — not with the intention of using them but to prevent others doing so. Registering common misspellings as well as derogatory domain names is a good precaution and so is covering extensions like .biz and .org. Costs are minimal, some lower than $50 a year.

And here is the money-shot of the entire article: you will not only be judge on the dumb or good things you do, but people know that you can really judge a company during a fit of rage, so you will also be judged by how you respond!

“Some people, for whatever reason, aren’t going to like or appreciate what you’re selling,” she said. “Accept this as normal, and you won’t stay awake at night letting a disgruntled client or a negative person who decided not to use your services bring you down with what will be transparently obvious to most people as sour grapes feedback.”

Angie Hicks, founder of Angie’s List, a member-generated ratings service where users report their positive or negative experiences with local contractors, said every company gets complaints at some time, but the way it responds can be more telling than the complaint itself.

“You can really see how that company is going to stand by their work based on how they handle problems that come up,” she said.

Don’t even try to attack, to counter-attack, to start making excuses, or by insulting or defaming your attacker. Remember what I told you about the tar-baby? Well, waging war with online conversation is an insurgency and requires asynchronous warfare techniques… I like to call them asynchronous marketing and asynchronous PR — forget about it, I already locked down the domain names!