April 25, 2010

Managing a Reflection of Your Brand Reputation

Many social media sites (such as Wikipedia) are a reflection of the markets’ perceived understanding and reputation of your brand.

To effectively balance competitive threats that manifest in Wikipedia, you must have something worthwhile to link to related to the topic of interest ? preferably lots (and lots) of domain expertise that establishes you and your firm as thought leaders.

I’m not surprised when businesses contact me to describe online social networking and brand reputation scenarios they find annoying and troublesome; I’ve been cautioning business leaders to use social networks and social publishing as a key source of online reputation management visibility since 2003. I’ve often commented that Google ceased being a search engine 10 years ago – it’s now a reputation engine.

However, a week rarely goes by when I don’t hear from at least one that hasn’t taken my advice to fortify their online reputation with some earnest degree of non-trivial participation in the read-write web.

A close business acquaintance (not a client) recently tossed out this thought in an email with a predictable tone of desperation.

Internet related postings and structures have a significant influence (beyond the recession) on the degree to which people find us, inquire, and/or buy our services and the degree to which our competitors are able to literally water-down and usurp our visibility to their advantage.

Customers, the media, competitors and journalists are busy shaping your online brand reputation using every manner of social content publishing and networking environment they can find. If you don’t participate effectively, how can you possibly expect your online reputation to reflect your own marketing message and product positioning?

The acquaintance goes on (I’m paraphrasing to conceal identity of course) to say…

Two competitors have literally moved into a Wikipedia page that should be about my company and undermined it in a couple of different ways: (i) they positioned themselves front and center in the page; (ii) they made the description of our core philosophy innocuous by focusing the discussion away from my company’s mission and core values.

Setting aside the misconception that Wikipedia is ripe grounds for marketing influence, links to opposing (or complementary) viewpoints, whether it’s from competitors or not, is Wikipedia’s purpose. To effectively balance competitive threats that manifest in Wikipedia, you must have something worthwhile to link to related to the topic of interest – preferably lots (and lots) of domain expertise that establishes you and your firm as thought leaders. The body of influence must be so significant that no Wikipedia editor could find reason to leave it off the page.

There are many ways to achieve this, but these three things come to mind as the most important.

A dominant and high-quality content based deeply indexed and organically findable across all major search channels.
A collection of tightly connected and purposefully integrated social networking presences.
A consistent and scalable social participation strategy that includes significant elements of both publishing and listening.

While these strategic attributes translate into a large number of business and technical requirements that seem to grow in scope every day, it is possible to simplify and streamline your online brand reputation by outsourcing some of the requirements to services and technology that wisely leverage automation and integration. Trying to chip away at your brand reputation objectives without a comprehensive strategy and tools to bring success into focus, is unlikely to produce competitive results.