A great brand can take months, if not years, and millions of dollars to build. It should be the thing you hold most precious. It can be destroyed in hours by a blogger upset with your company. Andy Beal

A company’s brand and reputation will live or die by what is said about it online. By following a few simple rules you can ensure that your company will fly. Failing to track and react to what is being said about you online could be fatal for your company.

Monitoring your reputation online is similar in many ways to monitoring what is said about you offline, with one major difference: news (good or bad) can spread like wild fire online. What starts today as a rant from a disgruntled customer could tomorrow have spread round the internet leaving your brand in tatters.

With a bit of inspiration, some talent and of fair slice of luck you can use the same power to drive your brand forward. The infamous digg effect can drive thousands of visitors and hundreds of links all of which can do wonders to your visibility online, and when used correctly can have a massive influence on the bottom line of any business.

• Surviving the digg effect
• Tongue-in-cheek alternatives to the digg effect

The following strategies can help you to exert a bit more control over what is being said about you online:

1. Track everything said about you online.

The first step is to track all mentions of you, your brand, your products and your company. There are numerous options, including our very own reputation monitor.

• Andy Beal shares the tricks
• Cameron Olthuis gives us the 101

2. Build relationships - say thank you

For each positive comment you find online take the time to say thank you. Make your “thank you” real, personal and honest and people will appreciate it. The more conversations you can have with people around the internet the better. Building relationships and building your network is an amazingly positive side effect of improving your reputation online.

• 10 reasons commenting is good for you
• Listen to the ways people say they want to hear from you

3. Participate in relevant online communities

Building your profile in online communities can be an incredible way to get your name known and to build a reputation. The golden rule is to go all out to help other people. If you are only in it for personal gain then you will not get any benefit from it.

Many of the leading names in the SEO world are incredibly active in various forums. In the SEO world over 50% of people in a recent SEOmoz post said they first learnt seo by reading an participating in SEO forumns. So not only can you learn gain an incredible wealth of information, these forums can give you incredible exposure and when used correctly can be a huge help in growing your online reputation. Here are a few guys from the Cre8asite Forums who have helped me immensely through their involvement in the forum.

• Bill Slawski / Cre8asite profile
• Rand Fiskin / Cre8asite profile
• Ammon Johns / Cre8asite profile

4. Give away the farm

There is plenty of debate about how much information you should give away for free. Talking purely from a reputation standpoint, the more quality advice you can give away the more you will build your reputation online. Businesses have been built based on giving away information. Take a look at these four posts from the “popular posts” at Marketing Pilgrim, each one is giving away information for free, and each new reader and new subscriber is one more relationship. Online reputation can be summed up as “build relationships”.

I doubt I am alone in subscribing to the GoogleCache based purely on reading this one post answering questions posed by SEOmoz. Give away the farm and your reputation will improve dramatically.

What if there are negative comments?

The first 4 rules are all about improving your reputation, however by putting yourself into the public domain you are also increasing the chance that someone will disagree with what you say. Not only that but people love to diss the big guys. The next set of rules are to help protect your brand and manage your online reputation.

5. Track what is being said.

(Yes, I know this is the same as #1 - you can go and look at our reputation monitor if you like!

Failure to track what is being said about you online is asking for trouble. If you don’t know what is being said, you can’t respond, and if you don’t respond and help to solve the problem the next thing you know is that the problem is out of all control and you will lose business because of it.

“Seven out of ten British consumers will not click through to a company’s website if search results contain negative comments about them. This must mean that McDonalds’ site gets very few UK visitors. ” e-consultancy.com

6. Say you are sorry.

When something negative about your company happens, take the time to say you are sorry - make sure it isn’t a false apology.

Take the time to speak to them, if you can speak to the person on the phone do so. It is likely to have the best response. If you fail to speak to them directly try to send an email or leave a comment or anything, just make contact. Be very careful any time you put something into writing as it can easily be miss-interpreted. Richard Denny has a great post and related free e-book on the very subject.

7. Put the facts online

Quite often, negative online press stems from confusions or incorrect facts. You can often clear up confusions and incorrect facts through dialogue with the appropriate people, but in serious cases, where many people are getting confused, you may well want to make your side of the story available on your website.

After the recent shooting tragedy at Virginia Tech, there was a bit of a stir caused by the claim that the killer had bought ammunition from eBay. An eBay spokesman denied this:

In looking at his activity on the site, we can confirm that at no point that he used eBay to purchase any guns and ammunition. It is strongly against eBay policy to try to sell guns and ammunition.

Their statement is also available on their own website: eBay statement (though it’s not particularly easy to find on Google.

• The basics
• eBay controversy on MSNBC

8. Control the search engine results

Whilst the stat above about people’s behaviour when faced with negative search engine results is based on British Consumers I suspect the story is similar around the world. One way of staying in control of the message people receive when they search for your company is to proactively seek to tell your story in the search engine results. Going too far down this route could be viewed as somewhat ‘grey’ hat (hi Graywolf), but certainly creating profiles for yourself and your company on many of the largest social media sites is a good idea to help you control your online reputation.

• 97th floor tell us that 29 Fortune 100’s are letting Google Tarnish their Reputation
• Graywolf reckons you should have all 10

9 Stay ethical in your reputation management

Whatever the issue that you are trying to deal with (whether real or perceived, ethical or unethical), it is important to do no further harm with your attempts to manage your reputation. This is not about “getting things deleted from Google” or covering up bad things you have done. It’s about presenting yourself and your company in the best possible light - almost every company needs some marketing, after all.

• SEOmoz on reputation management
• Are all companies who need reputation management bad?

10 Listen to feedback

If you can take on board suggestions and criticisms from your customers and the wider community, you are a long way towards doing the best you can. In this mode, we’d like to invite comments and suggestions from you guys. Let us know what you think we’ve missed.

Three links to Hugh because he says it so well:

• Shameless
• Afraid to blog aka ‘I was God’
• Customers or consumers

One of the things that we’d really like to be able to do with reputation monitor, is some kind of sentiment analysis - i.e. working out whether a story about you is positive or negative, good or bad.

This is hard, for a number of reasons, but we think we might be able to have a crack at it - there is a wealth of published material on the subject and hopefully we’ll be able to come up with something useful.

Some of the challenges we have identified before writing a line of code (as opposed to those myriad problems you identify once you’re writing code!) follow. We’d love any input you might have to guide us along the way:

• context: the same word / phrase being good or bad depending on the context (do you have an explosive vertical leap or explosive laptop batteries?).

• synonyms, antonyms, homonyms: words that mean the same thing, appear the same but mean different things, and all the other joys of the English language (does GLA refer to the Greater London Authority or the Greatest Living American?)

• sarcasm, irony and other humour: I think it’s safe to say, we won’t be working this out algorithmically any time soon

• computing resources: do we stick with term weights, look at vector weighting or move to full Markov chains? There’s a lot of information out there, and we need to be able actually to sift through it all…

So, we’re looking forward to seeing what we can create, but we’d also love your feedback and input.

Update: I saw SEOmoz’s term targeting tool this morning which partly prompted me to write this post (term targeting being a related semantic analysis to sentiment analysis) so I thought I would run it over this post. The results look great guys - the top two targeted 2-word phrases were: ’sentiment analysis’ and ‘reputation monitor’ which I think is fair (the 3rd was ‘London authority’ which is slightly less intentional - although maybe we should aim to be the London authorities on sentiment analysis!)

This is the first of what we hope will be regular posts comparing the online reputation of major brands. This initial post is a bit of a stab in the dark, whilst we try to come up with a good and repeatable way of coming up with a score for a company’s online reputation.

This “Reputation War” is between McDonald’s and Burger King, so let the games begin…

Reputation at a glance

The graph below is a representation of how well the two contenders fare when someone searches for their company name online. I have used google.com to perform the searches (though interestingly if I used .co.uk - the UK version the results are somewhat different, but that may be the topic of a follow up post).

The graph shows the first 20 results of a google search with a visual indication of the strength of a page. The colour of the bar indicates whether the story is owned by the company in question (grey), positive or neutral (green) or negative (red).

• The vertical axis is page strength as shown by the fantastic tool over at SEOmoz. I used this to give an indication of how important the page is. It is likely, though not guaranteed that a page with a strong page strength will cause more damage than a page with a low page strength. This is because the reach of a strong page is likely to be more than that of its weaker competitor so more people are likely to see it.

• The colour of the bar, and therefore the nature of the page is far from a science. Hopefully you will agree with (or temporarily forgive) my judgement. Note only those pages that aren’t owned by the company in question are coloured. It is assumed that a page owned by the company says positive things.

Reputation by Numbers

As we see it there are (at least) two components to a company’s online reputation. One element can be described as reputation management and covers how well the company is protecting their brand online. This is obviously easier for some companies than it is for others, which brings me nicely on to the second component of a company’s online reputation, which could easily boil down to how good a brand they have. Do people love it or hate it?

We have come up with a repeatable way of scoring a company’s online reputation. We give a company a score out of 100, so a company with an online reputation of 100 is both super squeaky clean and is doing very well with their reputation management. Anyone approaching a reputation of 0 should not be trusted, since they have an awful reputation and they aren’t doing a good job at hiding managing it.

Scoring a company’s online reputation

To represent how well a company is managing their reputation, we give a score out of 50 depending on how well they control the first 20 results for their own name.

The factors affecting this score are the number of results a company owns, the number of positive results and the number of negative results. We have weighted these based on the position in the SERPS (so a page high up the search results is worth more than one lower in the results). We then weight it further so a company owned result is better than a positive result (since a page not controlled by the company could change at any time). A negative page removes more from the score than a positive result would have added.

With this score, we are trying to measure how well a company is doing at managing their online reputation. Anyone with a low score for this section would almost certainly benefit from reputation monitor!

The second element is giving a rough indication of how the company is perceived ignoring any effect from reputation management. For this we have looked at the ratio of positive mentions (an albeit inaccurate, but nonetheless quick search using allintitle: companyname rocks vs allintitle: companyname sucks)

Ok, show me the numbers

The totals are… (drum roll please)

McDonald’s:

46 / 100

Made up of:

33 / 50 for the “top 20 results”

13 / 50 for the “starting reputation”

Burger King:

57 / 100

Made up of:

42 / 50 for the “the top 20 results”

15 / 100 for the “starting reputation”

The Winner:

So the winner of the first Reputation Wars is Burger King with a score of 57 / 100 versus McDonald’s with only 46 / 100.

Some Conclusions.

The conclusions we have drawn are as follows:

• Both companies own an incredible number of the top 20 results for their name.
• McDonald’s suffers online from a few strong negative results. We think that this is mainly due to the size of the company making them more of a target (I suspect that Supersizeme would also have had the same effect if he had only eaten Burger King)
• Burger King owns less of the top 20 results but has more positive mentions than McDonald’s
• Overall I think McDonald’s does a better job of managing their online reputation, but is starting from a much weaker position (more so than is reflected in our scoring). Burger King does a good job, but has a much better starting point.

Why do I care / What can I learn

I think the lesson that we can take from these fast food giants is that controlling the top 20 results is a good thing. If you do get any negative press being able to amend one of your results to respond to it is a step in the right direction.

As this is the first of what we hope will become a regular slot I would love your feedback. What would you use to score a companies online reputation? What would you do differently? Do you think the scores (46 and 57) are a good reflection of the online reputation for McDonald’s and Burger King?