When you put your name or your brand out into the limelight people will talk, and you won’t be able to control what they are saying.

There is an interview about to start on BBC Radio 2 about whether there is too much publicity around the disappearance of Madeline McCann http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/6627605.stm.

I’m deliberately not going to get involved with the debate, but it struck me that there probably isn’t a more honest or less self promotional story than that of a missing 3 year old girl. Despite this, the BBC are questioning whether there is too much publicity surrounding the story.

My point is this. Even though the name in question is a 3 year old missing girl there is starting to be some negative press. Put yourself in the limelight, and people will talk. When people talk you can’t control the message - but by monitoring what is being said you have the option to respond.

Are you in the limelight? Can you risk missing negative news?

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Over the last week or so I have been very busy updating reputation monitor. The changes that have gone live today are:

• Snippets - Both the rss feed and the results page have had snippets added.^*
• Robots.txt - The reputation monitor “spider” now obeys robots.txt
• Improved scheduling - We have updated the way we schedule feed monitoring. This includes better prioritisation amongst our various levels of account
• Various database optimisations - Due to higher than expected (but very welcome) demand we experienced some issues with the responsiveness of our database. The various changes we put in place mean that the database is now 3 orders of magnitude quicker than previously… (I’m quite chuffed)

Hopefully everything is working smoothly for you. Should you spot any problems please let me know.

^*Initially Will and I were in two minds about the snippets, as they weren’t something we controlled (we use the snippets given to us) so we couldn’t vouch for their relevance and therefore how useful they were. However, all the feedback we have had has convinced us that we were wrong and that the snippets would be useful. Now that they are live, if your opinion changes do let us know..

Also we would love to hear your ideas about what would make reputation monitor even better. What is the one thing we could add that would be the most help to your online reputation monitoring needs?

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…Or: How to take advantage of competitors who aren’t monitoring their reputation

Ok, so here’s the deal. You’ve got your brand, it’s kicking ass online and everyone loves you (or at least no-one can find that site with all the bad reviews). You’re monitoring your reputation, you’re on top of the game.

But what happens now? What’s next? Surely there must be something you can do other than rest on your laurels, chilling out? Well don’t panic, there is! It’s called ‘Aggressive Reputation Management’:

What is ‘Aggressive Reputation Management’?

In a nutshell: placing organic rankings for your competitor’s company name

Why should I do it?: Because it’s easy traffic, and the traffic acts double because you’re stealing it from your competitors!

Is it blackhat?: Not at all.

Tell me more: sure….

Ok, so let’s take an example. We know that one of our competitors is www.competitorA.co.uk. Now every man and his spider knows that you can’t put PPC on “competitor A” since you’ll get trodden on by the trademark police. So what’s the next best thing? Well let’s take a look at the SERPs:

Obvisouly the number one spot is pretty locked down - but what about the number 2 spot? Unless they are managing their online reputation the number 2 or 3 spot is usually WIDE OPEN (unless the company name has several meanings - such as Distilled) making it very easy to rank on. So why not throw up a page about how your services are better/cheaper than your competitor and get it ranking number 2 for your competitor’s brand name? Sure the traffic you can actually gain through this is minimal, but look at the ROI - it’s the easiest keyphrase you’ll even rank on!

Tips and Tricks

Ok, so now you understand the concept let’s take a closer look at a few more things to consider:

CTR (Click Through Rate)

This is where you put your linkbait skills to the test. Rule number 1 when doing this is that everyone who puts in the search for competitor A is looking for a specific company so you need to make sure that your title and description are appealing and drag users away from the number 1 spot. There are two ways of doing this:

1. Use good old fashioned PPC values (i.e. focus, focus, focus on every word of your title and description)
2. Appeal to people’s inherent eye for a bargain (i.e. see what your competitor is offering and offer something better!)

Conversion Rates

What is rule number 1? Everyone is looking for competitor A. You’ve done about 70% of the work persuading people to click on your link rather than your competitors. Now, you need to make sure you deliver. And deliver fast. If your average Joe doesn’t find what he was promised in the title/description then he’ll leave. A good way of keeping them is to use traditional ‘landing page’ methodology from PPC. Create a page which screams CONVERSION. Do your utmost best to drag this person into contacting you/buying from you.

Remember - this user didn’t want to use you. They wanted competitor A, so go all out to grab their attention and make sure they convert.

Lastly - just remember that this is yet another reason to start managing your online reputation. After all, if you aren’t doing this to your competitors then how long will it be until your competitors start doing it to you?

What the ancients called a clever fighter is one who not only wins, but excels in winning with ease. Sun Tzu

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There has been a bit of a furore about the recent deal between Innocent Drinks and McDonalds. You can read about it in their own words on the Innocent blog and the follow up, but the short summary is that Innocent, a company renowned for their ethics, are running a trial of offering their smoothies in McDonalds restaurants.

They have been accused of ’selling out’ (and worse) by some of their customers and the comments on their announcement blog post are heavily critical (with a few supportive voices that I imagine must be gratefully received at Innocent HQ). Innocent argue that it will help get fruit to more kids who would otherwise not have had an option of a smoothie while their opponents argue that they shouldn’t align themselves with a company that makes money out of junk food (and that their endorsement might make more kids eat more burgers). It’s an interesting dilemma, especially as McDonalds try to improve the healthiness of their products with somewhat mixed results and response (we have written about McDonalds reputation before).

I have followed the story with fascination for a few reasons:

• I like their smoothies!
• I went to the same college as the founders
• I am a big fan of their friendly approach to business

According to the Sunday Telegraph, they:

“have tried to track and contact every negative blogger on the website to personally explain why Innocent joined forces with McDonald’s”

Which is exactly how we would recommend they approach their reputation management, except that we imagine this is turning out to be a bit of a chore for them – depending on how they are going about tracking all the mentions of them online.

So, in an innocent spirit and because I think they’re taking a bit too much flak for what we have to remember is only a trial at this stage, we would like to offer them a free pro account on reputation monitor which will let them track mentions of them, their website and their blog over the next month with a lot less effort than however they are doing it at the moment (I’m fairly sure).

If you know anyone at Innocent, let them know about this (hopefully they’ll pick it up through the monitoring they are currently doing) – we really want to help and we’ll even help them get their monitor set up as well as possible.

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On Sunday I sat through one of the dullest FA Cup finals I have seen for a while, whilst watching the cricket on cricinfo. For those who don’t know the FA Cup is probably the most famous knock out competition in the world.

This year was the first time it had been held at the new Wembley stadium. Since the football was so dull I found myself searching around, and was shocked at how little attention the various sponsors had paid to the search engines.

E.ON paid £32 Million to sponsor the FA Cup for 4 years. Unlike the other big brands advertising or sponsoring the FA Cup, E.ON have also spent some time to ensure that any positive brand recognition isn’t wasted. A search for eon fa cup has E.ON has three of the top 5 results, two of them specifically talking about their sponsorship of the FA Cup. For the big brands the rest of this article is less of a happy tale.

There were three other brands allowed to advertise pitch side at wembley, these are Umbro, Carlsberg and National Express. I am assuming that National Express is the third supporter mentioned on the partners page at theFA.com

For these three brands it appears that they have forgotten about the search engines. A search for umbro fa cup has the FA Cup website top, and the rest of the results are sites selling the Umbro FA Cup Ball. carlsberg fa cup is slightly better as carlsberg ran a competion to send two people to the final, but this result is still second behind the fa cup website. national express fa cup has national express top (with an indented result) with the fa website second.

Finally there are the sponsors of Man Utd and Chelsea, AIG and Samsung respectively. The AIG search is one of the better set of search resuls (AIG fa cup) yet still they only own two of the results (though there are two more from Man Utd websites.

The worst set of results is without doubt those of samsung (samsung fa cup) who don’t own a single result in the top 10.

Brand recognition wasted.

Given how strong these brands are, and how easily they could rank for searches I was shocked at how little attention has been paid to the brand recognition available on the back of the FA Cup. The FA reckon last year’s final had a tv audience of 484 Million. I would bet that this year’s will attract a higher audience.

I don’t know how much money was spent sponsoring either the teams or the competition, but with over 400 Million people viewing a brand I am shocked someone hasn’t thought to throw up a couple of pages on their website mentioning the deal. With the strength of the various brands and their websites they would rank so easily for even relatively competitive phrases to do with the FA Cup. A simple page with a title along the lines of “brand are proud to sponsor the FA Cup” would easily rank for the phrases above, and I’d wager a lot more besides.

Once you have build up a big brand, and the associated powerful website, failing to do such a simple step is bordering on insanity. I have read about the massive spike of traffic for the advertisers of the super bowl, why not for the FA Cup?

Am I being harsh? Are there brands out there that join up their strategies and backup huge offline exposure with an equivalent online exposure?

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Today we increase the number of Critchlows working for Distilled from one to two, with the addition of Tom Critchlow. (What is the collective noun for Critchlows? - I vote for thicket).

So whilst coming up with Tom’s job title we came up with this list of job titles through the ages..

Initially I was going to have the business cards evolving over time as well as the job titles, but my skills aren’t quite up to that but I’m sure you are all impressed by the coffee stains!

Search Engine Job Titles

• 1997: - Head of Submitting websites
• 1998: - Head of Meta Tag re-writing
• 1999: - Head of Keyword Stuffing
• 2000: - Head of Forum spamming
• 2001: - Head of cloaking
• 2002: - Head of reciprocal linking
• 2003: - Head of link-farms
• 2004: - Head of 3 way linking
• 2005: - Head of .edu link aqcuisition
• 2006: - Head of link buying
• 2007: - Head of linkbait
• 2008: - Head of Personalised search
• 2009: - Janitor
• 2010: - Head of ‘Google-Clean’
• 2011: - Head of anti-Google protest
• 2012: - Unemployed

Luckily we have a few years left until Google takes over the entire world…

What have we missed? What would make it funnier? (or funny in the first place?) - Leave some ideas in the comments and we will update the list in due course.

Oh, and Welcome aboard Tom…

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Cutting straight to the point - we don’t believe that enough companies are tracking what is being said about them online, to counter this we are offering a free month of an agency account (worth £200) for our online media monitoring tool - reputation monitor to the following 100 UK PR companies.

To claim your prize all you have to do is to email us support@distilled.co.uk before 5:00pm on Friday 25th May telling us how you found out about the link. The first 20 people to respond will also be given a free bottle of champagne^* from our friends at drinks of france.

Media Monitoring as a service

Given how much damage can be caused by negative press and how negative mentions online can stay in the search engines we think that all companies should be tracking what is said about them. For PR agencies, tracking online buzz is a fantastic service to offer to your clients, giving them piece of mind. They will then know that if anything negative is said about them online they will be told about it, and given a chance to respond. Given that an agency account can monitor 20 clients for £200 it should be easy for you to make a profit. Who in their right mind can turn down a better service and increased profits?

Sign up now, help a child

We would love to be proved wrong, but our gut feel is that less than 25% of the PR companies in this list will contact us. To put more of our money where our mouth is, if more than 25% of this list reply and sign up to our free trial we will donate £150 to Great Ormond Street Hospital. Go on, prove us wrong

The companies we are offering a free month of an agency account to are:

• Citigate Public Affairs
• APCO
• Nelson Bostock Communications Ltd
• Nexus Communications Group Limited
• Portfolio Communications Ltd
• Fleishman-Hillard (UK) Ltd
• Custard PR
• Garnett Keeler Public Relations
• Golin Harris
• Bite Communications UK
• Munro & Forster
• Partners Group, The
• Penrose Financial
• Focus PR Limited
• Burson-Marsteller
• Henry’s House Ltd
• Intelligent PR
• Kinetic Communications
• JBP Public Relations
• EHPR Ltd
• Livewire Public Relations
• Hill & Knowlton
• Six Degrees Limited
• Capital MS&L
• Kinross + Render Ltd
• Bright Consultancy, The
• Eperon Consulting Limited
• Hanover
• Kaizo
• Red Lorry Yellow Lorry
• Eulogy!
• Cirkle Communications Ltd
• piranhaKid
• Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide
• Resonate - OBSERVER MEMBER
• Escapade
• Inferno
• Text 100 Ltd
• Publicasity
• Native Instinct
• LawsonClarke Ltd
• Manning Selvage and Lee Ltd
• Carrot Communications Ltd
• Phipps PR
• Chrome Consulting Ltd
• Haygarth
• Barrett Dixon Bell Ltd
• Profile Plus
• Euro RSCG Biss Lancaster
• Redhead PR
• Page Relations
• Lansons Communications
• Montpellier Marketing Communications Group
• Pleon
• RED Consultancy, The
• Revolver Communications
• AxiCom
• Jackie Cooper PR
• Grayling
• College Hill
• Kysen PR Ltd
• Lexis Public Relations Ltd
• Clear Communications LTD
• Salt
• Marketforce Communications
• Twelve Consultancy
• Green Energy Group
• Connect PR Limited
• Mainland PR
• Chameleon PR Ltd
• Republic PR
• Threepipe Communications
• Westbury Communications Ltd
• AUGUST.ONE
• Armadillo
• Good Relations
• Waggener Edstrom Worldwide
• Chocolate Communications
• Parker, Wayne & Kent
• Eloqui Public Relations
• Brave PR
• Haslimann Taylor
• Mango Marketing
• Porter Novelli
• The PR Shop Ltd
• Consolidated
• Early Doors
• Clareville Communications
• Sonus PR
• Kilpatrick PR Ltd
• Kavanagh Communications
• Richmond Towers Communications Ltd
• Clarion Communications
• Portland PR
• Fourth Day Ltd
• Chatsworth Communications
• Unity
• Broadgate
• Ketchum
• Edelman

To claim your prize, all you have to do is email us at support@distilled.co.uk telling us how you find out about the link and we will set you up with a free month’s trial of an agency account and if you are in the first 20 to reply, we will also send you a bottle of champagne^*.

Reputation Monitor is also available in smaller accounts designed at brands who want to monitor what is being said about them. Why not sign up to a pro account and monitor what is being said about your competitors at the same time? We also offer a free months trial of an individual account.

^* - The champagne offer is only open to the first 20 people to respond and can only be posted to an address in the UK.

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We are primarily an seo company - and most of what we write about here on the Distilled blog is related to search in one way or another.

One of our largest areas of interest is reputation monitoring and reputation management and much of our time is spent thinking and writing about reputations:

• Reputation wars: McDonalds vs Burger King
• top 10 tips for managing your online reputation

Most of our posts will be in article format - though I’m sure we’ll throw in some shorter and more flippant posts.

What not to expect

We are not a news site. There are already a glut of SEO news sites, and to be honest, if you read Search Engine Land you’ll hear all the significant news, and we get most of our analysis, comment and discussion from SEOmoz and Marketing Pilgrim. (If you want to see an up-to-date list of what I’m reading, you can check out my public bloglines blogroll - though note that I probably have a few thousand unread posts in there!).

So if it’s not news…?

We think the areas where we can be most interesting and useful are in writing articles about (mainly search-related) issues we come across in our day-to-day work, in-depth analysis pieces where we try to put our maths and computer-science backgrounds to some kind of use and also in being a (relatively) lone voice in the search world agitating for more reputation monitoring and reputation management.

I hope you enjoy reading and even participate from time to time in the comments. Please feel free to drop me a line any time: will@distilled.co.uk.

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So who are these Distilled guys anyway?

Distilled is a small SEO and web design company based in London, UK. Duncan Morris and I (Will Critchlow) started the company a little over two years ago from Duncan’s front room. We are now based in the crypt of St. John’s Church right outside Waterloo station in the heart of London.

Initially, we focussed far more on building websites for our clients than on the Internet marketing side of our business, but we have always been very interested in the various ways to make money online. SEO and PPC management are by far the fastest growing areas of our business and we are hugely enjoying helping our clients build their businesses.

As an example, some people we are currently working with include:

• Sofa.com – a UK-based online sofa retailer
• Borthwick Castle - a Scottish castle and wedding venue
• RST - a security training company

For a while, the team was just Duncan and I, but last summer, we also started working with Michael Campbell. In February, our account manager, Emily Wright started and now our team is growing again with the addition of Tom Critchlow (my brother) as head of search marketing.

As well as building websites and doing all forms of internet marketing for our clients, we are also very interested in online reputation monitoring and online reputation management. Reputation monitor is our tool to help companies and brands monitor their online reputation – an area where we see significant growth coming over the next few months.

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