…but no more than mail order companies…

The Telegraph reports that the OFT (Office of Fair Trading) says most online businesses don’t know the law as it relates to consumers (for example, did you know that in the UK, consumers have an unconditional legal right to return anything they buy at a distance and can’t see before buying for any reason? Or that you are legally obliged to provide an email address for customers to contact you easily?

Most of the laws are the kind of thing that the market would steer good retailers towards providing - solid terms and conditions, great returns policies, easily contactable - but not all businesses want to offer the best possible experience to their customers.

I liked the angle the journalist, Richard Tyler, took with the OFT spokesman, but I would have liked to see him take them to task a little more about the fact that there isn’t really a lot of news content in this story beyond the fact that some Government department has done a study. He first got an admission that the growth in complaints about this issue were:

rising in line with the growth of internet shopping and were similar in proportion to the mail order sector

In other words, nothing to see here, move along. Businesses break rules and the Internet doesn’t cause more businesses to see what they can get away with.

This was followed with a direct quote from the OFT director Robin Finer:

“We have found that businesses are not complying with the law. What we haven’t found in this study is that there’s significant consumer detriment”

In other words, not only did they not find any real change in the number of businesses breaking the law, but they also found that it was no big deal, as far as consumers were concerned. So why the PR? (The article was reported prominently in the ‘enterprise’ (i.e. small business) section of the Telegraph). It couldn’t just be a Government department trying to justify its existence could it?

The law, SEO and reputation management

No, I’m not going to go into the legalities of various SEO and reputation management tactics, but rather, as hinted above, the kinds of laws that the OFT is talking about in this study are the kind of thing that genuine companies should be upholding anyway. Not out of fear of prosecution but because it will be good for their reputation and SEO.

You can differentiate yourself from your competitors through great customer care and this can make a huge difference to the way you are talked about online. If you treat your customers badly, you’ll end up with search engine results for your name that look like this: dvdsoon.com with a page full of results telling people not to buy from your company. Their approach to customer care appears to have resulted in them taking down the website.

We came across an article in the Wall Street Journal via Reputation Advisor.

It’s a shame the journalist didn’t speak to some of the more responsible elements of the reputation management industry while writing the article. It comes across as a somewhat shady practice because the tactics of the companies featured are not necessarily best-practice. The analysis at Reputation Advisor is spot-on in terms of pointing out that these companies are dealing with individuals rather than companies. A tie-in to corporate reputation management services would have been interesting, I think.

I guess it’s a good thing that online reputation issues are starting to creep into mainstream publications, but (just as with SEO), there is a lot of work to do in order to reassure readers of the honest intentions of the majority of an industry that contains some shady characters.

Writing in the FT, Baroness Kingsmill (former deputy chairman of the Competition Commission) calls for an inquiry into Google’s pseudo-monopoly (I found this via searchengineland).

She positions it as a small-business issue, saying:

by far the largest and most vulnerable group are the millions of small companies with niche products and a geographically dispersed customer base that rely entirely on online adverts to reach customers.

I would agree with this, and I think that Google’s dominance of PPC advertising does pose a serious risk to a lot of online businesses (particularly in the UK where the other search engines have much lower market shares than the US). I think, however, that there is some confusion between the paid- and natural-search markets. The Baroness goes on to say:

For most of these companies, there is no viable alternative advertising mechanism. Because these organisations are so readily identifiable, they are prone to price discrimination by a dominant broker.

This statement is true; these companies have little choice in who supplies them with PPC advertising. There is a parallel with the ruling on mobile phone competition here: it was ruled that mobile operators have significant market power because you do not have a choice of who ‘terminates’ your mobile phone call. While you can choose which operator you use, you can’t choose your friends’ mobile operators, which means that each operator can set higher rates for inbound calls to their network than they should be able to and people will (to some degree) be forced to pay them because they want to speak to their friends.

The parallel with search is that while Google’s near-monopoly of search queries isn’t a problem for searchers (they can choose another search engine as easily as typing w w w . y a h o o . c o . u k into their address bar), advertisers have no choice but to advertise on the dominant platform if they wish to reach those users.

However, the article goes on to claim:

This power was demonstrated when one website saw its traffic slump by 70 per cent after Google removed its site from the search index in March 2006.

…and this is where I disagree with the Baroness.

This is surely natural search? ‘removed… from the search index’ doesn’t sound like a banned advertiser - it sounds to me like someone was caught not obeying Google’s webmaster guidelines and removed from the natural listings. Now, while I’m sure they did see a huge slump in traffic, that’s very different to using market power to control pricing in advertising.

There is a whole other debate about the power Google can wield against those who disobey its guidelines (or live in that ‘grey area’ near the edge), but I don’t think it’s a monopolistic argument - it applies just as much to all the search engines. What right do companies like Google have to determine who they list in their search results? To me, the answer is pretty clear - they can list who they like. If they allow themselves to become corrupted, they will gradually die, and be overtaken by a better solution.

I haven’t been able yet to contact the author of the article. If anyone knows how I can get in touch with Baroness Kingsmill, please let me know!

To be clear, I don’t necessarily disagree with the conclusion that an inquiry would help small businesses, just that I feel whenever we are talking about issues as large as this, our thinking should be as clear as possible.

While toiling away trying to unlock the secrets of linkbait it occurred to me that there’s something missing from 90% of linkbait attempts (figure plucked from thin air). It might not stop them from being popular, they may well still gain some links but they will be missing out on becoming truly successful.

If you’re writing content tying to figure out how to bridge the gap between your cool idea and your target audience then you’ve probably gone about things wrong. You are missing the yeti of linkbait, the missing link between content and links. The missing link is NEED, or DESIRE. It’s not good enough to simply create content which is amusing or interesting (although this often does play well) you need to create content which your audience is actively looking for, searching for and desperate to find.

The concept itself is really quite simple:

Research the question before you provide an answer

The world wide web is a huge place, it’s got so much information out there that you’d think every possible question had been answered. Well you’d be wrong, that’s why there’s still room for questions, questions and more questions.

These resources are a goldmine when doing research because they provide a snapshot of what questions your audience is asking. What are they struggling with? What are the common questions? Is there one topic which is regularly mis-understood? By digging around (that’s digging in the usual sense, not ‘digg’ing around) in these sites you can get a good picture of what people are looking for. If 10 people have asked a similar question then you can be sure that there’s a significant chunk of your market which want to know the answer to that question too, not just those 10 people.

The basic premise here is that if you discover what content people are already looking for then it becomes much easier to provide them with content that they will love. Discover their NEED and you’ll be able to create content which is popular, useful and linked to.

Tips & Refinement

Ok, once you’re comfortable with these ideas here’s a few extra pointers:

• Don’t always look for un-answered questions, how often do you see answers which are very informative but quote 30 different sites? How about summarising all of the information in one easy to read article?

• In a similar way to above Wikipedia can be a good place to look as well. Look for topics which only have short or inaccurate pieces on them, these often indicate a gap in the market which you can move into.

• Answering a need doesn’t always have to be answering a question, sometimes it’s providing a product or service as well. Look for ‘how do I….’ questions as well.

Note: If you don’t understand the title then you’re probably not a hardcore geek (all fanmail to the usual address please!). You can read more about the reference here (NSFW - offensive language). For those of you who do get the reference, sorry there weren’t more pictures of cats (all SFW). And just a big list of cats (also SFW) for good measure.

Google are now incorporating your personal search and click history into the display of adverts. You are likely to see this manifest itself as your ad disappearing when you carry out your searches. If you do the search a lot and never click on your own advert (sensible behaviour!) they will stop showing you the advert, figuring that it’s obviously not relevant to you.

I just got off the phone with Google AdWords support after seeing this happen on one of our client accounts.

We are keeping a close eye on this account because we have just taken over the management of it and have made some changes to the account including adding quite a few negative keywords (since they do a fair bit of broad matching). They have consistently been appearing very high up for their highest-traffic search (very often in the highlighted box at the top of the search results). Today, despite their CTR having improved on the historic levels because of our negative keywords and an improved advert, they were nowhere to be seen…. Most of the time. Every so often, they would appear - exactly the kind of behaviour you would expect if their budget were too low compared to their CPC (but that isn’t the problem - the budget is set at more than double what they have spent on recent days).

I was a bit stumped (especially because the preview tool showed them appearing).

When I spoke to the account manager at AdWords, she told us that there has been a change to the algorithm to take into account your history with respect to the particular ad. Apparently this change has only come in the last few days - and I haven’t seen any mention of it (have I missed something?). I can’t see it on the official blog.

The official advice is to trust your stats and reports and to use the preview tool as that is what everyone else sees. I’m worried though, that if they don’t publicise this a little bit, advertisers are going to want to increase their bids figuring that they aren’t paying enough and their keyword must have become more competitive (this is what our client wanted to do). I think Google should let people know about this kind of change so that advertisers aren’t shocked when they see it happen.

The logical extension of this behaviour, by the way, is to stop showing you any ads if your history shows you don’t click on them - you’re obviously not interested! I can’t imagine they’re going to go there though…

[Update: Andy found a mention of a trial of this last year. The AdWords rep I spoke to said it was a recent change so it seems like they have just turned it on.]

We’ve just come across an article from Joost about making your reputation management look natural. It’s a good point and one that we thought was worth summarising here:

The essential point is that someone doing a search for a company or brand is probably looking for one of two things:

1. the company itself
2. reviews

If they are looking for reviews, and you have aggressively managed the first page of Google results to push all reviews below the results you own, then the second category of searcher is going to continue looking until they find the reviews they are looking for.

The suggestion from Joost is therefore to make sure that your reputation management strategy involves boosting some positive reviews up the results. You want these to be natural, good reviews that people have written about your company. Go looking in the mid-reaches of the rankings for the search you are trying to target (pages 2-5 on Google for example) and water them with some link-love to boost them up among your owned results.

Having positive reviews scattered in around the results you own makes it more likely that people will trust you and go ahead and buy from you.

The warning that goes with this is that you won’t generally have any control over the content of these sites, so once you have got them ranking well, you are at the mercy of people who come along after that to submit reviews. For this reason, you may consider that positive articles are a better bet as targets for this strategy than review websites where multiple people submit reviews and averages etc. are reported.

I did a search for ‘mars bar’ while doing some research for a reporter the other day and I noticed that the second result at Google is wikipedia, with a 2nd, indented result about deep fried mars bars (also at wikipedia).

I think this poses interesting questions from a reputation management perspective. The main wikipedia page is not a dreadful result to have appear high up for a company but the indented result is probably not the message that the company would like to project. Especially at a time when all confectionery manufacturers are nervous because of the changing advertising regulations.

Without the main result on wikipedia, the indented result would not rank anywhere significant for this search, and I think it is a little bit of a flaw in the current Google algorithm that it gives quite so much additional weight to other pages on a domain that has one piece of highly relevant content. While it would probably be correct to provide an indented result on the main Mars website about the Mars Bar, I don’t think most people who search for ‘mars bar’ are interested in finding out about deep-fried mars bars!

In general, the domain weighting present in the current Google algorithm causes good results, but on a site like wikipedia, where the relevance of one page is utterly unrelated to that of another, I don’t think it is a particularly appropriate result.

So what could they do about it?

By creating a highly relevant page on the mars.com domain about mars bars (there may be one, but I can’t find it), they should be able to get their own indented result for www.mars.com/marsbar (or wherever they put it).

While wikipedia is a very powerful website, a large multi-national company like Mars should be able to manage their reputation significantly better than they currently are - and claim a significant proportion of the first page of results for their primary brand. Doing this would mean that even if wikipedia continued to benefit from an indented result (which I think is unlikely if they pushed it down the rankings, because I don’t think the 2nd page is actually that relevant to the search), Mars would own more results above it and hence fewer visitors would see the wikipedia page about deep frying their product.

We’ve written before about the how to improve your online reputation as well as what we called aggressive reputation management where you attempt to rank for your competitors’ brands.

There is another use for reputation monitoring, however, which is to gain competitive intelligence.

What are your competitors doing?

Depending on the industry you are operating in, you will care about your competitors’ movements to different degrees. In some FMCG (Fast Moving Consumer Goods) markets, the big players expend a huge amount of effort in monitoring every move made in the marketplace - who is running a discount, what promotions are on offer, where you can buy something cheapest etc.

You can see examples of this in action in your local supermarket - where you will often see signs telling you that something has been price-checked against a competitor this week, or that a particular offer is x% cheaper than the store down the road.

We saw an example of this recently when a Waitrose (quality, though pricy supermarket) opened just opposite a Sainsbury’s in our neighbourhood. The Sainsbury’s was quite established and had a reasonably loyal customer-base, but nonetheless, the arrival of Waitrose to a neighbourhood must have given them pause to consider the possibility that their highest-spending, least price-sensitive customers might desert them to the quality newcomer.

As part of their launch strategy, Waitrose sent discount vouchers to all local households (£5 off when you spend £50, that kind of thing). This seemed like a nice idea and, indeed, I stuffed the vouchers in my pocket when I next went shopping, thinking that I might at least go and have a look. When I arrived, I was confronted by a large banner outside the Sainsbury’s saying “We are accepting Waitrose vouchers”. In my case at least (and judging by the overheard conversations in the store) it was a good tactic - I scrapped my plan to go into Waitrose and instead did my shopping as usual and claimed my discount.

It’s a small example - and in the ‘real world’ away from the Internet, I don’t imagine there was any sophisticated monitoring going on to alert Sainsbury’s to their competitor’s tactic, but the Internet is a big place, and you are unlikely to find out about your competitors’ movements (at least until too late) unless you actively monitor them.

A funny spoof of this can be found in some competitive advertising.

Why not consider adding your main competitors into your normal day-to-day monitoring?

Who’s talking about your competitors and what are they saying?

The other reason you might want to add your competitors and their brands to your monitoring routine is that it might benefit you to know what is being said about them online (in the same way that you want to track your own buzz).

There are two scenarios here:

1. your competitor starts getting really positive buzz for something they are doing; can you benefit from it? Can you hijack the message? Can you do some clever PR that makes people think you thought of it in the first place? If it’s only just beginning to get the buzz, you might be able to associate your brand with it
2. people start bad-mouthing one of your competitors for a screw-up or oversight; you certainly want to avoid falling into the same trap, and potentially might be able to exploit the situation to your advantage - if it’s serious enough and you don’t think they’ll have it fixed any time soon, it could go into your comparative advertising if you are careful.

Comparative advertising rules

As an aside, I was interested to find the rules on comparative advertising (i.e. comparing your product to a competitor’s) in the UK while researching this post. Out-law.com tells us that comparisons are allowed in adverts provided:

• They are not misleading;
• They compare goods or services meeting the same needs or intended for the same purpose;
• They objectively compare one or more material, relevant, verifiable and representative feature which may include price;
• They do not create confusion in the market place between the advertiser and the competitor or between the advertiser’s trade marks, trade names, other distinguishing marks, or his goods and services, and those of a competitor;
• They do not discredit or denigrate the trade marks, trade names, other distinguishing marks, or the goods, services, activities or circumstances of a competitor;
• They do not take unfair advantage of the reputation of a trade mark, trade name other distinguishing mark or a competitor or of the designation of competing products;
• They do not present goods or services as imitations or replicas of goods or services bearing a protected trade name or trade mark; and
• Where a comparison relates to a special offer it must indicate clearly the date on which the offer closes, or, if appropriate, that the offer is subject to availability. If the offer has not yet begun it must also indicate the commencement date of the period during which the offer is valid.

Have you ever made a mistake that cost your company $30,000? I suspect for most of us the answer is no, or at least we think the answer is no. What if the mistake was something that you didn’t even notice was a mistake.

I was browsing through the power 150 top marketing blogs, and stumbled across the following blog from Mike Wagner about owning your brand. There are two recent posts that should make everyone out there sit up and listen. I would strongly recommend that you go read and inwardly digest them.

The first is a story entitled But you promised telling how not fulfilling a promise cost one hotel $30,000. The second is a follow up post and has some great comments about what people would do to rectify the situation.

What steps have YOU put in place to protect your brand?

If you enjoyed this post you can subscribe to the rss feed to hear more about how you can monitor and protect your brand online.

Recently I have been doing a lot of link-building for our clients, partly because it’s my job and partly because I just love SEO (all fanmail to my usual address please ) but mainly because I’ve recently come up with an alternative use for our very own Reputation Monitor which allows it to be used as a link building tool and it’s now delivering me sites relevant to my clients, ripe for linking, directly into my feed-reader! Awesome.

How you ask? Read on young link ninja (if you don’t know what a link ninja is then go read all about it here!)

Using Reputation Monitor to feed you links

The first step is to sign up to reputation monitor (sign up for a free trial now!). Insert the information about your client (simply their brand/company name and any identifiable products services they offer) and any possible negative matches that might exist. Enter their URL and slap a relevance score of 3 or 4 on there (I find 3 or 4 is best, though if you have more time on your hands you could set it lower). Here’s one I did earlier:

So How Does it Work Exactly?

Now that you have set this up for your site then go ahead and subscribe to the feed that it produces (I use Google Reader). Now, the new feeds will drop into your reader, showing you new stories about your site.

How is it useful for link building?

Well, they key thing to note here is that all these stories are relevant to your site however, not all of them link to your site! This is the crucial part. What you’re getting is a feed of ALL articles about your site, some of which link to your site and some of which don’t. All you have to do is browse through them, filter the ones which link to your site from the ones who don’t and contact all the ones who have written about your site but haven’t linked to you and ask them for a link. These links will be fantastically easy to get simply because they have already written about your site, they already have everything in place! (Note: I actually have a tweak in my settings which filters those that link to the site from those that don’t which provides me with a feed which is entirely made up of sites which don’t link. It’s not a public tool yet but if there’s enough demand for it………….)

Closing Thoughts

I’ve found this really useful and it’s providing me with a great list of sites to gain quality links from. Another use I wasn’t expecting is for helping viral marketing and linkbait. We recently managed a youtube video release for a client. The original story was hosted on the client’s site but the video was hosted on YouTube. One of the problems however with hosting the video on youtube is that people can pick up the story or link to the video without linking to your site. Using reputation monitor in the way outlined above notifies me whenever someone picks up the story or video but doesn’t link back to the main site, it’s then easy peasy to get them to link back to the original site.

For those looking for a more in depth discussion on the pros and cons of hosting a video on youtube vs hosting a video on your own site you should head on over to the SEOmoz premium section where Rand has a great post about that very thing. It’s well worth the money to sign up, he also has a document all about link-building techniques (no mention of reputation monitor though rand ……?!)

Anyone else come up with any nifty tricks with reputation monitor?