The majority of UK PR companies are failing to identify potential negative blog posts, and aren’t able to protect their online reputation and brand.

A study carried out by Distilled - the creators of Reputation Monitor, a media monitoring tool, found that only 2 of the 100 PR companies found a mention of their company on the Distilled Blog.

“A great brand can take months, if not years, and millions of dollars to build. It should be the thing you hold most precious. Don’t let even one negative blog comment go unnoticed.” warns Andy Beal - one of the world’s most respected online marketing experts.

“What starts as a ripple in a small pond of discontent, can quickly become a tidal-wave of negative consumer sentiment, unless your company is able to quickly identify potential negative blog posts and move quickly to protect its online reputation and brand” Beal said.

Despite prizes worth over £200 (champagne, a no obligation trial of reputation monitor, and an offer to donate to charity) only two of the 100 companies listed replied to the offer. Duncan Morris from Distilled said “To be honest we weren’t surprised at the lack of response. Online media monitoring is just taking off in America, and what we often see in the online world is that the UK can be years behind America.”

If these PR companies aren’t monitoring the online media on their own behalf, are they doing it for their clients? The very nature of a PR campaign is to generate mentions of a company. These days it is increasingly likely that these mentions will be online, and with the best will in the world some of these mentions could be negative.

“Not only is it a wasted opportunity to add an extra service to their clients, but it could prove costly to their brands. Blogs and other sources of user generated content have taken off to the extent that failing to track what is being said online could destroy the reputation of a brand. Every company should be tracking their online reputation” said Morris.

Distilled, formed in 2005 by Will Critchlow and Duncan Morris, specialises in helping companies get more business from their websites, through a combination of website design, development and search engine marketing. They regularly write on the topic of reputation monitoring on their blog.

You can read this release in full on the Distilled website, where you can also signup for a free trial of reputation monitor.

In the course of doing some research into the online presence of UK football clubs (soccer, if you’re reading in the US), I discovered that a huge number of them are based on a platform provided by a company called Premium TV. For some of the larger clubs, e.g. Chelsea it is not immediately obvious, but for most of their football clients, they host the website on a sub-domain of their own site:

• Reading
• Portsmouth
• Newcastle United

etc.

Having discovered this, I obviously wanted to know a bit more about the company behind all these sites, so I first did a Google search for Premium TV before realising that Pay-Per-View is often called Premium TV so I couldn’t get the results I wanted about just the company so I did a search for premiumtv. This is where I found the best reputation management I have ever seen. Because of their relationship with so many large clubs (who have 301′d powerful domains to their sub-domains), you have to look to the ninth page of Google search results before finding a single result not controlled by the company (and that is a job advert!).

The image above shows part of the eighth page of Google search results for their company name. I expected them to have a lot of high up results, but was surprised by the extent of their dominance - it’s not as if these football club homepages have premiumtv in their titles or in the text on the page. It appears to have been achieved purely by domain weight, exact match on the domain and the fact that many of the inbound links use the URL in the anchor text.

There is a similar story if you try to look for news about them, or if you restrict your search to specific news websites - the BBC and the FT for example mention football clubs’ websites rather than talking about the company itself.

Intrigued about how this came about, I called their press department and was told that they:

“have a relationship with the football leagues but have negotiated individual deals with the clubs.”

It appears that they inherited the rights from an earlier deal distributing digital rights to UK football matches. Their stranglehold on the market is quite astonishing - their press office confirmed that they have:

“about 14 of the premiership clubs and most of the Championship and Conference clubs”

An interesting side-effect of this is that Alexa can’t distinguish between any of these clubs (or between the clubs and the company itself). All the usual caveats against using Alexa for SEO apply, but it should in theory have been interesting in this market, since the websites are in the same industry so we shouldn’t see the same kind of skew you get comparing sites across different sectors.