It’s been a while, but I am pleased to give you the next in the series of Reputation Wars, where we take two big brand names and compare their online reputation. I have changed the format from the last one, which was our comparison of McDonald’s and Burger King because this time we’re comparing two companies with generally better reputations.

Given the recent furore around the collaboration between British Airways and Virgin Atlantic in setting fuel charges I thought these two giants would make a good comparison.

Scoring a company’s online reputation.

To compare these brands we have looked at the first 20 results for a search for their name. I am comparing the results returned from Google.co.uk (since they are both British companies, and this is where the fine was handed out) and have taken screenshots so you can play along at home.

We looked at each of the results and put them into one of three categories. From a reputation perspective we think there are 3 types of results.

1. Those that the company in question owns
2. Those that the company doesn’t own but are either positive, neutral or not about the company
3. Those that the company doesn’t own but are negative.

Our favourite quote that we trot out on occasions such as these is:

7 out of 10 British consumers will not click through to a company’s website if search results contain negative comments about them. e-consultancy.com

From a reputation point of view what harms a brand is negative results in the search engines. When deciding whether a result is positive or negative we have used only the title and the snippet shown in the google results. This could mean that when you click through the page is negative but the result doesn’t show it that way.

From a pure reputation managment point of view, you should obviously care about negative results, but the idea of this analysis is just to look at the first impressions in the search results.

British Airways reputation

The results are as follows (click to enlarge)

1. www.britishairways.com – Owned
2. www.britishairways.com/travel/home/public/en_gb – Owned
3. www.baworldcargo.com – Owned
4. www.baworldcargo.com/tracking – Owned
5. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways – Positive
6. www.britishairwaysjobs.com – Owned
7. www.britishairways.no – Owned
8. www.baa.com – Positive
9. www.oneworld.com/ow/member-airlines/british-airways – Owned
10. www.baholidays.com/packages/ – Owned
11. www.foxnew.com/story/0,2933,291304,00.html – Negative
12. www.bavirtual.co.uk – Owned
13. ocaoimh.ie/tag/british-airways/ – Negative
14. www.bafc.co.uk – Owned
15. www.londoneye.com – Owned
16. www.britishairwaysrfc.co.uk – Owned
17. www.topix.net/com/bab – Positive
18. www.worldtracer.aero/filedsp/ba.htm – Positive
19. www.gbairways.com – Positive
20. www.flybmi.com/bmed – Positive

As you can see there are a couple of negative results here – but these have been pushed down to the second page. There are a couple of results on the first page that BA doesn’t control, but these are either not about them or they are positive.

To allow us to compare the two sets of results, we give them a score out of 50. This is based on the type of result (Positive, Negative, Owned) and how high up the results it appears (how influential (to the searcher) it is).

British Airways gets a fairly respectable score of 42 / 50.

Virgin Atlantic reputation

The Virgin results are as follows ( click thumnails to enlarge )

1. www.virgin-atlantic.com – Owned
2. www.virgin.com – Owned
3. virgin.com/uk/default.asp – Owned
4. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Atlantic_Airways – Positive
5. www.virginatlanticglobalflyer.com – Owned
6. www.flyingwithoutfear.info – Owned
7. www.v-flyer.com – Owned
8. www.virginatlanticflights.com – Owned
9. gs19.globalsuccessor.com/fe/tpl_virgin01.aps?newms=hm – Owned
10. www.airlinequality.com/Forum/vir_atl.htm – Positive
11. www.cheapflights.co.uk/airlines/virgin-atlantic.html – Positive
12. www.forbes.com/forbeslife…etc – Positive
13. www.forbes.com/forbeslife…etc – Positive
14. www.virginatlanticglobalflyer.com/MissionControl/Tracking/ – Owned
15. farechase.yahoo.com/airlines/virgin_atlantic-214281 – Positive
16. www.engaget.com/2007/01/17…etc – Positive
17. www.virginmobile.co.za/…etc – Owned
18. www.cheapflights.com/airlines/virginatlantic.html – Positive
19. www.fastcompany.com/…etc – Positive
20. www.usatoday.com/…etc – Negative

Virgin continue the trend we saw above by owning most of the first page of results. On to the second page there is a slightly different story. Virgin owns less of the second page results but you have to go all the way to the 20th result before the first negative result is found.

Our calculation gives Virgin a score of 44 / 50

Comparing the online reputation with the actual reputation

To make things a bit more fair, we are also interested in the actual reputation of the companies we are looking at. This is to ensure that a company that has hidden any negative press is still found out. It is interesting to us to find companies with bad reputations that have been covered up with some good reputation management.

To give a very rough score for how well a company is liked we compare the number of results for “I love brand name” with “I hate brand name”. We converted this ratio into a score out of 50.

The results

“I love British Airways” – 436 results “I hate British Airways” – 172 results

Which gives British Airways a score of 36 / 50

“I love Virgin Atlantic” – 597 results “I hate Virgin Atlantic” – 3 results

Virgin Atlantic end up with a fantastic (49.75 rounded up to) 50 / 50

The Reputation Wars winner is…

Winning in both our tests Virgin Atlantic has a better online reputation than British Airways, and takes this competition with a final score of:

British Airways comes (a not particularly close) second with a final score of:

…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

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?