After all, countries already hire PR firms to raise their profile abroad. The Russian government hired U.S.-based PR agency Ketchum in 2006 to spruce up its image in the West for the remainder of its G8 presidency. They indicate that they were also working on the Internet.

Russia is fairly thinly resourced on the communications side, so they need a whole range of support: advice on how the Western media operates, logistical support, technical support, drafting materials, web materials, and things like that.

There’s certainly a lot of work to do for the team handling French online reputation. Not only this latest event but looks like they have barely touched the ‘French cowards‘ SERPs.

Technorati Tags: French, Henry Thierry, ORM, WorldCup

WhosTalkin.com is a social media search tool that allows users to search for conversations surrounding the topics that they care about most. Whether it be your favorite sport, favorite food, celebrity, or your company’s brand name; Whostalkin.com can help you join in on the conversations that you care about most.

Joe Hall asked me to beta test the system and aside from a few minor issues my first impressions are very positive.

The Interface and Controls

Top marks for making this simple and intuitive. Steve Krug would approve. My first choices are limited to a single search box, which gathers results from all their sources.

You can then drill down results by each source, listed on the left. These range from Twitter, Technorati to Bloglines and YouTube. Simple enough. My only complaint here would be the need to operate two scrollbars, one for the menu and another for the results. Even with the site at full screen, the design is limited by a fixed height. It would be good if scrolling could be limited to one controller only.

The Results

A quick vanity search on “Nick Wilsdon” produced 210 results. Although I monitor this search in Google Alerts, there were several new results for me here. To be fair to Google Alerts, my free account only returns results to a certain depth.

WhosTalkin should have an advantage over GoogleAlerts by querying the sites direct, but this advantage will depend entirely on the quality of each API. If they manage to provide a more comprehensive picture without charging, it will do very well. Clearly this could become another useful tool for ORM monitoring.

Other Features

The WhosTalkin team are considering or already working on a range of paid subscription services to compliment the free system. On their list are plugins for WordPress, iGoogle and Firefox. The must-have function for me is RSS feeds for selected searches.

With a hat tip towards my industry collegue Brian Carter, adding feeds from WhosTalkin.com and Google Alerts into your iGoogle desktop would make an excellent D.I.Y. monitoring tool.

Overall this is an excellent mash-up and will prove useful to anyone monitoring their online reputation. There’s still room in the market for ORM search engines, provided they return better results than their competitors. WhosTalkin.com seems to be succeeding on this point.

You can follow the progress of WhosTalkin on their blog. They don’t have a launch date at the moment, beyond “very soon” but Joe is open to beta test requests on the system.

Technorati Tags: ORM, Reputation Management, Search Engines, Social Search, WhosTalkin

1. Following other accounts in order to gain attention to your account or links

2. Creating a series of accounts in order to promote the same thing

3. Sending large numbers of @reply messages that are not genuine replies

4. Creating updates in order to show up in search results

5. Disguising links (i.e. writing about one thing but linking to another)

6. If a large number of users have blocked you (relative to those following you)

These guidelines are in addition to their standard TOS clauses.

I don’t think these will impact too many ‘real’ users but there maybe some implications. Point 3 would seem to kill off any automated response scripts for example. Some of these new guidelines do seem a little vague from my perspective, for example #4 would seem hard to prove and most Twitter users have probably been guilty of #1 at some time. What do you think?

Considering that people/companies invest a large amount of time and therefore cost into establishing their Twitter accounts, you would hope the moderators apply these rules with account history and context in mind.

Update 01.09.08: Is this the End of Keyword Marketing on Twitter?

A tweet by Scottclark just got me thinking that #3 maybe the one to watch here. This guideline could potentially apply to keyword marketing on Twitter. Companies have caught onto using Twitter as a source of potential customers, with operators using free tools such as search.twitter.com or http://tweetbeep.com/ to alert them when certain keywords are mentioned. They then @reply the user with their marketing message or offer of support.

For example, you mention you are looking for an image and a certain image search engine will send you a note. Or less helpfully, as Scott points out, there are now Indian outsourcing companies jumping on mentions of programming languages.

You also have companies replying ORM style to mentions of their name or products. If you comment about Firefox you can expect a fairly instant response from their support team.

This adds a new dimension to the earlier comments in the Twitter announcement about companies creating “opt-in relationships”. Where do they draw the line here?

Hat tip Paul Silver

Technorati Tags: Microblogging, Twitter

The only thing they were good at was stealing my money. The scammed me with a guarantee, took my money and only achieved minor results in Yahoo and MSN, never even got any of the 60 keywords within the first 100 pages of Google! I think they even got me banned from Google for three months for using black hat techniques.

The results were poor and the pricing is high. I would recommend them only to the largest search spenders.

In summary, [Company] misrepresented their expertise, their technology, and showed no integrity as they breached their contract, refunding nothing to us. I strongly warn anyone and everyone to avoid spending any resources with this organization. Take your money and burn it. You’ll get more satisfaction from that experience than with working with [Company].

Part of me applauds this effort. Everybody knows there are companies who fail to deliver for clients. If this site can stop businesses falling into this trap it could raise the standard and public perception of the entire industry.

However there are some problems with the model.. First users are allowed to comment anonymously. This could lead to malicious attacks by competitors. Second, it seems unfair not to offer companies a way of replying to the critics. Without this feature, they can’t counter any bad publicy or address the issues presented by the reviewer. In fairness to SEMCompare though, their representative, Boris Mordkovich has publicly agreed to address these issues.

My final gripe though, is the way the pages have been optimised. SEMCompare has placed the company name in the title, meta description and the leading H1 tag on each page. It’s hard not to see these review pages ranking for companies who have been slack in protecting their company SERPs. If that sounds like you, I’d start building those company web profiles fast.

As for us, we only have a few select clients, and the ones we have would hopefully be more sensible than to identify themselves in public. In this age of negative SEO, it isn’t clever to attract the scrutiny of competitors or certain search engine employees. This site isn’t exactly going to help keep you under the radar. If you’re about to publish your URL as a site actively optimising, you better be very sure you don’t have any skeletons or say…paid links in your closet.

If SEMCompare decide to publish reviewer details I anticipate a sharp slow down in posts. Another factor maybe the company’s current relationship with that vendor. If they refuse, they will face lawsuits from angry SEM agencies, determined prove the claims are false. You have to hope they are making money from such a hot potato.

Although this story has been published in various industry haunts, we’ll only see the true reaction when these reviews appear in the SERPs. If I were Andy Beal, I’d be jumping on the opportunity by offering all companies reviewed a free copy of his Trackur software. After all, if Danny Sullivan’s Sphinn introduced most of the industry to social media, SEMCompare may be able to pull the same trick with reputation management.

NB: The more observant among you will notice that I’ve chosen not to link to the new review site. First I want to see what direction they take the site in and if the points above are addressed.

Technorati Tags: Andy Beal, Boris Mordkovich, Danny Sullivan, Reputation Management, Sphinn, Trackur

1. The easy way first

It’s always worth trying the direct approach and asking for the site owner to remove the material. If the content is user generated, for example in forums then the site owner may be inclined to help. If you need to compromise then ask that your company name and identifying information be removed or blanked out.

2. Neutralize the accusations

If you can’t remove the content then it’s a good move to deal with the issue publicly. Even if these results move down the listings potential customers may stumble upon these comments. A company that addresses issues responsibly can often come out with a positive spin. Take a while to compose your replies, write professionally and read up on the Cluetrain Manifesto. You’re looking to put a line under the incident not fan the fires.

3. Take up the black arts

According to Google’s guidelines there is nothing a competitor can do to hurt your rankings. Well a few people would disagree with that. Research the wrong kind of links, long discredited linking schemes, bad neighbourhoods and google bowling. However this strategy is negative, time is more valuably spent in areas which build up your profile and business.

4. Threaten them

This is a very risky strategy. There’s a real possibility this will fan the flames, creating even more content you need to deal with. I would recommend you think twice before sending legal threats to popular bloggers. However in some cases the site owner may decide it’s not worth the trouble and remove the material. Success in this strategy will depend on a lot on the target and how professionally you approach this.

5. Piggyback trusted sites

The idea behind this strategy is to place content onto other well ranked sites. If you pick wisely your content can be listed fast and placed high up the listings. For example business forums let you register as a company and place your profile there. You can register on social sites. You can even look at creating Wikipedia, Google Knol, HubPages or Squidoo pages. Although Wikipedia is the ultimate prize here, the company will need to be noteworthy enough.

Consider placing your company job listing sites online or make some up for this purpose. Some vacancy sites are quite powerful within the SERPs.

6. Release a freebie

Get a tool made or give away some free software. Web based stuff works but a free download can take advantage of the PAD system for effortless distribution. More on this technique here.

Find a suitable application for your business. For example a paintball company might want a mobile phone application which lets users calculate the pressure settings on their guns, i.e. a paintball calculator they can use on site. To get extra mileage out of this plan think up something useful for your users that will increase your brand.

7. Create new sites

This is a good strategy but you must wait for the new sites to rank. However the major advantage of this strategy is that you end up with direct control over the content. To speed things up it maybe wise to look at buying old domains through auction or using sub-domains.

Buy domains containing the keywords you are protecting, for example, your name or that of your company. Google will see these as more relevant for that term and with relatively little effort, you can rank these high in the SERPs above other comments.

Subdomains are also useful for this but be aware that Google will rarely show more than 3 results from your site for any one query (main site plus 2 subdomains).

8. Link building

Paid links or unpaid but if the former then make sure you’re doing it under the radar. Remember to make the links related to your industry as the last thing you want to do here is damage your own ranking.

This isn’t only about building links to your own site(s), you can build links to other material that mentions your company and push that up the rankings (see #5).

Do vary the linking text though if you are directing most of the links yourself. As Todd suggests, not more than 80% identical anchor text.

9. Press releases and articles

Try and create some noteworthy press releases and pay well for the maximum distribution. Sites such as PRWeb and PRLeap can help here. Sites such as EzineArticles or GoArticles will let you syndicate articles that reference your company.

Don’t risk duplicate content penalties by publishing the same material on your site. To flash back to point 8, you can also build links to this content.

10. Linkbait

Although I’ve touched on some linkbaiting techniques, this strategy deserves a category of its own. Successful linkbait ideas can generate a huge number of inbound links and references on other sites. If you can’t think up your own ideas then maybe it’s time to hire Andy, Rand or Aaron.

Conclusion

The main goal here is to clear the first three pages of search engine results. As you may have noticed reading this list many of these techniques go beyond reputation management and help your business. Reputation management techniques often compliment your long term link building strategy. If these approaches are well thought out you will come out of the other side of an attack stronger than before.

The final points to consider are that this work is better done preemptively. If you have the sites and rankings in place before an attack they may not even appear. Check the results on your company name and make sure you have strong coverage there.

Take out automatic email alerts on search engine results on your company name and any other important keywords. This can be done for free at Google or GoogleAlerts. Early responses to complaints can stop the issue before it becomes a problem.

Thanks for reading. If you have any other reputation management techniques then please share.

Technorati Tags: Reputation Management