September 26, 2010
Online Reputation Management, Twitter, Website Strategy
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For £30 a year you can have a .co domain name.
Does that sound expensive? If so, read on …
Over a year ago, the Custwin email newsletter encouraged people to grab available Twitter names while they were still available. That message clearly didn’t get out to enough people and since then I’ve seen many examples of companies who can’t tweet as their company name because someone else (probably competitors in many cases) have snapped them up.
Going back much further there was a land grab on standard domain names, although the range of names available was obviously much bigger than the limitations of Twitter names. But the principle was the same – grab good domain names while they’re available.
So along comes the .co domains you can buy, and with it a heftier price tag at £30 per year. Let’s look at a few reasons why you may think it’s worth buying a good .co name while you still have the opportunity …
- You want to ensure that competitors don’t trade off your name in the future. So, if your company is called Widgets for Midgets and you already have www.widgetsformidgets.co.uk and www.widgetsformidgets.com then you may feel quite safe. But what if the widgets market gets more competitive and someone comes along and decides to trade off your name by buying widgetsformidgets.co? They create a nicer looking website, do their SEO and other marketing better, and suddenly they’re pulling in a load of traffic that should really be yours. If you’ve not protected your company name in any way then there’s nothing you can do to stop them.
- You have a crystal ball. You don’t quite know why yet, but you feel that by having one or more .co domains, it could be beneficial in the future. Look at all those who bought numerous domains years ago, some gaining financially from then selling them on to buyers who needed them. All those Twitter names that people have registered and are keeping active – will they be of use some day? Who knows, and although there’s no guarantees, it’s just possible that .co domains could be beneficial in the future.
After all, stranger things have happened – who would have expected HMRC to write off up to £1.5bn of unpaid tax, as in the news this week?
- In a personal capacity, you may want to create a personal brand for yourself in the future. Many of the big names in business (and other spheres of influence) use their names as their brands. So, let’s say your name is Jane Smith and you’re going to create something fantastic and your name is going to be your brand (potentially). You may not have a clue how you’re going to create this personal brand, or when it’ll happen, but if you don’t grab your janesmith.co name right now then it’ll be gone by the time that you want to use it. And yes, quite surprisingly, at the time of writing this, www.janesmith.co IS available, as are so many other name variations.
Just in case you think “it couldn’t happen to me”, the two screen grabs below show that (as at 26th September), Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg, are up for grabs as .co names (although David Cameron has been snapped up, presumably by someone with a bit of foresight).
September 24, 2010
SEO
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You can tell it’s September because daddy long-legs are everywhere. They flit about aimlessly, bumping into everything, and generally seem a bit pointless. They live for a couple of weeks and their sole purpose is to mate and die within a few days.
They remind me of so many businesses who practice the art of what I call ‘daddy long-legs marketing’. That marketing could be online, offline, or a combination, but whatever form it takes, it’s short-lived and manic.
Here’s the scenario – a company has a lightbulb moment that it needs to do some marketing and they either do it themselves or get outside help in. The enthusiasm is high for a burst of a few weeks and then, like the daddy long-legs, it dies out. The reasons for it dying out are many but include other things that suddenly take priority and a fear that the marketing will get costly.
This is particularly relevant in the field of SEO because many companies have the perception that SEO is something that can be done in a blast and then it’ll work forever. This is not unlike the company that assumes that a new website launched will automatically appear up the top of Google, even though SEO was never a consideration in the development of the website.
SEO is not a quick fix – it’s an ongoing process that requires time and investment. It’s also not just about the pure driving of traffic to a website – it’s about ensuring that the traffic is analysed and ongoing website refinements are implemented. Other forms of marketing also require an ongoing process in order to be successful. Yes, some marketing activities do have set timescales but it’s rare to see marketing happen in one blast, like the daddy long-legs invasion during September.
So if you’re a company that is thinking about gaining more business and believe that marketing of some form is a possibility then who do you trust? I’d suggest that trust should be built in those service providers that encourage a longer-term relationship with you. For example, The Purple Edge (South East UK) are people I know well and trust to look at the longer term picture of marketing in general. Obviously, for web-related marketing, you’d expect me to say that Custwin are the service providers of choice.
It shouldn’t be underestimated how much marketing can cost, but spread over a longer period of time, with goals and expectations set, it gets fantastic results, whether that marketing is online, offline, or a combination of both. But daddy long-legs marketing is definitely not advised because when the initial flurry of activity dies off, so does the potential for success. And the end result is money and budget spent and the (mis) perception that ‘marketing doesn’t work’.
September 13, 2010
Website Strategy
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There are numerous websites that allow people to ask questions and gain answers from well-meaning respondents. Some of those sites are particularly well known (e.g. Yahoo! Answers) and many require you to log in to answer questions. Taking Yahoo! Answers as an example, you need to log in with a Yahoo id to respond to questions, but it’s feasible you may already have a Yahoo! login and it’s also feasible that you may create one if you think you may answer questions more regularly.
But so many of these types of Q&A sites get it wrong. An example I saw today was a site that I’d never heard about before. I noticed a tweet where someone was asking for advice about walking Hadrian’s Wall. I’ve done that walk, made most mistakes that could be made, and so probably have valuable input. However, there was a big barrier that prevented me from responding.
Following the tweet took me to the page http://oraculus.info/john-asked-i-need-some-advice-on-walking-hadrians-wall, within a site called Oraculus. The site, like so many others, exists so that the site owner can benefit from people who click on the Google adverts displayed – that’s fair enough but if the site wanted people to keep coming back (so that there’s more potential for them to click on the Google adverts and earn the site owner a few pennies), then they need to make the response to questions easier.
Let’s compare two scenarios. In both cases I’ve initially found the website by chance and I would want to answer the question …
Scenario 1 (current scenario)
I land on that page and see that I have to log in to post a comment. I’ve never seen this website before and I only want to answer one question, so why would I go to the effort of creating a profile, that I’ll probably never use again? I don’t bother answering the question and I also don’t bother clicking on any of the Google adverts.
Scenario 2 (the common sense scenario)
If I landed on that page and it allowed me to post a response, but without having to create a profile, then I’m highly likely to do that. The website owner can set it so that the responses don’t get automatically uploaded until they’ve been checked (therefore retaining quality). I then feel as if I’ve contributed useful information and if I see Oraculus appear again in search results and the subject interests me then I may go and look again, and possibly respond. The more times I go to the site, the more chances there are that I could click on one of the Google adverts, and so earn the website owner a small commission.
Looking through the older postings on that Oraculus website, the only interaction appears to be between the same people posting questions and one other person, who appears to be a moderator, and the answer is usually that they don’t know the answer and “can anyone else help?”. Well, the answer is probably that thousands of other people can help, but if they’re going to make people create a profile in order to answer a question, then the vast majority just won’t bother.
This is a fairly common problem and the answer is simple – make it easy for people to interact with the website (i.e. don’t force them to create a profile and log in) and things will flow from there.
September 8, 2010
Online Reputation Management, Twitter
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There’s a flurry of tweets this morning from one of the people I follow. They started off as:
Has anyone else had a bad experience at @onealfredplace?
followed up by …
Yes, the staff at @onealfredplace have been spectacularly rude to me twice in a week. Will be making formal complaint shortly
and evolving to other tweets from the person who was clearly annoyed by a poor level of service from the private business/leisure environment called One Alfred Place.
I’ve never heard of One Alfred Place before but I see from their website (http://www.onealfredplace.co.uk/) that they’re on Twitter. I wonder whether they’re picking up on such tweets that are spreading negative publicity about them? Sadly, as with so many companies, they may not be.
So the negative publicity tweets about them, coming from someone who is pretty well respected in business, and has 3,015 followers himself, is spreading outwards. People like me have picked up on it as a subject to blog about. Other followers will just make a mental note that One Alfred Place is somewhere to be wary of. Others, of course, will retweet it onto others in their network.
Bad news spreads faster than good news and while most people will give a supplier of a service a chance (as I know this particular tweeter would have done), there comes a time when the knife goes in. What would it have taken for the staff to have provided a good service and so avoided the negative publicity via Twitter. What will the management do now, having found out that the negative publicity is out there (and will likely be visible in Google as well)?
Above all, when will companies start to realise that the offline and online worlds do not exist separately and an offline problem within a business can spread like wildfire online and have a significant knock-on effect?
As I said, I’d never heard about One Alfred Place before but now that I have and the viewpoint was negative, then that’s something that will stay lodged in my brain for awhile.
The lesson here is that at a minimum, companies should be monitoring online talk about their name/brand and be appropriately responsive so that any negative publicity is addressed, which will include handling the issues that caused the negative publicity in the first place.
September 4, 2010
Online Reputation Management, SEO
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For many businesses, being high up in Google seems to be of high importance but how many businesses keep a close eye on what else is appearing prominently in the search engine results when your company name is typed?
Clients, whatever form they take, will become ever more powerful online and however much a company does to raise its online visibility, if there are unhappy customers then there will always be websites that put (often rightfully so) a spanner in the works.
As an example of this, if someone was interested in iphoneworldwide.com and had typed that into Google, they’d see several website links related to that website. However, just below that they’d see a link to the url http://www.sitejabber.com/reviews/www.iphoneworldwide.com and then another one below saying ‘BEWARE of http://www.iphoneworldwide.com/’.
The first site (Site Jabber) allows people to say positive and negative things about websites. In the case of iphoneworldwide.com the feedback is heavily negative and would make someone think more than twice before using them.
Everyone knows that it’s possible to engineer such comments (it wouldn’t be hard for competitors to instigate the writing of negative things about any company, multiple times under different names – or indeed, a company could engineer positive comments about themselves) but the point is that if the comments are believable then people will react accordingly.
The subject of online reputation management is huge and this isn’t the blog to go into detail about the best policy for companies to adopt. No, the point of this blog is to provide a (perhaps obvious) beginners tip that applies to any company.
First of all, it’s worth answering the comment of “that wouldn’t happen to me!” …
Actually, it could happen to you – if not now, but in the future. As people get more comfortable with making complaints online, more and more websites will spring up that enable them to do that, often anonymously. So, let’s say you’re a company that’s messed a supplier around and hasn’t paid them, resulting in a breakdown in the relationship. Within no time at all your company name could appear high up in Google as being a bad payer. That’s just one example and the simple message is: “this could easily happen to you as the web evolves, so be prepared”.
There are plenty of software solutions that help with online reputation management but for many companies (particularly smaller businesses) the following simple process may be sufficient. It’s a manual process and there are better ways to do things but this keeps it simple, albeit a bit more time-consuming and not instantly responsive to online changes …
- Put a note in the diary to check at a regular interval (e.g. each month, fortnight, weekly).
- Search Google (and optionally other search engines) for your company name. Look through at least the first 20-30 search results.
- Click through to any websites that you’re unfamiliar with. They may contain content about your company that’s fine. They may also contain something negative. Quite often they make you think “actually, we could make better use of that site that we appear on”.
- If using Google, don’t just use the main search results – go for the Blogs, Updates, and Discussions options from the ‘More’ button because you’ll get a different set of results.
Although basic and not making the best use of technologies available, it costs nothing more than a bit of effort diarised in at the time intervals you choose. Then, IF anything negative appears about your company, you’ll be well prepared to act on that. And then we’re into a totally different subject of how to react to negative publicity online.
