What do you do when someone blasts your idea, product or brand via an online/social channel? I mean, it happens every day. Is it better to ignore it? Is it better to let the C levels attack it head on, keeping it real? Is it better to run a smear campaign against the offenders? Or, D, “None of the above?”

This is where working with your clients to develop an appropriate response strategy and Online Reputation Management policy is critical. This little effort will do more than you can ever foresee towards helping you manage your client’s ORM efforts. While it is impossible to not take some things said about your idea, product or brand personally, how you choose to respond will speak volumes for your online authenticity.

Fuel to the Fire: Adding Authority without Intention
A little bit back now, Derek Powazek, posted a very unfortunate and slanted view of how horrible those of us in the SEO profession are. Regardless of the fact that he was using some excellent SEO link bait tactics throughout the post, the content was rather searing. It read more as a person scorned than a true position for debate, but you read it and decide for yourself.

We SEOs don’t typically take negative comments lying down. Derek Powazek’s post had the comment fields enabled. As the word spread (rather quickly I might add), SEOs and Online Marketing professionals galore started posting their ‘you’re stupid, how dare you’ type responses. What I want to suggest to you is that before these response comments were posted, the post was nothing more than a pissed off opinion being published online. The moment my peers jumped on his site, saying ‘no that’s not the way it is’, they made it real. This is inline with the most basic rules of debate. Point and counter point. Before there is counter point, it is nothing but a thought. The worst part in this whole thing, the more people that responded on his site, the more credibility they provided Derek on the subject as far as the SE algorithm are concerned.

Owning the Situation
It being the fate of SEO at stake, there was no one really more qualified to handle the issue than Danny Sullivan. Danny, in all of his painfully “me me me” wisdom actually taught us something through practical application. Instead of going to Derek Powazek’s site to make a comment on how wrong Powazek is in his thought process, Danny used his platform, Search Engine Land, to post an open letter to Derek Powazek. Danny took back the controlling hand in the situation. In sense he contained the fire.

While Danny’s actions are not anything that we did not really know before the fact, the simple act of seeing it in practice was rather profound. We now have an illustration of what we have been suggesting to our C levels and clients for a while. We can point them to it with a ‘see, this is really important’…

In The Real World
In our day to day, we are always trying to help our marketing and executive teams embrace being candid and open online, interacting in an authentic way with their content’s users (consumer, subscriber, reader etc). To us (the SEOs), there is an understood and excepted risk of the negative opinion showing up when you choose to use online as a primary means of communication. However, what we know and understand, is not always apparent to our clients and the executive teams. If they see a negative review, it is hard for them to avoid becoming emotionally charged and then respond, often in a visceral fashion. No matter how accurately and professionally they craft a response, the simple act of responding makes their detractors’ comments real.

A client that I work for recently had opportunity to present at one of the many conferences that have been going on in October. As no surprise, there were live bloggers in attendance for my client’s presentation. Within the first minute of the presentation, a live blogger started slamming the presentation. Sad things were being declared by this live blogger. My client, immediately following the presentation, saw this and was quite steamed, to say the least. Before we had the chance to talk and coach through the response strategy, emotion got the better of my client. The next thing I knew, there was a response comment to the live blogger’s opinion posted on the live blogger’s site. We were fortunate in that the response was not negative. It was a well-formulated counterpoint to the objections outlined by the live blogger.

Since it was a well formulated-response, no harm, no foul right?

Nope.

Just as the SEOs in the previous example provided Derek with fuel to the fire, my client’s response now made this blogger’s ill-conceived opinion real in the user’s eyes. Regardless of how awesome of a response it was, (which is was flipping awesome!) it was issued on the wrong property. My client would have been way more successful if they had followed the lead of Danny’s tactics; bring the conversation to the brand’s blog. Reference the opinion of the live blogger with a clean link that might have a slightly negative anchor text and proceed to outline what was suggested by the live blogger and dissect the argument in the brand’s domain.

By doing this, there is a layer of authenticity that will be perceived by the user, since you genuinely want them to know what is being said and where you stand on the issue. You are being deliberately transparent. To boot, in the event that you are actually wrong on something, which can happen, this lets you describe how and what you are doing to solve the issue.

As this post rambles on, it brings to mind how important it is to have online and social policies in place. Your ORM extends way past your main domain nowadays.

Things that need to be considered are like:

• When something negative is said about your brand, what is the way your organization will uniformly respond?
• What channel or company property is the right one to manage responses?
• What types of pictures are safe for your employees to be posting on their Facebook pages?
• Is it cool for your employees to have pics from their weekend’s club crawling pint drinking adventures?
• What language or tone can your employees use when talking about you (the employer)?
• Is calling out how stupid a customer an employee dealt with today on Twitter acceptable?
• Is the sales team allowed to Astroturf on industry specific posts or forums?
• So on and so forth…

It is a delicate balance to let people be people, with emotion and free will, and to best manage your ORM. Its not easy, or we would all have the right answers on this topic. Without question, you should embrace being online, but in the same way you want to make sure that all outbound communications are branded, your online reputation needs to be considered in the same holistic manner.

A show of hands please…

How many of you recognize, and are frustrated by, the fact that no one in your organization seems to understand a word you say when the topic is search?

Next, how many of you think its ridiculous that you know their team’s/group’s speak, yet they make no effort to know yours?

Ahh – exactly as expected.

Every search team/agency has challenges with communicating effectively with its organizations/clients. This is not unique, we appreciate your frustration(s).

It is all too typical that a company knows it needs search. Said company admitted it did not know enough about search to do it themselves with the resources available to them. So, they hired you, the expert. From there, you turn in a few recos and go work your voodoo and magic and call them when you can satisfy their egos with #1 SERPs and big index and link counts, thus proving your value. (sound about right?)

Take this one step further; you’ve spent the last 3 months testing and executing some great SEO strategies. The final step in the plan is to turn them over to client facing teams that will be managing the intersection of often outlandish client requests with sustaining the integrity and intention of your hard work. Suddenly you’re getting requests to do things like ‘sprinkle some SEO on it’ (I seriously wish I was joking…) because the client facing teams have no yardstick by which to gauge the validity of these incoming request. Though you held training meetings, they were trained in SEO process, not SEO concepts. Sprinkling some SEO is no more unusual to the CSR than that of adding a button or image to a client’s site.

Admittedly, its hard for the first reaction to ‘sprinkling some SEO on it’ to not default to how dumb can someone be? Does common sense not visit this office? As much as I would like to get on the beat um up – make you feel better bandwagon, the reality is that you failed your client and yourself. Your hard work that is producing all these great positive results, is going down the drain because no one managing the services understands how to uniformly talk about it. When they ring you for technical help, you might as well be speaking _insert non intelligible language here_. Fortunately, this is something that you can ultimately control.

When introducing your early stage recos be sure to include time to train the client facing teams on common terms, definitions and context. Make this a separate meeting altogether. It will pay dividends for you and team and the organization signing your paycheck. This step should literally be baked into your recommendations moving forward. No exceptions. Just like you must request and get commitment for IT resources for site architecture improvements, you should require inter company training time and commitments. Part of your responsibility in this should be to turn the key players (leadership, client facing peeps, whoever else you deem appropriate) into conversationally capable SEO-ers. By doing this, you introduce the missing yardstick of reason for conversations with their clients. This step of evangelism for promoting the most basic of understanding of a common vocabulary of key terms and definitions will have your clients managing their clients with great effect. As an added benefit, you no longer have to spend long hours honing your SEO sprinkling skills!

While there are no universally accepted definitions or language per say, there are a growing number of accepted standard meanings for commonly used search marketing concepts. With this, Words Go Here takes a crack at offering a Search Marketing glossary. Allow it to serve as a research point for you as you develop your recos and approaches to your client management efforts.

(Please note: We will be tweaking it over the next few months as we get it better dialed in ourselves.)