Following my colleagues earlier post about Tiger Woods and his mistakes (read it here), there is now a very much debated example from the corporate world that touches on the matter of bad reputation and negative branding online. Weather your clients heard the story online or offline is not important for them. However, The IMPACT it will have on them,  is THE most important thing for a marketer or brand manager to measure.

Whether you are Tiger Woods or a big corporation that made a mistake you need to understand that your reputation now has a very bad taste that needs to be replaced or neutralised in order to go away.

The corporate case: Vodafone. An employee had used the official company Twitter account and didn’t realise(!) that he was tweeting about his private matters on Vodafones behalf. Of course, this is not good from a branding point of view. Vodafone also shows that they don’t have restrictions or guidelines for using the company Twitter account nor do they have any control over the staff using it.

Vodafone sent out an apology and suspended the employee. However, with more than 8 000 followers, damage was already done and the message was retweeted over and over again. Vodafone acted and used the same channel to apologise wich in itself is good, but thinking the story will be gone in a few weeks time and the storm will be over is perhaps not the best strategy. This strategy works in old fashion PR on TV and actually even on Twitter, where a new bigger and more juicy headline will take away the spotlight from Tiger Woods or corporate mistakes the next day. From a search marketing point of view this is not the case. People will continue to search for the same or new serch terms around your brand and the old news can still appear in the search results.

Reality is that what has happened in the past is unfortunately for many brands always in the search results, if it was published in a newspaper, blog or tweet.
Let’s say you want to look at Vodafone and perhaps follow them on their latest news on their Twitter account. You search for it in Google and there it is: News article with logo and negative headlines! Will you start following them right away? Probably not. There are many examples of bad reputation showing up in the search results years after it has actually happend.  Many of them are a lot worse than the Vodafone example, and many clients ask me what to do if it happens. Below I am sharing  a top 5 list of important things to consider if it happens to your brand.

5 steps to improve your negative reputation online longterm:

1. Provide answers to the negative messages around you. Post it on your blog, website, facebook groups, Linked:in, tweet it and reproduce it in all kinds of channels that will rank in the search engines. Communication is key and you need to stay on top of the responses on other blogs and newsrooms by discussing the matter. It can be time consuming, but definitely worth it.
2. Purchase the Paid search keywords around the subject and communicate what you are doing to improve it.
3. Remember that your clients are not in the purchase cycle. You need to refocus your paid search campaigns, rethink your message on the landing pages and rebuild your reputation. In the Vodafone example; Do not try to sell your clients a new phone or sign up for more months at the same time as you have a negative story occupying the search result listings for the same keywords.
4. Remember that your reputation online and offline is the same, what you would communicate if a client called you and were angry is the same message and apology a customer would expect from you in all channels online.
5. Measure the rankings, the impact and the spread your new message have as well as if your most positive clients (=ambassadors) have picked it up and helps you spreading the word. And if they do: Reward them!

Good luck!

Oh.. and btw: Now it is a good thing that Vodafone goes under the brand “Telenor” in Sweden

//Sara

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