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.

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I got the inspiration for this Blog post from an article in the Swedish computer magazine Internet World, an article in which I was one of the interviewed search specialists. You can read the entire article here.

The article is talking about how much better search is today and how the business has matured. This is both true… and false. There is a long way to go still and sad to say – for companies employing Search agencies today, you have to be aware! Read the rest of this entry »

When travelling through Heathrow Airport this Christmas I was faced with this message :

It was a while after the Tiger Woods scandal broke out and I was surprised that the ad hadn’t been withdrawn already but what struck me most was the relevance of the message. It was as if Tiger Woods was teaching himself a lesson and I couldn’t agree more. No matter how many mistakes you make or how badly you play your cards, it’s what you do next that counts. Read the rest of this entry »

PPC advertising allows you to pay to have your ad listed on the major search engines. They are the sponsored links you find at the top or right side of the search engine results page in for example Google.

The common idea about PPC is that it is so easy – easy to get started, quick and flexible. This is true, however I often experience the lack of strategic thinking and the actual forming of goals for the campaigns. What is the primary intent, the gain and the outcome we want or expect? In my mind you have to look beyond driving traffic and focusing on communicating correctly with your audience in order for your PPC campaigns to be successful. Therefore I would like to give some pointers on issues that is rarely carried out or taken into count when running a PPC campaign. Read the rest of this entry »

Having worked in the search industry for ten years, I have seen the start and development process of the search engines and the clients in this industry… but also the lack of development from the consultants. Don’t get me wrong – I love what I do and this industry is if ever as exciting as now when we move rapidly and changes of the engines listings are bigger than ever before! But the lack of development among some can be very frustrating.

In 1999 when I first went to a search conference I was one of very few women and only a hand full of us had a marketing degree. The fellow search marketers back then had coding as their biggest interest and the discussion in the bar was all about how to get around the search engines algorithms and how to trick the engine to value what they wanted it to rank. Read the rest of this entry »

A small group of Hyper Island students, calling themselves “Control your info”, received media attention last week after hijacking Facebook groups. By hijacking, I mean that they became members of groups in lack of an admin and claimed the admin spot, enabling them to handle the groups in any way preferred. As the admin of a Facebook group leaves the group the position is open for anyone to take. This means that numerous groups with high number of members are without control over their groups content. What the Hyper Island students wanted was to create awareness of this bug and encourage people to be aware of the importance to control their online information.

As social networks are gaining more influence over the search engine results and as news and live feeds are ranking highest in the search results -the importance to be aware of and to control your online identity is increasing. Read the rest of this entry »