Warren Brown wrote an article about the 2009 Chevy Cobalt SS this morning for the Post. His review of the Cobalt tangented into some of the most important lessons that Detroit’s big three need to learn, Zippy Affordability Blazes Better Trail for GM.

General Motors should stop trying to please everybody. It’s a strategy that embraces the lowest common denominator. It’s hard to make a favorable impression when your primary objective is to avoid offending as many people as possible. You wind up pleasing no one, or next to no one, or so it seems. You are relegated to second-class status. Or worse, you are forgotten.

[...]

That told me that the Cobalt SS was the car that Chevrolet regarded as the real Cobalt, the one the company regarded as the most representative of that compact economy car line. That being the case, I wondered why the company wasted so much time, money and marketing muscle pushing lesser Cobalts — disparagingly regarded as “rental cars” by the automotive media.

[...]

No one regards the comparable Honda Civic, Hyundai Elantra, or Toyota Corolla as a “rental car,” although all of those models can be found on somebody’s rental car lot. A Civic is a Civic. An Elantra is an Elantra. A Corolla is a Corolla. All are compact economy cars with good road manners and excellent quality. Their reputations are so strong, their names speak for themselves.

[...]

I suspect it’s because of GM’s dedication to the lowest common denominator — the company’s tendency to take a good idea, such as the Cobalt, and dilute it as much as possible in pursuit of maximum affordability.

The end result is a line of cheap, forgettable cars. That’s too bad because as demonstrated by the tested SS, the Cobalt is so much better than that.

And I can’t help but think that the Cobalt would be even better had GM not squandered money and reputation spreading the car’s value over a broad field of less-than-impressive materials and mediocre performance in pursuit of more sales.

GM needs to abandon that practice, even if it means losing aggregate sales. It should consider trading volume for memorability, which could lead to an increase in higher quality sales — cars and trucks sought by consumers more for likeability than price.

[...]

But they all said they would strongly consider buying the Cobalt SS, although it comes with two fewer doors and a substantially higher price than the workaday Cobalt sedans flooding the rental fleets.

“I don’t get it,” said a Virginia friend after taking a spin in the Cobalt SS. His first experience with the Cobalt was via a car rental agency in South Carolina.

That rented Cobalt was so ordinary, “it was depressing,” he said. But the Cobalt SS was “a boss little car, something I could see myself owning,” he said.

“I don’t get it,” my friend said. “Why doesn’t GM put this one [the Cobalt SS] in the rental fleets. It’s like GM wants us to have a bad impression of its products. That doesn’t make sense.”

Enough said.

It all comes down to producing cars that work too hard to appeal to everyone that they appeal to noone. In my opinion, American car models are too broad and there is too much desire to water brands down to a lowest-common-denominator.

In Germany, Mercedes-Benz is more of a “tool-car” that offers cars at most levels of affordability while still not offering garbage “rental cars.” There is a difference between offering fleet-level vehicles and what people perceive as “rental car quality.” Fleet-worthy vehicles are considered durable. Most European taxis are diesel Mercedes sedans. While not the luxury S-class sedan, the reputation Mercedes-Benz has in Europe comes from the ubiquity of these MB workhorses.

When people think of rental cars, they think of plasticky sub-compact tin boxes, not durable everruns. Do you see what I mean?  American cars (not trucks — American trucks are built, and priced, to be workhorses)  have become associated with being the vehicle you buy until you can afford a Toyota or a Mercedes.  Even Saturn is being shuttered — and rightfully so, since it has long ago lost its novelty and associted nationwide appeal.

And, while this article is about General Motors, the same can be said about Ford and Chrysler, too.  Yes, you will tell me about the Corvette and the Ford GT and the Jeep and even the Hummer and all of these little eddy brands.  Well, when we take the trucks and the sports cars away and you’re left with 2-door coupes, 4-door sedans, 5-door hatchback, and wagons, what’re you left with? Especially when it comes to “tool-cars” and quality sub-compact and SMART-like high efficiency vehicles?  How about resale and reliability statistics?

Around here in Arlington, cabbies are replacing the unquitous Crown Vic with Toyota Priuses and Camry hybrids.  On that note, the Crown Victoria was the last real success story when it came to fleet vehicles: cop cars, cruisers, taxis. Too bad the Impala — an amazing car when it was the real Chevy Impala SS — doesn’t seem to get the pick up the Vic did.

When I realized that I could download the OPML file from the Power 150 site and then hack it around into a contact list of over 900 of the top advertising, marketing, PR, and SEO bloggers on the planet, I did so.

Ever since, I have been scheduling calls with all of the folks I have been admiring on a daily basis. Two days ago I spent an hour on the horn with Lee Hopkins, “one of Australia’s leading thinkers on communication strategy in an online environment,” who is, in fact, one of the World’s leading thinkers on communication strategy in an online environment.  We had a great chat — and amazing talk!

At the end, Lee asked me if he could blog the conversation and I jumped at the opportunity and late last night Lee published Is email marketing still relevant in a 2.0 world? which is not only the most complete description of what we at Abraham Harrison LLC do on a daily basis but it is said in a better, more comprehensive, way than I could even conceive of doing myself.  Here it is, in full.  Be sure to visit (and subscribe to) Better Communication Results, Lee Hopkin’s blog.

Is email marketing still relevant in a 2.0 world?

G’day – thanks for returning!

I just finished a fantastic conversation with Chris Abraham, the President and COO of AbrahamHarrison.

If you’ve been around the internet for a while, especially in the ‘marcoms’ (marketing communications) space, you would certainly have heard of Chris; if not of the man himself then certainly of one of his marketing and outreach programs.

Chris is one of those select few online marketers who’s text doesn’t read like a traditional online direct mail piece – you know, with LOTS OF CAPITALS and heaps of bold text and yellow highlighting and italics and

• bullet
• points
• a-
• plenty

and testimonials by the kazillion…

I could point you to a zillion of those sites – which is not to say that the style of marketing they use is not successful; it is, otherwise they wouldn’t keep doing it. But you know as soon as you see the huge, bold, bright red and often in CAPS headline what to expect for the rest of the (very) long toilet roll of a page.

Chris takes a much softer approach, always has done, and it seems to work for him and his style of copywriting.

Video, the radio star and plain ol’ bandwagon idjuts

With the advent of Web2.0/Social Media there were many ill-informed and just plain ‘bandwagon’ pundits who hailed the death of traditional communication tools such as email, web1.0 sites and – gasp – newspaper, magazine, radio and television.

Much as television didn’t kill radio as force it to rethink its place and find its niche, so too with Social Media. Every new technology platform or societal change brings with it a change in how all that came before it must view themselves and continue to offer relevancy.

Radio didn’t die, newspapers haven’t been killed off, I can still pick up plenty of magazines that appeal to all demographics and both genders from my local newsagent, and email hasn’t disappeared off the radar (if my bulging inbox every morning is anything to go by).

So it was fantastic to finally chat with someone who, like me, believes that email is STILL a fundamental part of the marketing toolkit.

In talking with Chris today, he was genuinely flattered that a fellow copywriter would find his material engaging; I thought it was brilliant reading and his deployment strategies for his clients brilliantly executed.

You see, Chris, like me, believes that email won’t go away, but WILL have to change in order to survive in the new communication landscape. Our shared view is that it will have to evolve in a couple of ways:

1. Shorter emails will be the best way of getting people’s attention
2. Long-form emails are best saved for newsletters; trying to ‘sell’ via email will become even harder to excel at.

If you’ve ever received one of Chris’ emails, you will be stunned by several things:

1. They are short – only 2-3 paragraphs
2. They link off to a SMNR (Social Media News Release) that gives a far more in-depth level of information (and all the material you might need to help you spread the word or get involved)
3. If you email Chris or anyone of his team back you WILL get a response, usually within 24 hours (Chris says they try to get back within the hour, but time zones can sometime defeat them)
4. The emails ‘read’ like they were written by a human being, not by a ‘PR’ flack or a ex-journalist hack; they aren’t full of ‘me, me, me’ stuff telling you how wonderful I (the company) am, but neither do they ‘strip-tease tantalise’ you so that when you do click on the link you end up feeling cheated
5. You get the very real feeling that there’s someone real at the end of the email.

Here’s an example (taken from my post about the Fresh Air Fund):

Hello again, Lee

On Sunday I asked if you would kindly help me spread the word about 200 inner-city children I have yet to place with host families in August. I apologize for following up so soon, but time is of the essence and you know how funny email can be. To make things simple, everything is collected into an online resource page http://freshair.smnr.us

This appeal comes straight from the top, so please do not hesitate to contact me directly.

Yours sincerely,

Sara

–
Sara Wilson
Fresh Air Fund
sara@freshair.org
www.freshair.org

Sara is a real person, not a ‘fake’ character. I sent her an email yesterday, wondering if her ears were burning, because Chris and I were talking about her:

G’day Sara,
Just finished the phone call with Chris — oh boy! Were your ears burning? They should have been!!!
Kindests,
Lee

From: Sara Wilson [mailto:swilson@abrahamharrison.com]
Sent: Tuesday, 24 February 2009 2:02 AM
To: Lee@leehopkins.com
Subject: Re: Fellow Power 150 blogger

Hello Lee,
Just a quick note to re-confirm that Chris will be calling you at 10 am, your time, tomorrow (Tuesday).
No need to reply unless something has come up on your end, otherwise he will speak to you in about 7.5 hours!
Best,
Sara

In reply, Sara said,

Lee,
And I thought it was just hot where I was last night … 
It’s very kind of you to mention it, thanks.   Chris is a great guy to work for, and generous with compliments, but it’s always nice to know that someone appreciates you, isn’t it?
Cheers,
Sara

Controversy

Because Chris and his team start any campaign with an email-based blogger outreach, some of the ‘holier than thou’ social media purists occasionally give him ‘stick’, or snicker behind his back and call him a ‘spammer’. Not true – the team are very hot on ensuring only a good taste remains in the mouth of any blogger they contact, and of only offering bloggers something of actual value to the blogger.

Which is a behaviour totally unlike the hapless, clueless and insulting PR flacks who regularly show up on The Bad Pitch Blog and who attempt to fill my inbox with material about electronics, or sanitary napkins, or (ahem) extension kits, or pharmaceuticals shipped from Canada. Thank goodness I have SpamArrest to filter them out before they hit my inbox!

Chris and his team have painstakingly built up a list of nearly 35,000 bloggers across several different demographics and topic areas of interest. Visiting their blogs, they harvest their email address. They then politely email them once to offer them something of interest – if the blogger likes it, they very often blog about it; it they don’t then they don’t. What is fascinating is the response rate Chris gets for his clients.

Word of mouth and gossip-sharing amongst internet marketers has the average rate of sales of anything (be it a blog post or an ebook or a ‘course you cannot live without’) as around 0.01-0.05% from an initial mailing, with the follow-up mailings increasing that to, perhaps, 1.0-2.0%…

Chris and his team regularly get a takeup in the order of 5%, which is phenomenal. In addition, once you start developing an email relationship with anyone in their team (as I have with Sara Wilson) then all future mailings will receive much more attention than would otherwise be the case. A case in point is my own, later, post on the illegal cluster bombing being carried out in South Ossetia and The Survivor Corps run by activist and author of the very powerful book,  I Will Not Be Broken, Jerry White. It is only because Sara had taken the time to develop a relationship with me over previous months that I read and responded to the material from Jerry White. Without that relationship I would never have bothered with a topic outside of my normal areas of interest.

It is the classic ‘relationship marketing’ that Social Media Marketing pundits claim to aim for but rarely achieve.

Goodness, if I could have a dollar for every new ‘expert’ that’s popped up in the Social Media space I would retire a very rich trillionaire (and at the same time wondering how you could be a trillionaire and not be very rich – I guess if you were living in Zimbabwe you wouldn’t be…).

You wouldn’t believe the number of ‘leading social networking and social media marketing experts’ who have suddenly come out of the woodwork and set up communities in places like LinkedIn, Plaxo, Facebook, etc. Curiously, I’ve never heard of these folks before. Most of them don’t even have blogs, or if they do those blogs have only been around for less than a year. Curious, hey?

But Chris, on the other hand, has been around for a long time, has figured out what works and what doesn’t, and as evidence offers the following case studies:

• Energy Bill 2007 Case Study
• Financial Services Reputation Defense Case Study
• Firebrand TV Case Study
• Fresh Air Fund Case Study
• International Medical Corps Case Study
• Movie Producer Reputation Defense Case Study
• Snapple Antioxidant Water Case Study
• Survivor Corps Book Promotion Case Study

If you want to see the sort of posts that are associated with Chris’ kind of blogger PR pitch outreach, here are some examples:

• Thank You Operation Survivor Bloggers
• Thank You All Who Supported International Medical Corps!
• Thank You Again Survivor Corps Bloggers
• Thank You International Medical Corps Bloggers
• Thank You Fresh Air Fund Holiday Bloggers
• Thank You Fresh Air Fund Bloggers
• Thank You Fresh Air Fund Camp Counselor Bloggers!
• The Powerful SEO Benefits of Blogger PR Outreach
• Happy Thanksgiving from Abraham Harrison

Here are some examples of client SMNRs from Chris and his team that I especially like:

• http://anamigo.smnr.us
• http://freshair.smnr.us
• http://banclusterbombs.smnr.us
• http://freshairfundcounselors.smnr.us
• http://survivorcorps.smnr.us
• http://iwillnotbebroken.smnr.us
• http://internationalmedicalcorps.smnr.us

So what???

The whole point of this post is NOT to fawn at the feet of someone who clearly knows what he is doing.

The whole point IS to let you know that you don’t need to throw out your baby with the bathwater:

• Don’t jump on the Social Media bandwagon without educated advice
• Don’t take advice from a pimply 17 year old fresh out of high school
• Don’t take advice from a less-pimply 23 year old fresh out of university
• Don’t ditch all of your understanding of how ‘people’ and networks work
• Don’t take advice from someone who doesn’t even blog themselves, or Twitter, or Facebook… (see my post about Social Media Gurus)
• Don’t take advice from someone who has been blogging less than 24 months

Instead:

1. Download Todd Defren’s absolutely superb ‘Brink’ guide to Social Media and Richard Meyer’s great presentation, ‘Social Media : What you’re afraid to admit you didn’t know’ (he also has a great pharma and biotech-focused pdf presentation). Download and read Trevor Cook’s and my ‘Social Media Report’.
2. Talk to someone who actually knows what they are doing – in Australia that means folks like Stephen Collins, Laurel Papworth, Trevor Cook, Darren Rowse, Gavin Heaton and, humbly, yours truly. If WE can’t help you, we can certainly put you in touch with someone who can. Unlike the USA, where there seems to be a spirit of “You’ll prize my rolodex out of my frozen dead fingers!”, there is no fierce spirit of competition here in Australia – we have  ‘co-opertition’ wherein we all help each other out if the ‘fit’ seems better for the client.
3. Stick to reading the seasoned ‘pros’ of the online marketing and/or business communication space: you cannot go wrong if you start at folks like any of the above, or Shel Holtz, Neville Hobson, Chris Brogan, Darren Rowse, Mitch Joel, Joe Jaffe , Laura Fitton and Chris Abraham himself; see who they link to. Follow your nose from them – all the way along the path you will be reading ‘the good oil’ as we say here in Australia
4. Examine Chris’ examples above and see for yourself how simple but effective your online marketing can be if you do it with the right intention – of helping out the blogger, not flogging stuff for your client. Get the relationship right and you will flog stuff for your client anyway, trust me!

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Currently listening to ‘Next’ by The Necks from the album ‘Next’. Superb jazz funk from one of Australia’s great cult bands.

I think you should check out Michael Gray new article, Using Directories for Search Engine Reputation Management, because it is a very interesting article — essential reading — I have only excerpted a wee bit of it here because I think you need to go over there and spend some time with the article, which is really valuable and essential as a way of inoculating your brand in advance of anything going wrong.

Search engine reputation management (SERM) is a growing discipline under the larger umbrella of search engine optimization (SEO). If you deal with client services, and you don’t already have at least one reputation management client, chances are you will in the very near future. The more tools or options you have at your disposal for this type of project, the easier the task will be. In this article I’m going to look at one of those tools; directories. (via Marketing Pilgrim)

I think it is really important for me to start writing more on this topic.  I have written a few things on this topic: I, Online Reputation Manager, The Powerful SEO Benefits of Blogger PR Outreach, An El Al Jumbo Jets Chaffing and Flaring the Skies Analogy, Online Reputation Defense: Resistance is Futile, Online Reputation Management, and Online Reputation Management Needs to Be Proactive.

At Abraham Harrison, we have three practices: 1) online PR, web video marketing, Twitter and social media marketing 2) social media and SEO consulting 3) online reputation management. Read the below excerpt from Danny Flamberg, What Tactics Work Best in a Recession? — whoops! 

Ironically many of the highly hyped tactics – online PR, web video marketing, Twitter and social media marketing –  are sorted OUT because of their limited track record in delivering quantifiable results. Though today they are cheap enough and accessible enough for marketers with a few extra bucks and some extra imagination to use creatively and break through to hard-to-reach customer or prospect segments.

Search (both SEO and PPC) and e-mail are the work horses in a recession. The costs are containable, the targeting can be quickly and effectively tweaked plus the ROI has been proven again and again.They are sufficiently interactive to meet “social” marketing needs and can be deployed almost on-demand to suit anxious CFOs.

Oh well, this is a very insightful and well-thought-out article with a lot of truth and some very important insights. Since I have over a decase of information architecture and SEO experience, I know that #2 is going to get a lot more of my attention in 2009 — thanks very much for the benefit of your experience, Mr. Flamberg, and remember that there is much more to the article, so please explore the rest, What Tactics Work Best in a Recession?

Jonathan Trenn popped this insightful article about Yelp over on Marketing Conversation, The contorversy about Yelp (and be sure to check out David Gelles’ article on a similar topic over at the Financial Times, Yelp rejects claims of extortion):

Ah, controversy.

Now, it’s with Yelp, the mega online review site.  On Wednesday, the East Bay Express, an alternative newspaper that covers Alameda and Contra Costa counties in California, published a very provocative article , “Yelp and the business of extortion 2.0″ on the sales operations and tactics of Yelp.  The paper made some very pointed accusations, some of them seemingly legitimate while others sounding too nebulous.  They state that Yelp is both maniupulating the placements of restaurants reviews as sales tools and then using scare tactics to then solicit advertising sales from these same restaurants.

The accusations are alarming but, because I think the article was poorly presented, it’s left me thinking that Yelp perhaps had a major sales problem in one office as opposed to a company wide sleaze factor policy.

Yelp’s initial response, written on the company blog by CEO Jeremy Stoppleman is inept and insufficient.  He’s likely satisfied that his blog posts are enough…and it may appear to be just that for the time being…but controversies such as this, be they true or just speculation, have a way of undermining a company’s integrity in a hurry.  Especially a site that 1)  is about user generated online reviews, and 2) has trust as a hallmark of its standing.

Oddly, the Yelp blog doesn’t allow comments.  That’s not a good idea…especially for a site that’s about online reviews and citizen participation.

Here’s the gist of the article.  Writer Kathleen Richards talked to “dozens” of business owners over the “past several months” and found that six of them said that Yelp sales reps promised to remove or move bad reviews if the business chose to advertise.  And these businesses would often get sales calls from Yelp reps soon after they mysteriously started getting a rash of negative reviews.  The theory here is that Yelp employees would start to or enlist others to write negative reviews on a company, those reviews would then appear at the top of a company’s page, and the company would get a phone call from a rep looking for an advertising by so those reviews can “go away”…usually to the tune of $300 a month.

For those that declined, positive reviews seemed to begin to disappear.  For those that did manage to buy, negative ones began disappearing.

This is pretty damning stuff.  If true, it shows a coordinted effort between people in sales those on the back end tech team.  It made some establishments feel as if Yelp was acting as if it was the “mafia” in that Yelp was threatening establishments to pay (advertise) in order to not be damaged.  That’s called “protection money” in organized crime.

But as I red between the lines I ended up scratching my head.   Over several months, after talking to “dozens” of businesses, Richards found six restaurants that felt that either they were being offered a quid-pro-qo for advertising to reduce or eliminate bad reviews; or some felt that this extended to manipulative threats of the placement of poor reviews and the elimination of postive reviews.

“Dozens.  “What does that mean?  36?  60?  84?  How did Richards find these restaurants?  Did she talk to one and then ask the owner/manager if he or she knew of any others that had similar stories?  Both questions are important.   The first because it leads to how widespread the problem actually is in the Bay Area and the second, because if there is a lack or randomness to all this, then the sample restaurants are self selected by the reporter.

The article relies on the how some of the restaurant owners “feel”.  These feelings may be completely legitimate.  But it is hard to counter a “feelings”e of another is the one with the feelings remain anonymous.  I fully believe in using anonymous sources, but there should be greater evidence used.  That is, if one is trying to prove that this is a consistent sales tactic used by the company as a whole.

And speaking of as a whole.  This article seems to be focusing soley on the East Bay restaurant seen.  True, it is an East Bay pub, but the article is written as if it is a widespread problem and the issue here is “the business of extortion”.  It fully damns the Yelp based on a small sample of local business’ feelings.

Stoppleman has since written a few more blog posts, but he could use a change of attitude.  There’s been enough discussion on the net about this article denigrating Yelp.  Hundreds of tweets on Twitter, negative mentions on Technorati, and articles in substantial online pubs.

The reason why I say that Stoppleman could use a change of attitude is because he’s treating all of this as an illegitimate attack.  The accusations, regardless of their veracity, at least sound reasonable.  And his defensiveness doesn’t really address the issue.

He does have on post that does work, at bit, in my opinion.  “Nine Myths About Yelp” is designed to negate what he feels are falsehoods.  The most important one he lists is #3 (it should be #1, but he doesn’t seem to realize it).  It is stated here:

Myth #3: Yelp salespeople manipulate reviews for prospective advertisers (for example, offers to remove a negative review if a new client signs up, or a threat to remove positive reviews if the business owner does not choose to advertise with Yelp)

Reality: We have every reason to trust the smart, hard-working and ethical salespeople who work at Yelp.  Beyond this, to avoid even an appearance of impropriety, we’ve taken several steps to ensure no member of our team is tempted to game the system.  Specifically:
1. Yelp salespeople do not have access to the system that deletes reviews; only a few members of Yelp engineering and user support team have this access, and they literally work on different floors within the office.
2. Every Yelp salesperson signs an agreement that s/he will not write reviews of any business while employed by Yelp.  We trust our teammates in sales to live up to this commitment.  We also have several monitoring systems in place to ensure nobody (accidentally or otherwise) crosses this line.
3. Through our vigilance, we once did find a salesperson who encouraged a friend to write a positive review for a prospective client (that the friend had actually patronized). The salesperson’s role at Yelp ended that day.
4. When a new advertiser signs up with Yelp, the relationship is handed off to an Account Manager.  The Account Manager then takes the client through a 30 minute phone training session — and confirms that reviews have nothing to do with advertising.
5. After the training call, the Account Manager sends a follow up survey that asks each client how much s/he agrees with the following statement: “I understand that Reviews are completely separate from the Yelp Ad Program, and that there is an automated filter that may suppress some of my reviews whether or not I am a client.”  Any client who does not click “Completely Agree” in this case gets yet another follow-up call for clarification.

Myth #4: Yelp removes positive reviews from businesses its staff does not like, or from businesses that do not pay for advertising

Reality: A review you may have seen on Yelp previously is no longer there; this happens.  The review in question may have “disappeared” for one of three reasons:
1. The review may have been suppressed by Yelp’s automated Review Filter, which is always out there looking for suspicious reviewing activity (like those anonymous rants and raves you see on other sites).
2. The writer may have removed her own review; she has the right to do that at any time
3. Another user believed the review violated Yelp’s Review Guidelines and sent it to our customer service team for review. The customer service team agreed, then manually removed the review.

Both our customer service team and the Review Filter work exactly the same way for advertisers as they do for non-advertisers.

This is how he should have addressed the issue at the very beginning.  Blown opportunity and his company has suffered and will continue to suffer as a result.  And he has to go beyond stating that the sales people and the tech people with access to placement of reviews work on different floors.

My guess is what happened is that a few sales reps in that particular office would scour the reviews on Yelp, and when they found some recent newly written negative ones, they then picked up the phone and made a sales call, offering the package that places a selected postive review on top – one that is visibly marked as being sponsored.  Some pitches probably went far beyond this…saying that they could make the negative one “disappear”.  Sales people will say sleazy things.  Stoppleman should understand this and not discount this.  He should then conduct some sort of internal audit that would show the public that he is trying to address the problem and root it out if it exists.  Retrain.  Resolve.

Now is it possible that some sales types had relationships with the tech people.  Absolutely.  Different floors – HA!  So the problem may have been more than a poorly written article.  Yelp needs to look into that because, as Yelp knows, online reputations matter.

And to Jeremy Stoppleman…you should allow people to comment on your blog posts.

We do brand reputation and online reputation management and the number one thing we tell our clients is that if you don’t amplify your brand online — add some signal to the noise, if you will — then someone else will.  And, you can do this before you’re attacked or you can do it afterwards as an ORM campaign, which, like going to a plumber when your pipes burst, is generally much more expensive.  Better to maintain than to repair.  Here’s a great article from over on Online Publicity Journal that you should check out, Be Proactive – Don’t Wait Until Negative Press Finds You!:

The internet has allowed people who have normally been quiet to now have a voice, and sometimes a loud one. That voice can easily cripple your business model and stop or slow down revenues coming like a wrench thrown into the gears. One online complaint can send ripples very quickly through your business model.

Whistle blowing websites are everywhere and frustrated clients and customers are waiting for a reason to shout and make noise if things go sour with their experience. If you haven’t’ done any proactive online marketing and your reputation has not been tarnished yet than that is great. But all it takes one angry customer to ruin that good luck streak and you just never know when it could occur.

Many times it will be from an angry customer you have never even heard from who just didn’t even bother contacting you first to try to fix the problem. If you take a proactive approach right from the beginning you can allow yourself to build up a barrier and wall against new, fresh new negative publicity coming in. It is much easier to build a barrier for you business of positive information before negative press finds it way to your search results.

With consumer confidence down and online customers becoming more and more savvy each day more and more online shoppers want to see a squeaky clean online image. If they see any angry clients or customers it could easily trigger them to purchase or do business with a competitor. Online publicity is a very quick and easy way to start building a clean online reputation.

As others pick up your releases you will effectively add more content to your search results. As these links sit and age they become anchored into the search results making it much more difficult for any Rip Off Report and Pissed Consumer listings to make their way to your search results generated by someone search for your personal or business name.

Chris Garrett has a super-smart, “stop, think, breathe, write, review, share, rewrite, and then maybe don’t hit post,” list of things to consider before criticizing anyone or anything online, 10 Tips for Criticism Without Harming Your Reputation:

1. Calm down – Take a breath, walk away, posting emotionally could cause more trouble than cure.
2. Know what you want – Why are you doing this? What is it you want changed or to achieve?
3. Does it need to be public? – First the best approach is to contact the company or person in question directly. I often go buy the rule of thumb “Praise in public, complain in private“. We all slip occasionally, but worth to keep in mind.
4. Stick to the facts – If you only present the facts as you see them then you are normally safe as far as legal grounds are concerned (though I am not a lawyer), and only use relevant information.
5. Get a second opinion – Before making something public, ensure you have expressed the issue clearly – this is not a time to be misunderstood!
6. Keep to the issues – Personal attacks, name-calling, embellishments, posturing and exaggerations will just make you look nasty and foolish. The issues should speak for you.
7. Swearing – Some people swear because they think it is funny or just part of their brand, which is fair enough if this is what your audience expects. I find though more people are put off than engaged by swearing, particularly where the quantity seems excessive even for swear fans. While you might like swearing, and might even think it is warranted, you will lose the support of your audience who want to see your points articulated well without resorting to it. If you must swear, give fair warning in your introduction, particularly if you are using audio or video.
8. Balance? – Can you balance it out with any positive, empathy or second perspectives? Is it possible you just got the wrong idea? Show that you are a human being with an issue, not going after someone for links and traffic.
9. Don’t sell – Make your point and leave it. Do not use the opportunity to sell or pump up your own stuff otherwise your audience will question your motives and you will lose their trust and credibility.
10. Use a mirror - Is your own house in order before you go attacking someone else? And spare a thought for how you would feel if you were on the receiving end of your article.

Bloody great, best-in-breed, article about online PR and marketing ethics by my buddy David Gelles of the Financial Times — he is surely a golden child and new media journalist rock star… be sure to put this article in front of your boss, whether you are a PR flack or are a corporate stooge — I think this article is actually going to be printed into the pink pages of the FT on Thursday, February 12 — go pick it up and hand it to the members of the C-suite, Blogs that spin a web of deception:

A web of deception By David Gelles

An overenthusiastic em­ployee from the computer supplies maker Belkin posted an offer online last month – $0.65 for anyone willing to write a positive review of Belkin products on Amazon.com. Several people took up the offer, producing gushing appraisals of Belkin products they had never used.

After a blogger exposed the scam, news organisations jumped on the story. The offer was removed and Belkin’s president weighed in with an apology.

The incident was a public relations disaster for Belkin. It was also a prime example of “Astroturfing”, the unsavoury marketing practice of generating fake grassroots enthusiasm for a product.

Given the anonymity afforded by the internet, it is hardly surprising that deceptive marketing is on the rise. Consumers are spending more time online and companies are seeking new ways to reach them.

But now, in an effort to regulate how employees behave on the web, companies and industry groups are developing their own online codes of ethics. They want to ensure that when staff do engage with social media, they act ethically.

Last year, Coca-Cola established its own set of social media guidelines and distributed them in a memo to all employees. The policy emphasises the need for transparency and encourages employees to use common sense when discussing the brand online. “We’ve always had very diverse channels to reach consumers,” says Adam Brown (pictured), digital communications director. “Wherever they are, that’s where we go. That’s now evolved into the need for a social media policy.”

So when Mr Brown went online to promote Coca-Cola’s Super Bowl advertisements, he followed the guidelines. On Facebook, Mr Brown announced that he was a Coke employee and pointed other users to the Coke ads on YouTube. On Pittsburgh Steelers fan forums, Mr Brown, who is from Pittsburgh, named his employer and then directed fans to the Coke blog, which had an interview with Steelers’ defensive star Troy Polamalu.

Mr Brown said more deliberate engagement with online conversations was a necessity for a global company such as Coca-Cola. “We’re mentioned several thousand times a day on blogs, and there are several hundred tweets about us on Twitter,” he says. “There is a lot of conversation taking place about our brand without us. Where appropriate, we wanted to start getting involved.”

Companies began interacting with social media years ago. But only recently have those involved with the industry perceived a need to develop ethical standards. Among the first to do so was The Word of Mouth Marketing Association, an organisation for the viral and buzz marketing industry. Womma published an ethics code in 2005, emphasising honesty of relationship, opinion and identity.

Since then, many companies have used the Womma code as a blueprint for their own guidelines. “Companies are learning every day that there is a right way and a wrong way to engage with social media,” says Paul Rand, vice-president of Womma’s board and head of its ethics project. “Some companies are learning by touching the burning pot; some companies are learning from the mistakes of ­others.”

One company that “touched the burning pot” is Shelfari, a social networking site for book lovers, owned by Amazon. As it battled for market share in late 2007, it came under fire for its poor design and clunky user interface. Soon, comments appeared on more than 50 blogs attesting to Shelfari’s greatness. “I have been on Shelfari for a couple of months now and absolutely love it,” read one. “Shelfari is such a great site. I joined a couple of months ago and I have been hooked on it ever since,” read another.

But all the comments were posted by the same user, “schaufferwaffer”, who was soon exposed as a Shelfari employee. Shelfari’s chief executive admitted to the Astroturfing (he blamed it on an intern who knew no better), and promised it would never happen again.

Such behaviour is declared out of line in the “disclosure best practices toolkit”, an ethics code drawn up by the Blog Council, an organisation for heads of social media at big companies. The document advises employees and agencies to announce whom they work for when communicating with blogs or bloggers. It also encourages employees to provide a means for contacting them directly, if someone they interact with via social media wants to follow up with a two-way conversation. The toolkit also warns against using pseudonyms.

IBM was one of the first companies to develop its own social media policy. In 2005, it published its “social computing guidelines”, which insist that employees write under their own names, using the first person, and make it clear they are speaking for themselves and not on behalf of IBM. It also prohibits employees from referencing clients, partners or suppliers without their approval.

UPS is developing its own online ethics policy after recognising how damaging Astro­turfing and other online misbehaviour can be for a company’s reputation. “If one of our airplanes goes down, we have a very clear plan for getting information to the media,” says Norman Black, director of global media services. “We realised we did not have a good plan for responding to a crisis on the ­internet.”

In some countries, deceptive marketing practices are not only frowned upon but also illegal. In the UK, the law identifies “falsely representing oneself as a consumer” as a punishable offence. And in 2006, the US Federal Trade Commission issued regulations stating that word-of-mouth marketers must disclose their relationships. But in spite of these new rules there has been little enforcement of the measures.

Even without prosecution, Belkin seems to have learnt its lesson. Melody Chalaban, speaking for the company, says Belkin will soon be holding seminars to teach employees how to interact ethically with social media, and is also considering joining Womma. “We want to stress that this is an isolated incident,” says Ms Chalaban. “We don’t endorse or condone unethical practices like this.”

Side Bar: The last post: underhand tactics can end in a PR disaster

* Flogging. Fake blogs can help companies get a personal voice behind a marketing campaign – but they risk a PR disaster if they are uncovered. When Sony tried to boost sales of its PSP portable gaming unit, it started a blog supposedly by two boys who wanted PSPs for Christmas. When it was revealed as a fake, Sony apologised and took it down.

* Astroturfing. A technique that gets its name from the practice of generating fake grassroots enthusiasm. One Florida company, PayPerPost, serves as a matchmaker between companies willing to pay for good press and bloggers willing to plug products that they have never used. After receiving criticism, PayPerPost now requires bloggers to disclose that their posts are sponsored.

* Comment spamming. Flooding the comment fields of blogs with enthusiastic notes about a company, even with full disclosure, is not welcomed by web users. When a Motorola employee commented on dozens of posts on a technology blog – each comment a plug for the new Motorola Krave – bloggers responded with snide criticisms of his spamming, which duly ceased.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

If you Google the name of our President and COO, “Chris Abraham“, you will see what it means to dominate the search engine results and own a position as an expert in a field.  We can do the same for your key staff.

Methods: Blogs — Yours & Others: Dominating the Online Space as an Expert & Generous Contributor. We will get your blog infrastructure and your content production policy established. This involves installation, set-up, and design of the blog software. To drive SEO it is important to get the relevant social bookmarking, ping server, etc. accounts and plug-ins set up and installed.

To further drive SEO, a powerful additional methodology is to mirror your blog content across multiple other blogs on highly-ranked blog hosting sites like blogspot, wordpress.com, etc., or under additional aggregation blogs you may set up under your own domain names.  This process will be automated at the outset and run without human effort thereafter.

Blog Content Creation Policy
We will help your team get the blogging policy right, following best practices in line with the informational guidelines of your company.   There is a clear culture of blogging and respecting and adhering to its norms and expectations will make the difference between you being welcomed as a respected contributor and being mocked as a soulless corporate shill (or an embarrassment and danger to your company).

It is essential to have a clear policy for your company’s bloggers, particularly in terms of outlining and reserving their freedoms as writers.  With a clear understanding by the blogger and by the company of what freedoms are allowed, you avoid cramping, overly-careful, stuffy-sounding, self-censoring while also avoiding cringe-inducing embarrassments of inappropriate disclosure and language.

Blog Content Creation System
The best system of content creation is to have the key staff members whose reputations are to be built writing the blog content themselves — that leads to the most honest, transparent, and bi-directionally informative information exchange. However, sometimes those key staff members simply don’t have the time, inclination, or writing talent to create that content.  In that case a content creation system and methodology must be put in place:

• Hiring or assigning professional bloggers or staffers with good writing abilities to produce the content under their names or
• Establishing a ghost-writing system where topics are suggested (by the writer or the key staffer), concept outline given by key staffer, posting written by the professional writer, posting edited and approved by key staffer, posting proofed by editor (optional), and article posted.

If this route is taken, there are workflow blog softwares that can be put in place and set up to manage this process.

Appearing on Others’ Blogs
By generously contributing to the community via bloggers in your spaces, you can get broad coverage and enjoy the implicit (or explicit) endorsement of these influencers.  We would help you get these content contribution requests by executing a Blogger Outreach. This is done by:

• Giving of yourself in the form of interviews, etc.
• Interviews are excellent relationship-builders that give you direct, personal access to the bloggers and builds up a connection for the future.  Interviews can be given via:
  • Email
  • Chat
  • Phone
  • Podcast (voice)
  • Vlog (video — either onsite or via video VOIP)

This list is by order of “live-ness” of the interview with email being very asynchronous, allowing time to reflect and gather info and Vlog interviews being very live.

Guest blogging by the key staff
Guest blogging is very warmly welcomed since it gives bloggers good content that they don’t have to write themselves, and it makes them look good because they are being honored as a valued platform.

Being a guest blogger gives you coverage on another site, increasing the number of locations you are appearing while giving you total control over your message and while driving your SEO by adding link-backs. Additionally, you get the implicit (or explicit) endorsement of the blogger in front of his readership.

It is important to be writing interesting, engaging content as a guest blogger and avoid presenting something that sounds like a callow pitch.

If the key staff member is not interested or capable of doing the guest blogging, then the ghostwriting approach outlined above can be followed

Podcasting and Vlogging (video blogging)
Podcasting is very much like blogging, but in audio format.  While it is not as SEO-friendly as text-based blogging, it has a stronger “star-quality” effect, as the listeners develop a stronger human connection to the podcaster.    The lower SEO-friendliness can be counteracted by posting transcripts of the podcast along with the podcast itself.

It can be done very simply, but generally it is good to have quality raw audio, a polished intro and outro, and good tone balancing so that the podcast sounds somewhat professional and is auditorily a pleasure to listen to.

We can guide your staff in setting up the recording mechanisms, get your intro/outro composed, and have the raw audio balanced and cut into a finished podcast.

It is also good to have clear, interesting concepts to speak about and an effective style of delivery.  It’s easy to be boring or irritating.

While the ghostwriting approach outlined above can be followed, much more responsibility lies on the key staff member who is recording, since it is a very “live” experience — you cannot read a pre-written article and come across as a compelling Podcaster.

The staff of Abraham Harrison, LLC, can get the transcripts written and assist in the posting of the podcasts and the maintenance of the podcast blog website.

Vlogging follows the same rules as podcasting in regards to production and quality, but the pressure on the “star” is that much more intense.

Abraham Harrison’s staff can guide your staff in getting the recording and production infrastructure set up.

An advantage of vlogging is that it has the even higher “star” effect upon the key staff member doing the vlogging, and the videos can be posted on all the video-sharing sites (dozens) to get more coverage and dominate search results.

We at Abraham Harrison can handle the video asset distribution for you, or train your team in the method.

Contact Mark Harrison, CEO of Abraham Harrison, for more information

I am not willing or able to say that the following 91 blog posts about social media, blogging, new media, social networking, etc, are the definite top-91 posts because I didn’t have the time or attention to go through all of my 5,437 blog posts:

1. Social Media Reputation Management
2. The Social Mediasphere is Truly Global
3. Real PR Takes Real Relationships, Really
4. Imagine Meeting Someone in a Bar
5. What Motivated You to Learn About Social Media?
6. Strong Community Demands Strong Leadership
7. Three Mistakes PR Folks Make Pitching Bloggers
8. What in the Heck are Twitter Hashtags?
9. Do Social Media Solutions Stagnate After Acquisition?
10. What is the Difference Between Marketing and PR Online?
11. Should Your Business Tap Social Networks?
12. Comprehensive Online Conversation Marketing Campaigns
13. Marketing in the New Millenium is PR
14. Blogger Outreach is PR and Not Marketing
15. Only Public Diplomacy Can Heal the U.S. Brand Perception Crisis Abroad
16. PR Needs Geeks
17. Corporations Do Social Media Wrong
18. Online Field Marketing
19. Web 2.0 Mirrors America as She Actually Appears
20. Live Commercials are the New Black for Television
21. Online Outreach and Online Engagement Primer
22. Do PR Execs and Lawyers Have the Same Bad Rep?
23. The Gap Between the Geeks and the Wonks Needs to be Mended
24. Old PR Needs to Learn to Love Not Loathe the People
25. What is a Vertical Blog?
26. Online Communities are Real Communities of Real People
27. Caveat Emptor et Lector
28. Long Tail PR Requires New Media Marketing and Online Outreach
29. Control the Language and you Control the Mind
30. PR A-List Bloggers are Alexa Amateurs
31. Online Communities are Not Virtual
32. Bloggers Can Ignore Basic Journalism Ethics
33. What I Would Have Done if I Were Edelman Me2Revolution
34. The New York Times Code of Ethics is Mandatory for Journalists Not Bloggers
35. In Defense of Edelman over Bribery Charges
36. Online Publicity
37. RSS Feed and Syndication Strategy
38. People Talk Online Like They Do Over Coffee or Across the Cubicle
39. Hill Holliday is an Expert at Textual Healing Flash for SEO
40. Repost: Blogs the Main Stream Media Read Redux
41. Online Reputation Management
42. Ping Servers and Wire Services Converge
43. Prospect Bloggers Before Blogger Outreach
44. New Press Releases Need Not Be New Media
45. How Many Influencers, Influencials, and Opinion Leaders are There?
46. Effective PR Blogging
47. Search Engine Optimization Works like a Champ
48. Magical Misdirection in Public Affairs and Politics
49. We Bloggers are Kingmakers
50. Authentic is as Authentic Does in the Blogosphere
51. Your Key Online Influencers are a One In A Million
52. MSM is Losing Control of the Press via Blogging, the Next Gutenberg Revolution
53. The Gender Divide in the Blogosphere is Actually a Literacy Divide
54. How Can Main Stream Media and Bloggers/Citizen Journalists Collaborate to Produce Better News/Information?
55. Is There a Widening Gap Between Mainstream Media and Bloggers/Citizen Journalists?
56. What is the Diff Between Advertising, Media Relations, PR, Marketing, Selling, Branding, and SPAM
57. The Definition of Medium as in “Because the Medium is the Message”
58. Why I Blog What I Blog on this Particular Blog
59. Brand Protection on Blogs
60. Articles About Blogging for Business, Professional Blogging, Corporate Blogging and PR Blogging
61. A Sample of the Best Blog, Blogging, and Internet Articles
62. Online Advertising’s Tipping Point Approaches
63. PR Blogging for Brand Promotion
64. The Interconnectedness of the Blogosphere and Mediasphere
65. Top Ten Rules for New Media Branding
66. An Argument for Online Market Intelligence
67. Virtual Communities v Blogosphere
68. Caveat Emptor et Lector
69. Always Remember the 95 Theses of the Cluetrain Manifesto
70. Effective PR Blogging
71. Control Your Google Listing
72. Quick Blog Search Engine Optimization Tips You Can Control
73. Don’t Worry You Didn’t Miss the Height of the Blogosphere
74. The Blogosphere Exists and it Can Include MSM
75. Comprehensive Online Conversation Marketing Campaigns
76. Three Mistakes PR Folks Make Pitching Bloggers
77. Earned Media for SEO and Profit
78. Using Twitter for Branding and Engagement
79. Social Media Reputation Management
80. The Powerful SEO Benefits of Blogger PR Outreach
81. Always Remember the 95 Theses of the Cluetrain Manifesto
82. Should Your Business Tap Social Networks?
83. Blogger Outreach is PR and Not Marketing
84. Live Commercials are the New Black for Television
85. All About Word-of-Mouth Marketing AKA Buzz Marketing
86. Journalism Gods Agree with Me on The Bribe
87. Marketing Online
88. What to Do When Your Decide Your Company Should Blog
89. Fake it ‘Til You Make It Repost
90. Purina ONE is Role Model for Word-Of-Mouth Marketing
91. What Networking is Versus What Networking Should Be