In this article I want to address the importance of mining of blogs and other online content by companies so that they can make sure that they know what is being said about them and accordingly respond to it. Your advertising and public relations efforts will be useless if there is a lot of negative content on the Internet about you.
We live in a world where almost anyone with access to the Internet is now a publisher. You buy something at Wal-Mart, bring it home, you don't like it, and the next thing you do is to post a message on your blog about the product. Even though it may be an isolated incident of a bad product, but that information will remain on the Internet forever and will hurt your brand. People's decisions are influenced by what they read on the Internet.
Let me give you an example. We recently received an unsolicited commercial email (or SPAM) from a Margaret Mayor at Freesites.com, a company that runs a business called AllFeeds that offers a program called "Google Backfill." Since the email did not look like SPAM and since we are a business, I reasoned that they were entitled to send solicitations to us, and I opened it. It looked interesting since we do carry AdSense ads on our portfolio of websites. Ms. Mayor informed us that the program works with an existing AdSense account by replacing Google's public service ads with paying ads from Allfeeds that look and feel exactly the same as the ads Google would normally display.
While public service ads is not a major issue for us, I decided to investigate any way. A quick Google search showed only negative information about the company/service. People had bad comments about the business model, the process being too cumbersome, and how little money people made. When I visited their website, none of these issues were addressed. My final decision - I am very suspicious of the offer and have decided not to display their ads.
Donald Rumsfeld, the Defense Secretary, put it very nicely when he realized that the US Government can take too long to respond to a negative message. He talked about "a global Internet with universal access and no inhibitions, e-mail, cell phones, digital cameras wielded by anyone and everyone" and "a seemingly casual disregard for the protection of classified information, resulting in a near continuous hemorrhage of classified documents, to the detriment of the country."
This is also happening to companies of all sizes. Once you start researching a company or a product, you read more negative information than positive information. The reason is simple. When you are happy with something, you don't bother saying nice things. But if you get mistreated or if you are unhappy, you go online to post a rant. That is why it is critical that companies have a strategy to deal with this. The Bush Administration did not have a strategy to manage the communication process for its social security privatization message and there was just so much negative news without any credible and meaningful response from the White House. No surprise then that the initiative is dead. (Related article: Lessons from failure of the initiative to privatize Social Security)
What can you do to make sure that you control the message about your company and/or products?
- Whatever you call it (data mining, business intelligence, etc.), you need to keep a close eye in real time on anything that can affect you. As soon as news breaks, the bloggers take over within minutes, and if it takes you even an hour to come up with a response, it may be too late already. So it is important that you make your PR team work 24X7X365 and give them more power so that they can respond with a press release without approvals from two-dozen people. (Related article: Press release strategy)
- Do not just communicate with mainstream media (MSM) or your preferred journalists. In many cases, a company's PR staff will simply speak to whoever calls or will send an email message to a handful of journalists. That does not work. Most credible bloggers will look at your website to see if you have a press release on the topic. If not, they will simply go ahead and publish whatever they want (without even including your response), and if you publish your press release on your website a few hours later, the damage will already be done.
- Create a section on your website that addresses issues that are circulating on the Internet about your company/product. You will be hurt if you ignore them. But if you systematically answer each and every question, search engines will eventually show your response in search results too and someone doing the research will get to make a more balanced opinion. Allfeeds.com does not address any of the issues raised by many folks in bulletin boards and forums.
Recommended article: How to maximize exposure of a press release?
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