Digital PR Strategies: Using Social Media to Influence Online Brand Visibility and Reputation
Integrated social media campaigns using public relations techniques to engage in web-based conversations can have a big influence on online brand visibility and reputation.
In fact for many marketers, social media PR campaigns are the key to obtaining G Cred – having your name, business, product or service, ranked positively in the first page of natural or organic search results on Google.
G Cred is the ‘cred of the next decade’ according to John Follis, author of the book ‘The Credibility Factor’ (quoted in US ‘Ad Week’).
As consumers become more web savvy and discerning, high rankings in natural or organic search (the main part of the online page) are becoming more important. This is because search engines become swamped with advertising (called ad words or pay-per-click) which appears on the right hand side or top of the page and identified as being a ‘sponsored link’, which research shows most consumers recognise as advertising.
Search engines – and especially the market-leader Google – are now far beyond being a simple Yellow Pages directory type service. Today they are a much more sophisticated commercial information source about companies, products, services and people.
“Google is not a search engine. Google is a reputation-management system. Online your reputation is quantifiable, findable and totally unavoidable”, from The See-Through CEO – Wired Magazine
Today’s social media environment exposes marketers to risks
Most marketers simply don’t appreciate the depth and breadth to which search engines are scanning and collecting information that can end up in the public domain for the world to see.
Today’s social media environment gives search engines a much richer vein of content to tap into. It’s not just the content on the company website that might end up on Google.
Information from blogs, podcasts, videos, online newsletters, online media releases, RSS feeds, del.icio.us links, tags, IM accounts etc is being pumped onto the Internet daily- and is being vetted by the search engine robots.
Google doesn’t care about whether what it publishes is good or bad. The risk for an organisation is that potentially information from up to a dozen electronic sources may be read and assessed by a search engine. Some of it may then end up being listed within a search engine page to be viewed by anyone who cares to look.
For example, any comment made on a blog by an employee that references a specific company or product could end up on page one of a Google search. It’s the equivalent of an internal memo ending up on the front page of a newspaper and what’s more, it is archived on the web – a permanent footprint.
Marketers need to revise their thinking about search engine marketing techniques
Until recently for many marketers, obtaining coverage on search engines such as Google has involved a dual approach:
·Advertise online through pay-per-click campaigns. It’s done by an external agency that researches key words to be targeted. It requires no input from the marketer.
·Optimise the web site. It’s done by a web designer and/or external search engine optimisation specialist. Much of it involves technical behind-the-scenes work.
Today, that’s increasingly not enough. With the explosion of the Internet, search engines are collecting – and ranking – content based on a multitude of sources on the web. The brand, product or marketing manager now has the power to more directly influence rankings.
That’s because content is king. While building a website so it is technically search-engine friendly is still fundamental, the proliferation of social media tools means the criteria for achieving top search engine rankings has changed.
If a marketer wants to achieve G cred, then it needs to implement a broad web-based integrated communications strategy, based on a solid publishing platform and strong content. Ideally this strategy should be driven by the public relations and communication specialists.
Social media actually gives marketers significant opportunities
Used in a positive way, web-based conversations can have a big influence on online brand visibility and reputation.
Considerations marketers need to take into account include:
·If you take great care to ensure all your traditional marketing – from advertising to collateral- is consistently ‘on message’ a similar degree of control and management needs to take place in your online communications. It should be noted however, that to truly engage, being ‘on conversation’ and listening rather than just on message is important.
·It’s not just your website that is a source for search engines such as Google to examine and publish. It’s every piece of communication – formal and informal – which uses the web. This also includes the personal profiles of your staff, their facebook pages, their LinkedIn profiles etc
·Engaging with customers, influencers and stakeholders on the web through the medium of social media creates a community of interest about a particular topic that often has more potential to achieve rankings on Google and other search engines than the company-produced web site.
·In fact, increasingly, alternative forms of publishing such as Blogs, podcasts and video blogs are often key components of a social media strategy that will in turn help achieve G-Cred.
·Search engine rankings seldom stay static. Something that ranks top of the first page today can have slipped off by next week. While the Google algorithm is incredibly complex and changes often, what is a constant is the importance of fresh and relevant content. In short, new content needs to be constantly created and published/posted.
Social media PR is about creating – and maintaining – a conversation with communities though providing credible and useful – content. It’s this conversation that engages and draws in others to give topics the substance and credibility that results in them appearing on the top page of Google or another search engine.
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Hunter Valley Wine Association Formed
The Hunter Valley has launched a new organisation and marketing campaign to emphasise its family heritage, while providing a fresh direction for the historic NSW wine region.
With the tagline ‘We are Family’, the newly formed Hunter Valley Wine Industry Association (HVWIA) has a strategic plan that will emphasise the importance of the region’s winemaking families and generational changes that have occurred.
The committee behind the project represents many of the significant family-run wineries that have been in the Hunter for up to five generations, as well as newer families now putting their own stamp on the region.
It includes Geoff Krieger from Brokenwood Wines, Andrew Margan from Margan Family Wines, Bruce Tyrrell from Tyrrell’s Wines and Christina Tulloch of Tulloch Wines. Also involved are Ken Bray of Braemore Wines, Andrew Thomas of Thomas Wines, Greg West from McWilliam’s and Will Creedon from Roche Wines, among other long-standing regional identities.
Australia’s oldest and most visited wine region has formed the HVWIA to combine the efforts of grape growers, vignerons, winemakers and cellar door operators. It collectively aims to develop and support the Hunter Valley by implementing a strategic business plan that addresses marketing, viticulture, winemaking and policy issues.
The HVWIA will take over the roles of both the Hunter Valley Vineyard Association (HVVA) and Wine Hunter Marketing, formed after an exhaustive 18-month process
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Batman fans beat Godfather with ’rank trick’
The blogosphere is buzzing over claims internet users enamoured with the latest Batman film have been sabotaging the reputation of The Godfather on one of the world’s biggest movie websites.
Fans of The Dark Knight, which broke box office records when it was released earlier this month, have voted the latest Batman instalment into the number one spot on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) Top 250 Movies list.
But several blogs have aired allegations that fans of The Dark Knight provided bad reviews of the former top movie, The Godfather, to skew the ratings.
"Could it be that Dark Knight fans are intentionally voting down Godfather in hopes of keeping The Dark Knight at the top spot?” asked one writer on movie blog "/film".
"The percentage of users who gave Godfather a 1 out of 10 grew from 6.1 per cent to 6.4 per cent, just enough to push (The Shawshank Redemption) ahead, while the percentage… who loved the film, giving it a 10 out of 10, remained the same."
"According to the ridiculously active message boards on TDK’s page, the movement to promote the movie to the top of the 250 involves registering multiple accounts and using them to give TDK 10 stars while simultaneously rating The Godfather one star, keeping it down below."
One blogger on technology website CNET said the event was the latest "meltdown" in the "wisdom of crowds" mentality that underpinned Web 2.0 sites like Wikipedia and Digg.
"We have seen, with some consistency, that the system can be broken or manipulated by the actions of a passionate group of individuals acting as a mob," Harrison Hoffman wrote.
"If these incidents are not largely prevented in the future and become commonplace, we risk a lot of people losing faith in this otherwise very useful system.
"Most serious movie watchers would argue that claiming that The Dark Knight is the best movie of all time is ridiculous."
A similar campaign was staged after the release of Lord of the Rings to promote that film to the top of IMDb’s Top 250 and was sure to happen again in the future, Radar said.
Not including such internet campaigns, The Godfather has been at the top of the list for almost a decade.
Only regular IMDb users can vote for films on the website’s Top 250 Movies list
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Google unveils Street View across Australia
Australia will today become the third country to have its cities, streets and landmarks "scanned into" Google as the search giant unveils its most ambitious Street View project to date.
Google Street View is an online tool that lets users take a virtual tour of landscapes from their computer by perusing an interactive database of millions of 360-degree snapshots.
The snapshots are taken by a fleet of cars fitted with special cameras that drive across the country, capturing images on every street corner and along every highway.
The technology has so far been used to create virtual replicas of major US cities and the route of this year’s Tour De France, but Google will today unveil its most comprehensive Street View project to date – the mapping of virtually all of southeast Australia and much of the east and west coasts.
Users will be able to wander the streets of Australian cities and towns from Port Douglas to Perth and along the Stuart and Eyre highways that cross the country, as well as view icons such as the Australian War Memorial and the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
Google product manager Andrew Foster said that because the company’s mapping tool was based on technology developed in Australia, it was excited to bring Street View to the country.
"Google Maps has its origins as an Australian invention so we’re thrilled to bring Street View here as one of the first countries in the world," he said.
Google Maps, the online mapping service that incorporates Street View, is based on a product created in Sydney by Where 2 Technologies that was purchased by Google in 2004.
Mr Foster said the company’s ultimate goal was to have every road catalogued on Street View. Australia will be the country most covered by the technology, but there are notable exceptions. Uluru will be absent from Google Street View Australia at launch. Google spokesperson Rob Shilkin said the search giant had applied for the relevant permits to photograph the Northern Territory, but that images of some areas were still being processed.
Street View Australia would be updated in "a few months" with more images, and Street View in general was updated "from time to time", Mr Foster said.
The Google Street View fleet of cars – which company representatives made a point of identifying as Holden Astras – began capturing images across Australia last November.
In response to security concerns raised in the US, Google said last year its Street View service would not identify faces or license plates in Australia.
The company has recently introduced an automatic face-blurring technology designed to obscure the identities of people caught in the lens of Street View. Mr Shilkin said that the low resolution of images would prevent vehicle number plates from being identifiable.
Users can also report any Street View images they believe to be inappropriate through a link on the website. Mr Foster said it would take anywhere between a few minutes to "a day or so" to remove to offending images once they were reported.
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