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Live blogging on the day can be followed on Multilingual-Search.com.

Is it a reasonable complaint?

Assess the complaint. What is the complaint about?   Is it reasonable?  Can your Customer Support team put the problem right, by replacing damaged goods, or offering a refund?

Is it easy for customers to contact your Customer Support team?  The correct action may be to put the complainant directly in touch with the people that can help them (and do make sure that they can help them, otherwise the complainant will be doubly aggrieved).  In this case, respond to the original comments politely.  Don’t make false promises or confirm/deny the original complaint.  Be sincere

Is the comment libellous?

Libel is a tricky issue, but if the comment is excessively heated (“Don’t use blah.com – they are rip-off merchants!”) it’s probably not worth your while getting into a debate.  It may be worth your while contacting the publisher/webmaster and pointing out the wording.  Most forums have strict policies about such content and will either remove the post, or remind the poster to abide by their T&Cs.

Don’t demand the post to be removed! Again, that could make the reputation problem even worse if you are too heavy-handed.

Is it that big a deal?

If the negative post is appearing prominently on searches for your brand name, this could definitely cause you a problem.  In this case,  the negative post will surely appear on a highly popular forum/blog and replying to the original post may well lengthen the life of the negative comment.

In this scenario, the best action is to “push down” the comments by engaging in a PR campaign that will generate lots of top level results.

If the post is hidden away on the 5th page of results on an obscure forum or blog, it’s probably best not to take any action, other than to learn from any mistakes your company may have made.

Reputation Management tips – get the basics right….

1. Make sure your customer complaints route is effective and can be easily found
2. Don’t rush into responding
3. The customer may not always be right, but they should always be spoken to as if they might be right

Adapting your writing style is a necessity in order to appeal to different readers; also the style of writing depends on who your community is. Adjust how formal, or quirky your tone of voice is to suit the expectations of your readership.

Be interesting yet factual where you can. Make sure your headline grabs the reader’s attention, so it gives them the urge to read on… Creating content does take time, so try not to rush, but do set yourself a realistic deadline.

Online PR is used more now than it was 10 years ago, with the internet now established as a primary communications route and the increase of search engine optimisation (SEO), online PR has developed with the help of SEO techniques to gain prominent search rankings in the major search engines.

Press releases

The use of high value keywords is essential when writing press releases for online distribution, also high quality links are what takes your audience to your websites products or services.

When writing press releases it is essential to keep the content interesting and provide insights or useful information like statistics to enhance the likability factor so your audience will continue reading. Knowing your audience is key when creating a public document, the style and way an article is written needs to appeal to the reader. Don’t forget to include your keywords!

Press release distribution

There are many paid and free resources online to send press releases to, depending on your online press release campaign budget. Not all resources will allow you to publish links; however some will include your homepage URL in the company information. It’s worth noting that getting a story published on a site which doesn’t allow links may offer substantially higher value than one that allows multiple links – such as the BBC site. Publishing your press releases may be time consuming, but after a week or so you may start to notice search results for your keywords in the most popular search engines like, Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Email marketing: Is a form of direct marketing – sending emails out to customers / clients with interesting offers as well as industry news will help get you noticed and promote specific areas of your website.

Blogs: A company blog will enhance your presence online providing you give your audience interesting and useful information, whether it’s about your brand or the industry sector you are in. It helps to include links and produce SEO friendly content to ensure good search engine visibility.

Articles: updating your audience by providing current news updates through press releases will help improve traffic if you use high quality links and fully optimised content, as well as good quality online news wire resources.

Social Media: maximise your blog posts and articles by publishing links on social networks such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

More traditional ways to help improve web traffic includes, search engine optimisation (SEO), link building and pay per click (PPC).

Experian Hitwise – has information from data centres in the US and UK as well as some European countries, more specifically stats and data from UK internet usage.

comScore – gives you up to date digital market intelligence from across the globe.

Alexa – includes information such as traffic metrics, search analytics, demographics and much more… from countries across the world.

In the SEM arena I have found the following very useful:

Forums:
http://www.multilingual-seo.com/
http://www.globalsocialmedia.info/

Blog sites:
Multilingual Search: Although this is an international search marketing site, it’s great to find out what’s happening in the rest of the world in the SEM arena.
Online Marketing Blog: This sites is great for marketing, social media/networking tips and much more…

Twitter:
http://twitter.com/mashable
http://twitter.com/andyatkinskruge

Social search tools such as Topsy, IceRocket and Social Mention to name but a few, work just like conventional search engines where SEO plays a big part and keyword insertion is essential.

There are many social tracking tools available free on the web or ones in which you have to pay – my advice is to use several tools to help quantify your social tracking research to aim for good overall balance.

Here are some tools which are available now:
Topsy
Trendrr
Social Mention
Tweetbeep
Trendpedia
Trendistic
IceRocket
Postrank Analystics
TwitterCounter
Hootsuite

This highlights how publishing has moved on and answers the question;  “What is the perfect headline?”  Answer:  “You need two of them to cover all bases.

Back in the day, headline writers were mostly bothered about space – and they still are if they are working on print publications.

Punchy, snappy, short – this is the style that most of the memorable newspaper headlines adopted.  Take the  Sun front page headline on the sinking of the Belgrano:  GOTCHA! Its boldness made it famous, but it would have baffled the search engines.

One of my favourite headlines of all time is from a report on an expected victory by Inverness Caledonian over Celtic: Super Cally Go Balistic Celtic Are Atrocious - it’s perfect…as a memorable headline, but less so as an search engine-friendly title.

Title tags are incredibly important to search engines, but they aren’t the only important part of the story as the keywords (and repetitions of) in the main body, category of news, tags, alt tags, links in etc. all play their part in the search engines reaching an understanding of the content.  Or not – see examples of Google News screw-ups.

So, unless you have a content management system that can deal with dual headlines, you’re best to aim for a couple of these options per headline.

Straight-forward, factual – using well-rehearsed keywords.  Thus, the Sun’s Gotcha would be “Falklands War:  Controversy over sinking of Belgrano”.

Be bold and controversial, but keep some keywords in.  “Bloggers revolt over scandalous Belgrano sinking”

Think, to hell with the search engines – and go with puns!

From a search engine perspective, ideally, keep your headline around 60 characters (for web listings)

Optimising your article could mean that 1000 people read it rather than 100. Getting your thoughts or article read from across the World Wide Web could be very important for your online status and reputation building.

I’m trying to get at how PR and SEO cross over, how doing some keyword research and optimising your text can get you known in your area of expertise. Here are a few simple rules I generally use:

1. decide on your subject area
2. do some keyword research, general, then narrow down your search topic
3. keep the keywords safe, as they could come in handy another time – always do a quick check to ensure you have picked the most searched for terms
4. write your text keeping your keywords in mind
5. When reading back your text insert your keywords > N.B. make sure the text still makes sense.

Inserting keywords can make all the difference to how many people view your piece.