From the category archives:

web site promotion tips

Reputation Offense – Can You Prevent Reputation Attacks?

by Tinu

It’s tricky. How do you catch a ball no one has thrown yet? And how do you measure how well you’re catching the balls you can’t see?

Better yet, just what in the heck am I even talking about?

Managing your reputation online.

It’s one of the fears that executives at successful companies have about the internet – anyone can say anything about any person, place or thing on the web, and it can go completely unchallenged as long as it doesn’t rise to the level of libel (or slander in the case of video or audio.)

And that’s one way to look at it. But what’s missing is that search and social are the ultimate referees.

The assumption is that what ever information out there is

1- find-able,

2- usable,

3- relevant and

4- thought to be so by search engines and people using social media.

This assumption is fueled by the fact that is it technically correct sometimes. However, it isn’t always practically so.

Just because another company can say – or has said – something bad about you doesn’t mean that item is going to appear whenever your name is mentioned. If you know to look for a particular article by a specific name, then yes, that article would be much easier to find, assuming the people who published it know how to bring it to a search engine’s attention, or at least to the attention of someone who uses social media sites like Facebook or Twitter.

On the other hand, people may just be looking up your company name to make sure you aren’t running a scam, or to find positive reviews about you before they buy. If that’s the case, a lone article against you may not show up – IF the other hundreds of positive commentary is already at the top and well-supported.

What if it does? Well, there are defenses against that, but I’m writing about the offensive today, so we won’t wade too deeply into those waters now.  (If you have an emergency, feel free to call me.) [click to continue...]

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Hashtags and TV

by Tinu

I just finished reading an article called Why #hashtags Belong on TV.

In case you don’t know what hashtags are, Twitter says “The # symbol, called a hashtag, is used to mark keywords or topics in a Tweet. It was created organically by Twitter users as a way to categorize messages.”

Here’s a quote from the article:

With on-screen hashtags, networks are tapping into existing conversations. TV shows regularly appear in the Twitter trending topics during prime time. Special events, such as awards shows (#oscars) and sporting events (#sb45), are especially popular for live tweeting.

My comment:

Cable networks with smaller audiences like Bravo have been heavily promoting hashtags, and have gone so far as to have 15 – 30 second spots during commercial breaks featuring what was taking place in the Twitter stream during the commercial, as far back as 2009. And though it seems like it’s not a significant enough portion of America that uses social media at that level, the viewers who gather around those hashtags make much more of an impact on the shows with smaller audiences.

But it’s even deeper than that. A few short years ago, if network executives wanted to take the temperature of the market, they either had to

  • wait for the market to respond – usually in an unfavorable way,
  • organize in-take research such as focus groups, or
  • get third-party data from organizations like Nielsen’s TV Ratings

The one thing all these research methods have in common is that there is a time delay.

With hashtags, even if the segment of the market they’re measuring is small – they can now get immediate feedback. People will tell them how they feel about the show while they are watching.

Think about how valuable it would be to your business, to get access to real-time research on what your prospects and customers think about your product and services as they are using it. Think about how much faster you can improve your products, make changes, provide support, respond to, or even predict market trends.

We’ll come back to that momentarily. There’s another point we have to review first.

Through developing Twitter communities, Bravo is also developing more rabid fans – there’d be a furor if any of the Real Housewives shows were to go off the air unexpectedly. (Well, except Miami and DC. Boring incarnations – but again, guess how they figured out the market reaction.)

Twitter is how they found out what the viewers were thinking. And don’t think Twitter doesn’t know how powerful the hashtag is for TV.

[click to continue...]

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