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Search Is Brand

A White Paper issued by Market Sentinel and Weboptimiser outlines the challenges posed to brands by search engines and blogging - and explains the tools and techniques companies can use to fight back...

A new White Paper issued by Market Sentinel and Weboptimiser outlines the challenges posed to brands by search engines and blogging. In turn it explains the tools and techniques companies can use to fight back, improving their online reputation and positioning...

[Register and post your own comments on this article below...]

The rise of blogs and message boards as influential places for customers to seek help on buying decisions, combined with the rise of search engines, poses a serious threat to brands. 87% of the population use search engines as their primary means of finding sites.

Mixed results for brands

Search results are increasingly impacted by commentary from message boards and blogs. In a recent survey of a Google search on the top 50 UK grocery brands, 20 were found to have detractors in the top ten results, including Coca- Cola, Walker’s crisps, Lucozade, Mars bars and McCain oven chips.

Twenty five of the top thirty FTSE companies were "not easily found" by search.

Blogs permeating the mainstream

Blogs are increasingly rivalling mainstream media for mindshare. 15 of the top 37 online news sources are blogs. Blog stories have recently had serious consequences for brands – Kryptonite locks recalled their product at a cost of $10m.

Bad PR can also be mitigated by intelligent, well-optimised blogging, and the report illustrates this with a few hypothetical tips for Madonna and Guy Ritchie!

New research covered in the White Paper shows that online recommendation correlates strongly to stock price.

But the white paper details how brands can take action to minimise the risks:

• Auditing and monitoring the threats to their interests
• Ensuring their web presence reflects their message
• Optimising their web presence for usability
• Making their web presence search engine friendly
• Ensuring that "brand detractors" are responded to, or outmarketed
• Creating and optimising a corporate blog
• Using search engines for tactical ‘audibility’
• Benchmarking customer loyalty against the competition

If companies use the most recent techniques of online monitoring and search engine optimisation, and if they borrow some of the techniques of the bloggers themselves, they can ensure their own message is clearly heard in the blogosphere and reflected in search results.

A copy of the full report (PDF format) can be downloaded from: http://www.marketsentinel.com/files/Searchisbrand280605.pdf

The report is jointly authored by Mark Rogers of Market Sentinel and Nicholine Hayward of Weboptimiser.

About Market Sentinel:
Market Sentinel monitor blogs and message boards on behalf of corporate clients and advise companies on how to make their voices heard in the "blogosphere". CEO Mark Rogers was a co-founding commissioning editor of BBC Online and co-founder of Amazon's multi-platform shopping service Amazon.com Anywhere. Market Sentinel CTO Ian Davis was co-founder of Calaba (now Surf Kitchen), and pioneered and co-wrote XML news syndication standards.

About Weboptimiser:
Weboptimiser was founded by former copywriter Nicholine Hayward in 1996 with CEO David White. Since then, as Marketing Director, Nicholine has helped to pioneer the vision, technology and terminology of ethical, brand friendly search engine marketing. She has collaborated on a book, ‘Dot Com Heroes’, published several White Papers –including one covering the integration between online and offline marketing – and spoken widely at industry events.

Related event: New Directions In Search – 8 September 2005

Discover the latest trends in local vs global search, geotargeting, integrated search, metasearch and mobile search from leading search engine and SEO/SEM companies including Overture, Infospace, Neutralize and Seekport at New Directions In Search on 8 September. Nicholine Hayward will be speaking at this event on integrating online search with offline search and marketing.