With so many people Googling just about anything online, businesses and individuals are now starting to realize the value of maintaining a positive brand online. Brand managers in particular have a reason to be doubly concerned: the world is full of people out to destroy your brand. Disgruntled employees, dissatisfied customers, competitors…they all have a vested interest in spreading negative information about your brand.

Building brand equity used to be a ’simple’ task. Block off primetime TVC ad spots, publish full-page Sunday newspaper ads, or treat journalists out to lunch. But the growth of consumer-generated media (blogs, forums, messageboards, video sites, etc.) has forced brand managers to rethink their traditional brand management model.

Now imagine thousands upon thousands of “reverse evangelists” publishing negative (not necessarily malicious) content about your brand at the push of a button. Worse, this content is easily found and indexed by search engines, which gives the content the ability to spread at viral speed and efficiency. Whatever brand equity brand managers spent years of offline PR to develop, online buzz can erode overnight (destroy even).

Consider the case of PLDT myDSL.

Weathering the User Generated Storm

For people interested in getting broadband access in the Philippines, most searchers would start their online hunt for a service provider via brand-based keyword searches like “PLDT myDSL” or generic keyword searches like “DSL Philippines”. When you do a brand-based search for PLDT myDSL you get the following results in Google and Yahoo:

First page results for “PLDT myDSL” in Google

Now if you’re a DSL service provider in the Philippines, you’d want positive-to-neutral pages showing up when you do a search. Nothing can hurt online and offline conversions more than a seething review or destructive blog comments left by disgruntled customers. I’ve highlighted the pages which contain negative user generated content about PLDT myDSL.

If 5 out of 10 first page listings give searchers a negative vibe, it doesn’t help your brand. You’ll have to spend a considerable amount of resources offline to counter the negative buzz generated by these 5 pages online. For PLDT myDSL’s case it’s worse, as their target market uses the Web for research purposes more than say a customer looking for a local vulcanizing shop. Independent reviews by bloggers can be particularly damaging since it can snowball into a PR nightmare overnight as more and more bloggers join the conversation, turning public perception against your brand.

How many online searchers were influenced into not subscribing to the service after reading the critical content on these 5 sites? Worse, how many online searchers actually signed up as a new subscriber with a direct competitor?

Companies like PLDT would do well to get some of their PR people to start monitoring the Internet channel. Online reputation management is the industry term for this specialized activity. If you’re looking to start such an initiative inhouse, try partnering your traditional PR people with search marketing professionals. SEM people are the de facto experts for finding ‘hurtful’ and ‘helpful’ buzz online. Give an experienced search marketer 5 minutes with Google and chances are he or she will be able to dig up dirt on your company, your executive team and your product from 2 years back. Search marketing experts become even more valuable since it’s those same experts who can directly influence what searchers see or read about you online.

Perhaps the most damning viral case against PLDT myDSL was the PLDT call center agent who was caught cursing a customer on tape. As soon as the audio file of the conversation got out, bloggers ran with this story for weeks. YouTubers joined the fray and uploaded remixed versions of the conversation. The controversy even made its way to mainstream media. We can’t put a peso amount to the damage this controversy has brought to the PLDT brand, but it has to be substantial.

Interested in learning how you can protect your brand online? Contact me via mobile: +639189066260 or email: marc@macalua.com.