Online reputation management professionals advocate creating multiple profile pages on social sites, forums and blogs for, let’s face it, parasite SEO tactics for the entity you’re doing ORM services for. What most pros fail to tell you is that most of these social sites are open, meaning they allow other users to add content, either via testimonials, comments or thread replies. This makes it easy for anyone with sinister plans on your reputation to hijack a seemingly positive/neutral page and load it with potentially damaging information.

Yes rely on these established sites for your ORM profile pages, but make sure you have moderation enabled for the UGC sections. Do not push a specific thread, blog post or profile page up the SERPs if you have no means of controlling the user generated conversation that can (and will) occur. There’s nothing funny or easy about having to push down a Wikipedia entry or forum thread that has mutated into an out-of-control complaints board for your company’s customers.

Blog in blog out you hear about the social media importance of bloggers in the influencing/evangelizing mix of things. Prevalent 2.0 knowledge would have you believe that for any online WOMM initiative to flourish, A-listers would have to be seeded, fed and sometimes paid to spread (maybe even host) the virus. Previous conference discussions on the subject that I’ve attended swear by the same old recipe: get an A-list blogger, get forum veterans, get senior Diggers talking about your virus…and the rest will come.

Now for a research firm to come out and shoot down this sacred belief…that’s just SMO heresy. Or is it.
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Damn, did they make her ride coach?

The local blogosphere was abuzz when YouTube star Christine aka Happyslip Gambito flew down to ‘experience’ the islands. Hats off to the marketing crew that hatched this idea. She connects well with a Fil-Am generation that feels 90% American already. She also connects well with local Filipinos, specifically the generation that’s working hard to be 10% American. She is humor, she is sex and to top it all, she is Filipino.

Her visit will no doubt inspire countless rootless Fil-Ams to come over and discover Cebu, Palawan, Taal, Bohol….and maybe take a side trip for that short photo-op with the grandparents they didn’t know existed. Making her the spokesperson was a brilliant move. I would have doctored some of the clips a little though, they didn’t really look that impressive. Must be the clouds.

One of the best examples of a viral campaign by a local company would be Star Trends Apparel’s warehouse sale. I learned about this through Anton’s blog and have followed it through the years through word-of-mouth (WOM) eyes. Here’s why I think they’ve been effective:
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Back when Yahoo! was the dominant Web destination and Filgifts was just a toddler, companies wishing to make a dent online relied much on advertising schemes like cross site promotions and direct ad placements to generate eyeballs. Web 2.0 saw the rise of a new breed of online marketers: the viral first, traditional second type.

With viral methods yielding better adoption, traction and ROI rates, buzz marketing has become the preferred promotional platform for launching and sustaining an online business. The smart search marketer understands this and prioritizes link building initiatives that have the potential of creating hundreds of links from a single viral idea over direct link building methods like link buys, link drops and link exchanges. The virus is transmitted from one prospect to another through user generated content (UGC) sites like blogs, forums and review sites. Marketers understand the buzz value of UGC sites. I call it the Multiplier Effect.

Here’s how the Multiplier Effect works. A feature on Techcrunch reaches thousands of early adopters and is instrumental in leading readers to either two conclusions: adoption or rejection. A scathing review from Michael Arrington would almost certainly mean a death sentence as the spirit of the Techcrunch review would be echoed over and over again by countless Arringtonians. Similar to how restaurants treat the published food critic as God, the Web critic that’s read by hundreds is somebody that deserves tender blogging care.

Now what about those bloggers who actually demand tender blogging care. I call it blogmail (blog + blackmail).

Thanks to this comment by Robin (excellent technology blog by the way), I found this TipidPC thread which I feel mirror a lot of the sentiments generic customers feel during a viral crisis. This thread is also a treasure trove of consumer insights for Globe. I’m just surprised Globe hasn’t joined the conversation (the thread’s 26 pages long and counting). TipidPC is geek central and is 100% in tune with their “mobile broadband for the mobile laptop-toting geek” positioning.

I feel a lot of marketing and PR professionals are sufficiently trained in ‘inducing’ a neutral-to-positive response from customers and prospects. I have friends in consumer goods and media who are on top of their game as far as conceptualization and roll out implementation plans for their beloved brands and clients go. What most of them lack are hard skills to induce a negative-to-neutral or better yet, a negative-to-positive response. The other thing that scares them is that they are absolutely clueless on how they should be reacting as brand managers to a downward spiraling online story. Word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing in a Web 2.0 environment is something most marketers don’t understand and thus, can’t appreciate.
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The honeymoon is officially over. Watch out Globe, time to start monitoring your online reputation before it’s too late. It all started with people leaving comments on my Globe Visibility post. You can see the evolution of comments from ‘wow Globe Visibility’ to ‘it’s not functioning as advertised’ to ‘off with Globe’s head’.

Saw the first signs of the blog revolt at Robin Lim’s blog, then here, then on Bryanboy.com with his well documented nightmare. A forum post at Tsikot.com is also starting to catch fire. Track the snowballing buzz here and here.

As for me, the service has been a bitch lately. No 3G. Like MobilityPH, this blog’s powered by Globe GPRS. With this type of mobile ‘broadband’ service, Globe Visibility is suddenly not worth the $45 per month price tag.

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.
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Who will drive your next get-on-Digg and get-on-Techcrunch campaigns? Acquaint yourself with the animal that is on top of the ’social’ food chain.
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The customer service people over at Globe Telecom should wake up before this snowballs into one huge mother…

I’m not sure if its the earthquake that hit Taiwan or what, but so far the speed I’ve been getting from my E220 has been slower than dial up. I live near Libis and I only get 1 bar when using HSPDA signal. Whats worse is my download speed is at a dismal 25Kbps (according to bandwidthplace.com and cnet.com. I then tried local sites and still the same. I tried accessing the sites using my regular DSL connection and there seems to be no problem with them. The next test is in my office in Valenzuela. HSPDA signal is 4 bars. Speed is 34Kbps. Useless! Tried my regular DSL connection, the sites that I go to are ok. My wife gave birth in Medical City along Ortigas, UMTS connection, 20Kbps. So for P2000 I’m actually getting slower than dial up speeds. I’ve only been a subscriber for less than a week and would like to return the unit, but I have to pay a termination fee of P11 thousand plus. That’s where Globe grabs you by the balls and squeezes it tight till the 24th month of service.

Customer service shouldn’t be a passive exercise. Don’t wait for us to call your hotline to complain because no amount of Taiwan-bashing will compensate for the crazy download speeds. Be proactive, face the problem and come up with a solution. Before you know it, the heat from the buzz might be too hot to handle. Pretty soon, you might want to rethink your Better than 3G positioning because it’s starting to sound like a lie.

I still recommend getting the Visibility service from Globe because nothing beats mobile broadband, just not now. Once they’re back to full capacity, it’s a no-brainer.