aimClear® Search Marketing Blog

Welcome back to aimClear’s coverage of #SESSF 2011! The Interwebz. It has changed our lives forever– the way we learn, communicate, share, and of course, shop. Thanks to powerful and ubiquitous e-Commerce functionality, we can buy sweaters, CDs, sex toys, even spaghetti take-out all from the comfort of our own homes, oftentimes in our underwear slippers.

Yes, the Internet has made shopping for this, that or the other thing easy as pie for consumers around the world. But it has also made it a potential minefield for brands. Bad Yelp reviews can populate and permeate like ink in water. Blog rants from dissatisfied customers can spring up like Super Mario Piranha Plants and gobble up slots on page 1 of Google SERPs. Or maybe the negativity takes the shape of nocent Facebook wall posts, flurries of furious tweets, etc. etc. etc. Such user generated content can track mud all over your brand’s carefully polished reputation, dissuading potential customers from buying your products or services.

The bad news: As a brand, you can’t really control whether or not such feedback exists on the web. The good news: There are actionable tactics you execute to not only save your skin in the face of an online reputation crisis, but help prepare for a similar flare up in the future, should one arise. The best news: Andy Beal, CEO of Trackur, was at Search Engine Strategies San Francisco 2011 to deliver a solo presentation jam-packed with tools, techniques & expert advice for Protecting Your Brand Online. aimClear live-tweeted this session via @beebow. Read on for the full effect. Read the rest of this entry »

A firestorm has erupted on the Mayo Clinic Facebook Fan Page wall. Whether the allegations against Mayo doctor Aivars Slucis, accusing him of being a racist are true, the spiteful rhetoric makes for one ugly fan page. Read the rest of this entry »

Google.com/alerts has been the reputation monitoring rage for years now.  Most companies seem to feel safe under the Google alert notification blanket. It’s true that Google alerts keep reputation managers apprised of a lot of content, conversations, news, media, etc… However, Google alerts alone are far from a complete picture of what’s going on out there.  Social media “updates” can take days or even weeks to show up, if at all.  Don’t get caught unaware. This post offers a guerrilla list of RSS feeds, crucial for monitoring one’s reputation, can be used to mine extremely fast alerts from major sites including YouTube, Google, Facebook & Twitter. Read the rest of this entry »

Whether you’re talking about sex, singing, or social media, it’s a fact of life: people don’t like to hear they’re “doing it wrong.” But when it comes to tweeting– a communal activity that’s constantly expanding in both significance and scope– how can you define what’s right?  Everyone and their mother has an opinion about what it means to “use Twitter correctly,” particularly for businesses. Since Twitter is so versatile, the types of brands who use it so diversified, the debate about right versus wrong becomes more of a quest just to not be an oblivious jackass. Read the rest of this entry »

The old reputation management adage is “want to know how to get 2 FDA.gov, 2 WashingtonPost.com, 1 CNN.com & 2389 blog links this week?” The answer (of course) is to accidentally injure people with your product.  Trust us, getting the ensuing horrible results pushed off search engine results pages (SERPs) will be much tougher than placing them in the first place.

Clients come to us wondering why they are unable to easily squeeze down negative search engine results for brand names, after PR debacles or other difficult incidents. In other words after the news results clear the SERPs, why do negative .gov, news or some prominent blog pages STILL rank above corporate controlled or “friendly-sentiment” content for direct brand searches ( i.e. “Brand Name”)? Such questions torture CEOs and CMOs alike. Read the rest of this entry »