So 6 weeks ago I was invited to an online pr workshop hosted by Damien Mulley. These are some of my notes on what was discussed in the session. As it was an all day session there was a lot of different topics discussed and Dave gave a good breakdown of the day already on the redfly blog, so I am going to focus on two areas that were discussed, crisis management and online reputation management (ORM).

Crisis Management

Damien had a great example of crisis management and how ignorance of how the internet works can add to the crisis instead of detracting. Damiens example was the Irish Pork Scare of 2008. Even now if you do a search for “Irish Pork” in Google, these are the results you see:

google irish pork results

Now you’ll notice from the results that the majority of the results are from News sites, which are authorative sites but you’d expect to see a result from a Government website, such as the Department of Agriculture considering that the pork industry is the 4^th largest agriculture industry in Ireland but you won’t because they don’t know how the internet works. If you look at the Dept. of Agriculture site, it is a PR8 site, this is an authorative site but if you search the site for an article with “Irish Pork” in the title it will return no results:

google doa irish pork results

It’s not that they didn’t release a statement it’s just they didn’t put any of the keyterms used to describe the crisis in the Title Tag:

doa site irish pork results

Lessons Learned:

1. Use the language that is being used to describe the crisis by the public
2. Always have the best team possible – if you do not know how a certain medium works, higher an expert. (Some that I would recommend who understand how online media works would be Damien Mulley (obviously), Piaras Kelly (Edelman), and Simply Zesty (especially when it comes to social media)
3. Make sure somebody has ownership for managing the crisis and is responsible for cleaning it up, which obviously wasn’t executed efficiently in this case with these results still showing almost 2 years later. This point will lead us onto the next topic.

Some other sources I recommend for reading:

http://www.pkellypr.com/blog/2006/0123/online-crisis-management/
http://outspokenmedia.com/guides/orm-guide/

Online Reputation Management

Online Reputation management is a growing field affecting all businesses with an online presence. The growth in review sites, such as TripAdvisor for hotels, RateMySolicitor for solicitors, Yelp for restaurants and hotels and ReviewCentre.com for multiple industries, means that no matter how small your business is, all consumers have access to online portals to vent their frustrations at substandard products or bad customer service and possibly tarnish your reputation. In the case of the search results above for “Irish Pork”, I think we can agree it is doing the industry no favours and possibly damaging sales, so what do we do about it and how do we manage it?

Lessons Learned:

• Assess how bad the potential damage from the query could be? You want to see what the monthly volume of searches for the query is. To do this you can look at the query in adwords to see how many people are searching for it:

google adwords irish pork results

• The volume of searches for “Irish Pork” currently is quite low but was quite high during Dec 2008 as can be seen through Google Insights:

• Identify why these other sites are ranking above you, is it due to authority or links. (Copyblogger has a great article on authority and iCrossing have a great study on the correlation of links to ranking). Some tools that can be used to identify links to an article/page on a site are Seomoz’s OpenSiteExplorer, Majesticseo and Yahoo’s Siteexplorer.
• Ask the Top 10 results link to your article as the definitive source for the query.
• Use other authorative resources as well by putting other related articles on Facebook, Twitter, etc.
• Develop a link building campaign to the articles hosted on sites that you control but also to articles on third party sites that echoes the response you want to be seen for the search results. Make sure you use the keywords of the search query when linking to articles (Anchor Text), i.e. irish pork, irish pork recall, etc.

Finally on occasion you will want to change the sentiment of the results for a query, as in the case of “Irish Pork”. There is no point to address the “irish pork recall” 2 years later so you’ll want to change the results that show up for it.

1. Look at the keywords that are used in the results and query, i.e. irish pork recall
2. Develop a positive spin on the keywords, i.e. Do you recall the first time you tasted irish pork?
3. Develop a campaign around it and release it to the online community

In the video above I showed a spreadsheet I created to identify online influencers and bloggers to incorporate into your campaign. If anybody wants it just ask me on twitter @leofogarty

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Finally getting around to putting up some posts about Bizcamp. Bizcamp was a brilliant experience for me, theres nothing greater than hundreds of entrepreneurs in one place participating in a free exchange of ideas and experience for the benefit of everyone.

This post is for a session I went to hosted by Caelen King from Revahealth.com . He was giving a talk on online business revenue models and believe me if anybody has researched online revenue models it’s Caelen. Caelens company Revahealth.com which he founded, announced in January 2008 that they had secured a €1.25m investment through Mianach Venture Capital and supported by Enterprise Ireland, with EI backing RevaHealth.com as a High Performance Start Up in 2008.

These models can apply to numerous types of affiliate sites so I suggest you take note because even if you can take just one small bit of information that you hadn’t originally considered from his slides or the video below, it will have a beneficial impact on how you plan your affiliate sites in the future.

Irelands online community is quite small and it’s easy to spot the people of substance, Caelan definitely gives me this impression, he’s got his business accumen covered as you’ll see from above but is also very knowledgeable when it comes to SEO which is great to see in a Boardroom exec for any online company.

Check out Caelen’s blog at http://blog.revahealth.com or follow him on twitter http://www.twitter.com/revahealth

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Ok as you can tell this post has nothing to do with Affiliate Marketing but it might demonstrate how powerful search data can be at predicting outcomes of an event. I’m not going to get into the Pros & Cons of the Lisbon treaty all I’m interested in is can we predict the outcome of the voting based on search trends? Now this isn’t going to be a perfect test as there are a lot of variables that we don’t have access to, so this is only based on search volumes and the ratio of anti or pro searchs related to the lisbon treaty.

The Data

First off lets look at the popular search terms related to the lisbon treaty:

Keywords	Advertiser Competition	Local Search	Global
lisbon treaty no	0.26	-1	1300
lisbon treaty no vote	0.2	-1	480
lisbon treaty yes	0	-1	390
no to lisbon treaty	0	-1	390
vote no to lisbon treaty	0	-1	91
yes to lisbon treaty	0	-1	91
no to the lisbon treaty	0	-1	73
pro lisbon treaty	0	-1	58
vote yes to lisbon treaty	0	-1	46
yes to the lisbon treaty	0	-1	16
vote no to the lisbon treaty	0.13	-1	-1

This isn’t the best way to make a judgement based on data analysis as this data set has been taken from Googles keyword suggestion tool which rely’s on last months search volume but its the best I’ve got available and this is a quick post so it’s what I’ll use as a rough indicator. I’ve trimed the list down to the searches that I could associate with either a yes or a no vote. Based on what I visually could see it leans more toward a “No” due to the slightly greater ratio of negative searches compared to pro but more importantly due to volume of negative searches compared to pro.

Can Search Trends accurately predict the vote?

This is what we are here to find out but lets look at the data we have available compared to the last vote. As we all know we had a No vote in the last round so if we analyse the data in Google Insights to see if it confirms this we get the following:

From the above graph it looks like it accurately predicted the outcome. So lets examine the graph more closely based on search trends during the past month to see if we can predict the next outcome:

From the above graph it looks like we’ll have a No vote again. Like I said this isn’t an accurate test but just a bit of fun inspired by a chapter in Bill Tancer’s book, Click. Whatever way you vote is entirely your choice. Will I be right in my prediction, only time will tell!

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Currently I’m reading a brilliant book and am enjoying each chapter even more as I go along. The book is called Click by Bill Tancer. If you don’t know who Bill Tancer is, he is the  general manager of global research at Hitwise, the world’s leading online competitive intelligence services. This book is for anybody who loves Search, Trends and the influece of psychology or economic/socio economic influences on how we search online.

I definitley put this book up there as one of my favourites of this year, what can I say? I’m a geek for data analysis. If you want to be a successful affiliate you need to understand why people search for products and when they are searching for them . This book is great for getting you in the mood for some data analysis. I’m just trying to convince the girlfriend to go on that weekend spa trip with her girlfriends so I can finish reading this book and spend the weekend checking out some real interesting searchs.

If you want to find out more about Bill, check out his website, click or he also writes a weekly column for Time magazine (Time.com) entitled “The Science of Search”.

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On Monday, myself and my girlfriend Zu got to go to U2 in Croke Park, Dublin. It was an awsome gig. They played a lot of there old stuff. The only thing that pissed me off was Bono going on about Amnesty International (nothing against AI, just sick of hearing it coming from Bono). Check out some of the photos.

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