I will be speaking at SES London and New York on a session called Search, PR and the Social Butterfly with a good friend of mine Mel Carson, Microsoft Advertising Community Manager at Microsoft Advertising.

“RT this. Take social media to the boardroom! Social media continues to spread its wings with the advent of Google Social Search, Bing, Twitter Search and Yahoo’s Twitter-like moves. With the demise of traditional media outlets and the rise of search and social, PR firms have also gotten a big lift and muscled in on the territory once ruled by advertising agencies. Time to eighty-six the anachronistic press kits and media lists and hand over the keyword rich online status updates and Twitter feeds. Don’t miss this opportunity to hear firsthand from online PR/social media pros that bridge the best of both worlds while influencing SEO via Profiles, Fans, Tweets, Friends and Follows.”

The Web is talking and you should listen, there are peple talking about your company, you and/or your services. An Icelandic company Clara is now one of many that is providing the listening service for company’s perfect solution for those that want to hear what is being said online about their services or stakeholders such as staff or even the competition. Clara’s proprietary web crawlers search the web looking for customer insights in news, blogs, comments and forums. The tool automatically sums up the discussion and shows you the results in a clear interactive web-based dashboard. CLARA delivers up-to-date results in close to real time.  What it makes it even more special is that is the only tool that is Icelandic friendly.

I have been speculating about whether Airbus has a public relations problem, after two major accidents involving airplanes from Airbus there is no reaction from the company on the Internet, so they seem to be taking the typical large organization “look but don’t touch” approach.

It unbelievable how the Internet does not seem to play a role in their Public Relations strategy as I mentioned in my previous blog post called When should you use PPC as a part of a PR strategy?.

How do they deal with this? “Actor Ashton Kutcher cautioned his fans on Wednesday that a pilot recommended to him not to fly on Airbus until the manufacturer’s composite tail is declared safe.” - I am afraid that this will not blow over and they need to get their act together if the Internet is not to harm them more.

Airbus use the Internet, use PPC, use online PR, use Twitter and Facebook! Don’t fall into the “Look – Don’t touch” thinking as other major organization seem to have the habid of doing.

Nordic eMarketing does this, works on creating online crisis management solutions for companies and governments to deal with crisis through the Internet using effective online assets.

Air France Google Trends

One of the most dynamic ways of communicating to the masses ASAP is through Google PPC, a great sample of that is the crash of the Air France Airbus plane flying from Brazil to France. The plane goes down after 300 KM and news start to spread.

As a part of an PR crisis strategy Air France should have gone out and paid for customized message for their brand search, dealing with questions like; Is it safe to fly with Air France’ and/or How can I find information about the crash?

Using the same method, Airbus could have dealt with people frighten to fly with Airbus planes, answering questions like is flying with Airbus planes save?

As one of those that fly frequantly but are not comfortable flying I was one of the first looking for anwers like the above and I do belive that I was not the only person. Check Google Trends http://www.google.com/trends?q=air+france&ctab=0&geo=all&date=mtd&sort=0 to back my case.

I have in cooperation with the IceNews Network and eNewsWire UK working on mapping the behaviour of Journalists, editors, Columnists use the Internet to research for articles and or react to breaking news using such services such as Google Alerts. What surprised me was the sometimes lighting fast reaction time. That is from the time news or a PR item was sent out until we saw someone from the major news outlets or stakeholder related come in and review the article. We are talking some couple of hours from when the article was send out until it was mentioned or quoted somewhere else online.
Major news outlets such as the BBC, New York Times and News Week where sometimes in within minutes from when Google showed the news in their Google News search. We have seen timelines such as news being posted at 10:00, picked up by Google News at 10:03 and a major news agency and/or stakeholder is in 10 – 20 min later. Truly lightning fast?

I am hoping to have more data gathered and reportable within the next two months, did some preliminary finding introductions at the SES in NY, but SMX in London should provide me a platform to give more in-depth data and understanding of the true impact of online PR and news distribution. If you want more information pls. send me an email to kmh /at/ nem.is.

Sometimes its good to be taken back a few steps and being reminded of the world that is inhabited by “normal” Internet users. Working professionally everyday with the Internet as a sales and marketing channel, easily makes you loose the perspective of those people. The people that are the end receivers of our clients messages and products.

Luckily though, an article in The Mail on Sunday on the 15th of February reminded me of the Internet reality that actually reigns out there outside of our office walls. Entitled “Millions lost by firms who ignore the net”, the article reveals that six out of ten British companies do not use the Internet to sell their products, even though they are quite happy to use the Internet to buy goods and services for their organizations. A survey on small businesses (up to 50 people) showed that four out of five use their website to showcase their goods rather than sell it. Even more surprising, 67 percent believed that they would not find customers online if they were to try. Considering the fact that 20 billion pounds was spent online during 2008, it feels safe to assume that they are wrong and that they are loosing out on considerable earnings by not incorporating the Internet as a serious marketing and sales channel.Our experience, among clients and partners that sell their product online as well as in physical stores, is that an online store usually outperforms physical ones in terms of turnover, distribution and sales volume per store. Likewise, our clients experience that active Internet marketing (rather than passive showcasing of products) such as SEO and online PR, more effectively generates substantially higher (and fully measurable) ROI, visibility and brand attention compared to marketing in traditional medias.

In the article in The Mail on Sunday, Phil McCabe of the UK forum of Private Business conforms this by emphasizing the need for businesses to become more cost effective in the current financial situation. Saying that the Internet is often a simpler and more cost effective way of boosting business.

For a web marketer the reporting in the article are stunning. Twice I had to check the date of the paper in my hand. Does it say the 15:th of February 2005? No, it is 2009. If it wasn’t for the mentioning of the financial crisis and the Obama article in the same issue, I would probably have taken it for a printing error.

From this, I can only conclude that we in the Internet marketing industry are still facing a huge communication challenge concerning what we do and how we can help virtually any company achieve higher ROI on their marketing budget. It is essential that we work to distance ourselves from the “tech geek” image and present ourselves and our knowledge to marketing decision makers as the choice of the future.

More on how we achive this in future postings.

I am starting to see more and more companies out there specializing in online reputation management and ePR. We have been doing this since 2005 inspired by such good people as Greg Jarboe www.seo-pr.com. what we have seen more and more are consultants and programs that tell you that there is a problem but can do little to implement the help needed to deal with the problem or help boost the positive impact out there.

Key questions as what to do if you company is under a brand attack online? How doe deal with that? How do you implement your online crisis management plan or for that matter create it? The list of questions goes on and on. Through Nordic eMarketing services eNews PR we have been working with companies on a multilingual scale creating in cooperation with traditional PR companies and Communication departments strategies dealing with scenarios that have had unforeseen effects on companies and peoples reputation among other.

Next week I am speaking at an event on reputation management, the date is October 21st  and the events location is the Dorchester Hotel, London. The event is held and managed by Augure - Corporate Communications Solution, you do not have to pay anything to enter, but there is limited seat availability so better book now than later.

“Reputation has become a board level priority affecting an organisation’s ability to raise capital, attract and retain staff, sell products and services and ultimately compete in today’s marketplace.”

Really good speakers are doing this event and it looks like a great event for those that are looking to learn about the latest in reputation management.

Just spoke at a session called “Reputation monitoring and management through search” at the SMX Sweden, with a great pannel of colleuges . The topic was quite wide and actual the title does not explain it to the fullest.

We talked about the challanges facing companies and individuals when information is available to the world as they arrive and can as demostated in the session spiral out of countrol.

The session was moderated by Sante J. Achille who did a great job and speakers inculding me where
Mikkel deMib Svendsen, Creative Director at deMib.com and David Lerdell the CEO & Founder of Lerdell Investigation AB. So it was a multinational session and reflected that quite well.

Great stuff and I always learn something when Mikkel is there, great speaker and full of knowledge.

Is there anything you can do to survive online crises with your brand?

The short answer is; yes use the Internet!

The longer answer is having a plan and understanding that all brands even the biggest are vulnerable, brands like Dell and Wal-Mart know that well.

The first thing you need to do is to show humility, the Internet has a mind on its own and the only thing you can do is to have a plan and deal with it the best you can by being prepared.

A part of the plan should always be listening, have your eyes and ears open to the buzz out there. The Internet is the main venue for dejected customers and in most cases the brand owner does not have a clue on what is happening. Forums and blogs are being opened everyday and some with the sole purpose of writing “bad things” about product in behalf of unhappy customers.

So what happens when you find something that is not to your liking, true or untrue?

Deal with it; take it on without a delay. One of the best ways to solve most of brand attacks is to respond promptly and head on, go to the source. Remember that the very same costumer that wrote the complaint is waiting for your reaction and I have had cases where by talking directly to the blog/forum owner he removed the post and it was out of Google two weeks later, problem gone. In this case it was a typical story that could have spiraled and gone out of control.

But is it this simple? No not quite! But the only thing I have to say that is “be ready”, have an online crisis management plan in place. A plan that answers at least the following questions:

1. What do you do when some talks about your brand in a negative manner?
2. How do you push down negative pages out of the search engines
3. When you have dealt with the situation, will you communication channels open?
4. Monitor the activates on your own site, who is returning you traffic and why, are you using web analytics?

The adult industry versus Radisson SAS Iceland
One of my favorite cases where a decision on one site of the globe can affect something on the other side is the “Radisson SAS Iceland versus the European Adult conference Case”, long title on short story that goes like this. Two years back, the European Association of the Adult Industry in Europe (not fully sure of the name) was going to have their annual conference in Iceland, the topic? I am guessing, the Adult Industry in Europe. So few weeks before the event was going to take place, there rose an political issue on this in Iceland, we did not want to get a bunch of naked people to our small country and under pressure the Radisson SAS hotel management in Iceland cancelled and guess what it hit the media and for some two or three weeks if you Googeled Radisson SAS or phrases like adult entertainment or adult conference Radisson SAS and the Adult conference story came up.

This story as such was not such a problem, but the problem as I saw it was twofold:

1. They where opening a new hotel in Bahrain or Dubai at the same time, so when the travel reporter that wanted to write about the new hotel he found little but some adult conference problems in Iceland through Google News and knowing reporters this could pose a huge proplem. Even know Radisson will be connected with the adult industry through this post and will come up under some adult related search phrases at Google Blog and you might be here and reading this article because you got a Google Blog og Web Alert.

2. The there is the linking, if I remember correctly only handful of the sites picked this story up (15 – 20) and some other sites had their RSS-feeds but all in all around 30 sites had some information on this topic, but most based it on two or three original articles. So here is what I feared, imagine this story being picked up massively, by thousands of sites and all of the having a link to Radisson SAS front page with the phrase “adult conference” – Everybody that has even the most basic understanding of link-building will tell you that such scenario would be bad.

So start creating your online credibility, when you need it might be too late.

Also if you are looking for a professional web analytics solution, try Yahoo! Indextools, it’s a great tool and it’s free!