A client, reviewing some of the sentiment scores on the net approval work we have been doing for them recently asked: “why are these people so negative? We don’t get these scores from our off-line net promoters work.”

The client was identifying a pattern we see quite regularly. Online commentary is more negative than off-line. Why? There is no systematic answer to this question, but if you were to attempt an answer you would divide it into three sections:

The squeaky wheel. People are likely to post on a blog or message board or a consumer review site when they have a reason to. The post can often be prompted by a problem they wish to solve, for example - difficulty with the product - if a car won’t start or a program won’t install. Because of this, and given the likelihood that the problem may persist, complaints about the product and the brand are likely by-products of a web session.

Monologue is more negative than dialogue. Research we have previously published  refers to work done by Delahaye pointing out that blogs are more negative that messageboards. 23% of blog commentary is negative, compared to 11% of message board commentary. The reason? People tend to be more measured, more polite face to face than they are in monologue. They do not make such bold, inflammatory “look at me” negative comments. The reason is that in dialogue a speaker is unsure of the feelings of the interlocutor. If he or she makes an emphatic statement about a product or service, he or she risks spoiling their social relationship with the other speaker (or poster) who may be a big fan of the product in question. This politeness factor may also explain why the results of face to face conversations are less negative than a sample of online opinion might suggest.

The third reason is that, particularly for bloggers, staking out one’s social territory online involves a certain amount of display activity - particularly for men! A vehemently negative comment about a large brand demonstrates a certain kind of alpha male aggression. It is show-off behaviour. Bloggers want to be linked to, and being showily negative, particularly in a witty way, may garner more links than a considered “one the one hand, on the other hand” approach.

Paradoxically, as we explained in our “Measuring blogger influence” report, this negativity amongst bloggers actually reduces their authority on a topic. For the casual reader, strongly negative views are off-putting. A neutral is more likely to be impressed, and influenced by the argument of someone who has weighed up the evidence for and against a brand, citing their evidence, than by someone who says: “Brand X SUCKS!”So … although brands are worried about extreme negative commentary online, it generally has little influence. That is, unless there is a special case.

The special case is, as in the example of Jeff Jarvis and Dell:

a) the issue complained of is real and the complaint justified, and echoed by others;

b) brand makes no direct statement on the topic, leaving the existing authorities no choice but to link solely to the complainant.In that one case, bloggers can be VERY influential.

A lot of people visit this site on the search term “brand audit”. Even with the miracles of Google analytics it isn’t always possible to tell who they are and what they are looking for. If you came here searching on “brand audit” or you are a brand owner interested in “buzz tracking”, here is a short scratch sheet on how you can use companies like ours to analyse the competitive DNA of your brand. Market Sentinel answers the following questions:

Who are the stakeholders in my brand? The partners, customers, regulators who have an opinion about it? Which of them talk about it, with what degrees of authority? What words do they use? How can I address them? Change the climate of opinion?

How do my customers rate my brand? What aspects of it do they particularly like, and which do they particularly dislike? Which characteristics of the brand are key to my customers recommending it to one another? How does my brand compare to other brands?

What is new here is the ability to answer these questions using reliable, tried and trusted mathematical techniques. What is new is the ability to reliably benchmark one brand against another, and to do so repeatedly. Market Sentinel performs this kind of analysis for Avis, Intuit, GSK, Rio Tinto, BP, Hyundai … It can be applied in any industry sector, or to any brand large or small. Our customers are in corporate communications, e-commerce, word of mouth marketing, customer service and market research.

Set up times vary, but you can get expect to get actionable data within two-four weeks.

New Communications Blogzine has published Mark Rogers’ article looking at how Market Sentinel measures corporate reputations with our “net promoters index”. Here it is:

A year ago when our new company Market Sentinel started distributing live reports on brands drawn from monitoring message boards and blogs, one of our early pitches was to a research head of a large mobile carrier who was sceptical as to the value of it.

“Who are these people?” he asked, reviewing a page of sometimes negative remarks on a new mobile handset. “Isn’t this just chit-chat?”

We realised then that we would need to produce a metric which showed – in as objective a way as possible – how positive and negative commentary played online. We lighted on the work of Bain and company’s Fred Reichheld. Reichheld, in a series of books like “The Loyalty Effect” (1996) and “Loyalty Rules” (2001) has demonstrated that there is a simple way of measuring the public attitude to a company. You simply ask a consumer:

“Would you recommend this product or service to a friend?”

If the answer is yes, the person is a “promoter,” if no, the person is a detractor. You deduct the first number from the second to reach something known as “the net promoters index.”

The index really comes into its own when you compare two or more companies in the same sector. The higher the positive number applied to a company, the more likely the company is to grow (more recommendations=more customers). The lower the number, the more likely the company is to shrink (more detractors=fewer repeat purchases).

Recommendations matter. In Emanuel Rosen’s book, the Anatomy of Buzz he points out that

• 65% of Palm customers heard about the device from another person.

• Friends and relatives are the number one source for information about places to visit or about flights, hotels or rental cars.

Of people surveyed by the Travel Industry Association:

• 43% cited friends and family as a source for information.

• 57% of customers of one car dealership in California learned about the dealership from another person

“This is not unusual,” says Jim Callahan of the research company Dohring.

[Source: James Torio’s “Blogging a Global Conversation” ]

The recommendations we would formerly seek from friends and family we increasingly find through Google. Research shows that 75% of shoppers use search engines with the intention of purchasing products and services . What they find when they get there is increasingly determined by bloggers and contributors to online forums. Recent research by Market Sentinel in the UK showed that, of Nielsen’s Top 50 grocery brands, 40% had negative commentary in the top ten results on Google UK . Searchers will even put keywords into searches to look for issues. For example, in the last 30 days, one of the popular searches tracked by UK-based paid search vendor has been “Ford Focus problems”. This is a search designed to flush out online resources dealing with customer service issues.

Why does this “net promoters” index matter? Why is it important to keep the number of detractors down, and the number of promoters high? According to Reichheld’s exhaustive studies, it is very accurate leading indicator of stock price. A high value means that your stock will rise, and a low value spells trouble.

I was reminded of this recently in the context of some work Market Sentinel and its partners are doing looking at the issues a famous corporation has been experiencing with its customer services function. The corporation, faced with a highly competitive marketplace, took the decision to offshore much of its customer services function to India. It cut down on expensive home visits which were an important constituent of its value add. Wall Street applauded and the stock price rose. However the number of negative comments about the company in message boards and blogs rose steeply. Customers did not appreciate the long waits for customer service. They did not appreciate the failure of the company to fulfil on its after sales promises.

Finally, earlier this summer, the company was targeted by a famous blogger who had bought one of its products and was frustrated not just by the poor quality of the product, but by the company’s failure to fulfil its customer service promise. The blogger started writing about it and was immediately deluged with comments and trackbacks by aggrieved fellow customers.

A couple of weeks back the company published its latest numbers. Growth has stalled (more detractors=fewer repeat purchases). The stock price fell like a stone. As Mr. Reichheld puts it in a paper published by the Harvard Business Review, the “net promoters” index is /”The One Number You Need to Grow”.

Market Sentinel’s benchmarking service provides an index of “net promoters online” and tracks it live. It is now our most popular service. Tracking corporate reputation online is the business equivalent of the Nielsen rating. And it is something managers and corporate investors simply have to do if they want to look at whether a company is on the way up, or the way down.

Mark Rogers is interviewed by Guillaume du Gardier of Blogging Planet in a podcast about online visibility, brand auditing and benchmarking, and brand response.

Market Sentinel gave a presentation on September 15th at the Internet Advertising Bureau, looking at how company’s reputations are effected by search. It is interesting to note that a huge consumer-facing company like Hutchison 3G, despite vast off-line investments in branding, have somehow ended up with a web site which contains fewer than 50 words indexable by search engines, with zero information about their products, services, customer issues, investor issues etc.

Hutchison Whampoa hopes to float the company next year and one wonders how long it will take them to sort this out.

Neville Hobson alerts us that Adrian Melrose has done a deal with Land Rover and is offering them the use of www.haveyoursay.com to use as a customer feedback forum. Land Rover’s Customer service chief Mike Mulholland admitted honestly that they have not been across online issues. It is a challenge for the guys there and a big opportunity for them if they choose to accept it.

They now have a willing audience of bloggers and blog-readers who know about the issue and are waiting for them to respond. If they take their courage in their hands, jump in and start talking to their customers, ideally via a corporate blog, they will reap a huge benefit in positive PR.

In the interests of openness I should admit that when this story blew up last week I got in touch with Mark Foster, their corporate affairs manager, and pitched him the Market Sentinel web monitoring and response service. The 700 visitors a day Adrian Melrose’s blog was getting represented (according to the calculations of our search optimisation partner Weboptimiser that 25% of the total Land Rover traffic via search engines and more than 100% of the “Land Rover Discovery” traffic. Proof, if proof were needed that, as our white paper points out, a blogger with a tiny budget but a big grievance can out market a very big brand in very little time.

However, now that Land Rover have the ear of thousands of interested and connected customers, they have un unrepeatable opportunity to change the climate of opinion about them, as they have started doing with Mike Mulholland’s response. As vlandro_1.php”>Dennis Howlett points out, a turned-round customer can be an amazing advocate.

via Noisefilter. Larissa Bannister reviews the threats to brands from bloggers in a Campaign article, mentioning Market Sentinel’s work to monitor this and to help companies deal with it.

Online PR gurus Shel Holtz and Steve Rubel have linked to our white paper Search is Brand dealing with the influence of online detractors and methodologies for coping.

Rubel suggests that one way forward is pointed by CommonCraft who deliberately targeted a #1 Google slot for “weblogs and business” and achieved it. Commentators on Micropersuasion suggest that this approach becomes more difficult the larger your brand is.

This is true, but Search is Brand shows that you can target smaller search phrases successfully, even if you are a big brand - like Madonna! The report shows how she could optimise her website if there were rumours of marital problems with Guy Ritchie, for example.

To take a theoretical example, Madonna might want to optimise her web site for the phrase ‘Madonna and Guy Ritchie divorce’, and point people to positive content on the site that emphasises how happy she and Guy are, having recently renewed their wedding vows. Then, should the marriage hit the rocks, and more people start making the search ‘Madonna and Guy Ritchie divorce’, the site content can be updated to give her side of the story ahead of the celebrity gossip sites which might not be so positive and promoted via the paid-for listings.