I owe an apology for the infrequency of blog posts here over the last few weeks.

We have moved office, trebled our London-based staff and begun work on some huge new accounts.

In the meantime both my beloved stepfather John Clater and my grandmother Désirée (aka Dorny) Rogers became ill and died. Dorny was 102. She was a vinegary old lady, who had a nasty (but often hilarious) word for everyone. “The Internet is really ghastly, isn’t it?” she would say to me by way of greeting. “Well, Granny …” I would begin.

I will miss them both greatly.

We published this press release today:

AVIS UK WINS INNOVATION AWARD FOR SOCIAL MEDIA PROJECT

Avis UK has won the SOCAP award for innovation in Customer Service at the National Customer Service awards dinner held in London on 18th September 2007.

Avis UK’s work involved monitoring and benchmarking consumer generated content and making changes to its product and customer service practices in response, culminating in launching the We Try Harder blog. These changes have resulted in big increases in the approval rating for Avis (the Avis Net Approval Index has increased over 200% and remains well ahead of the competition) and key product innovations.

Market Sentinel provides the technology for CGC research and guidance on blog editorial.

Market Sentinel CEO Mark Rogers said yesterday: “The phenomenal growth of social media over the last few years has left many companies scratching their heads. Many congratulations are due to Eibhlin Payne and Xavier Vallée of Avis UK for demonstrating to others how to use statistical methods to understand social media and develop insights enabling them to forge real links with customers. We are very proud to have contributed to Avis UK’s success in creating a genuine partnership between marketing and customer service. Many thanks are due to Sheila Sang and Caroline Harris who worked so hard in helping Avis launch the We Try Harder blog, to Mathew Vattolil whose analysis drove decision-making and to our partners at Web Liquid, Matt Cronin and David Shiell who had the vision to bring the project to life, to Xavier Vallée and Eibhlin Payne themselves for commissioning the work and to Rob White for his tireless efforts in bringing it to reality”.

We shared the Dell case study showing the apparent association between customer recommendation and stock price with Peter Hutton of Brand Energy Research writes:

Thanks for sending me this.

Yes, I am familiar with Reichheld’s NPI. Curiously enough, I developed my own advocacy scale, with a net advocacy score, 12 years ago, before Reichheld came to prominence with the book ‘The Loyalty Effect’ published in 1996, I believe.

The NPI has been much criticised not least recently by a chap called Tim Keiningham who looked at Reichheld’s own data and found that the conclusions he asserted in his book just did not follow from the data and analysis that he had used!

This did not surprise me too much since, when I was at MORI, I tried unsuccessfully to find positive correlations between net advocacy and growth (of profit, sales or whatever) and concluded it was for two main reasons:

1. It is rare, and generally impossible, to find survey data and financial data that also have exactly common fields and in sufficient quantity– e.g. time period and business unit – to run robust correlation analyses. Customer satisfaction surveys are often conducted in discrete time periods that do not correspond to the business accounting periods. Moreover, they are normally undertaken for business sub units or products/services whose financial performance is not necessarily separable from other areas of activity in the business’s accounts and/or where spending in one period is not necessarily designed to have an impact until some time later (e.g. R&D, recruitment, marketing etc).

2. What drives value creation in a business is very complex. In the long term, of course, more loyal customers will enable you to grow faster; but so too will a lot of other things – properly structured financing, favourable market conditions, weak competition, well motivated staff with the right skills, clear business strategy, effective advertising/marketing, sound leadership and management and so on. All are necessary but none are sufficient on their own to achieve outstanding performance. In that light it is no surprise that one factor – customer loyalty as reflected in the NPI – has no correlation with growth.

However, that does not detract from the value of the idea underlying the NPI. In my experience knowing that you have x% advocates and y% detractors is very important and should be a key focus for top management. But the most valuable questions, as you imply in your piece, are those that reveal what is driving your scores up or down. They are the only ones you can actually act on and are therefore arguably the Ultimate Questions.

This is what I wrote to him in response:

Thank you for this very thoughtful response. We have a lively debate on the NPI with Justin Kirby of “Connected Marketing” fame. He makes the same point as Tim Keiningham, broadly.

Fred Reichheld may have over-stated the case when he entitled that book “The ONE number you need to grow”! Clearly you need to have other things in place to execute. A company can promote warm feelings but it takes marketing professionalism to turn that into a world-beating brand.

My hunch is that online monitoring solves some (but not all) of the sample bias issues associated with using NPI off-line and that it adds an interesting additional value which is that it provides an index of

A) voluntary, spontaneous endorsement or criticism
B) explanations for that endorsement

which goes very much to the heart of what businesses are looking for when they want to create word of mouth marketing campaigns.

Dell have just announced a profits jump of 46%, topping analysts’ estimates. The stock price rose to the $28 level. This chart shows the stock price’s movements over the last six months. [Data from Marketwatch]

In March 2007 Market Sentinel completed a case study looking at how sentiment was changing relative to Dell’s customer service. It is Frederick Reichheld’s contention that you can predict the future of a company by asking its customers if they would recommend it. We apply this methodology to consumer commentary online, but with a twist. We look for the reasons consumers give for their recommendation or their disparagement of a company. Our study showed an improvement in general sentiment about Dell’s customer service in 5 of the 7 key metrics we used. Customers were still irritated by the simple errors made by customer service in recording names and addresses and by the practice of off-shoring in general. But in relation to general customer service issues, speed of response, technical competence and other miscellaneous issues, sentiment had moved positively from the year before. There was also a highly positive response to Dell’s social media initiatives StudioDell and IdeaStorm.

If you have bought the stock at $22 six months ago on the back of this study, you would have been looking at an appreciation of 27%. That is ahead of the market (the Dow Jones Industrial average is up around 16.6% over this period). Our report lends additional support to Reichheld’s thesis: investors should track sentiment as a leading indicator of company value.

[We are advertising again … this is the ad that is doing the rounds]

Are you passionate about social media?

We are a London-based web monitoring start-up with a stellar client list looking to build our team.

You would be suitable for this role if you have a proven track record and solid experience in market research, internet-based research, statistics, market analysis. If you have interest in, or experience of web communities, blogging, web-monitoring, and social network analysis it would be an advantage. You should have a very good academic record, total mastery of Excel, Word and PowerPoint and an excellent command of written and spoken English (other languages are a plus).

If you have the experience described above and bucket loads of energy and passion, we’d love to hear from you! We are willing to consider remote working in relation to this post.

Market Sentinel is hiring!

Do you love simple, useful interface design?*

We are a London-based web monitoring start-up with a stellar client list looking to create a simple interface to our new plaform.

You would be suitable for this role if you have a proven track record and a great portfolio of UI design and have a strong understanding of both sides of human-computer interaction, adept at user-centred design methodologies, design theory and research. This is a contract job, but there may be ongoing work.

If you have the experience described above and bucket loads of energy and passion, we’d love to hear from you! Call 020 7793 1575 or mail us through this site.

*Our favourites are

a) the Skype client b) Google c) the old Palm pilot

We get many briefs from digital agencies and clients outlining in great detail the age and interests of the customers they are targeting with particular products. The ideal customer, we learn, reads Grazia magazine, is 18-30, is a pre-family female. Or he is a time poor urban professional dad who relies on the internet for his news. How, the agencies, ask us, can they use the web to reach these demographics?

It is possible to get demographic clues from user generated content. There are techniques we deploy to determine sex and age amongst writers who have expressed views about products or brands. Some writers even provide profile information explaining that they are fans of Embrace, or give their age (albeit claiming to be 97), their location, and other interests.

The question I would ask clients and agencies is: why? Why are you trying to discover the demographic profile of your customer by inferring it from partial evidence online? How does it help your sales?

Looking for demographic information profiling ignores the most useful and fundamental characteristic of web-based content, which is that it is driven by passions. Reading online conversations you aren’t in the position of trying to infer than someone might be a customer by discovering their age, location and music tastes. You know that they are a customer because they tell you. You know how they feel about your product because they tell you. You know how they are connected to their social circle on a key topic because the web offers you contextual links which you can analyse.

So, without getting into demographics at all, the web offers you the answers to the following questions:

a) What do my customers and other stakeholders think about me? b) What do they think about my competitors? c) How should I be improving my product? d) Which customers do I need to talk to? e) What are their key interests?

The internet - let’s not forget - is driven by passions. Every day hundreds of millions directly tell the brands of the world what they want by entering terms into search engines. They traverse content sites driven by the information they find most useful. Between that information - John Battelle’s “database of intentions” - and the kind of market research we provide, what’s not to know?

This information is so direct, so useful, that it is a constant surprise to us that brands are still using indirect methods and demographic profiling to buy space in media. And the media - naturally - still present themselves in demographic terms. Online marketing requires navigation (and commercial exploitation) by the key themes that drive our passions.

AFTERWORD: there is a good story by Robert Colville about the demographics of UK broadsheet press in the Telegraph blogs picking up on an Economist piece which suggests that these papers are disproportionately read in London and the South East.

We have long been admirers of 37 Signals - we use their Basecamp software for collaboration - it is cheap, simple and reliable. I was pleased to see in this Time profile of the company an account of their working methods. It is interesting working model and it gives comfort to Market Sentinel’s decision to have a 3-person office and to work remotely with a team based in places as far-flung as Auckland, NZ (Kia ora, Rob), Kerala (good day Mathew!) and Buenos Aires (hola, Claudio) and now Plovdiv (welcome, Lyubomir!).

Today we publish a new white paper: Responding to Crisis Using Social Media. It is an update to our white paper Measuring Blogger Influence, which looked at the Dell Hell débacle and measured the role of bloggers in creating the damage to Dell’s reputation for good customer service. Dell has publicised their increased investment in customer services and has launched the social media initiatives Direct2Dell (their blog), StudioDell and IdeaStorm to increase dialogue with its customers.

Has it worked? We surveyed customer commentary from before and after the new initiatives and used our net promoters methodology to find out.

The bad news is that the increased spend on customer services ($150m - on Dell’s figures) has not yet had a strong positive impact on overall sentiment. There has been a slight dropping off in the volume of negative commentary about customer service, but errors seem to be up and opposition to off-shoring has increased. The good news for Dell is that its social media initiatives have offset this, and there are signs that they may be successful in changing opinions about the company. The recent PR wins which saw Dell salvage XP for domestic customers and announce the launch of a Linux Ubuntu desktop (although they occurred after our data sample was taken) have reinforced the impression that using social media is a big customer service plus for Dell.

In Tuesday’s FT Chet Henderson of Unilever Insight (the multinational’s research arm) discussed with Carlos Grande why the company had taken the decision to move 80% of its market research to the web. “Internet response are more honest than those gained by traditional methods,” Henderson observed. The article points out that the market researchers hope to save 10% to 20% of the cost of traditional methods. Grande estimates Unilever’s annual market research budget at €400m (£272m) which represents a big endorsement for the credibility of web-based research methods. The article appears to be talking only about focus-group work. There is a lot to be said for such methods, and companies like Baldo Faieta’s Synthetron have some interesting solutions for establishing focus groups online.

Unilever could also consider making use of the data that consumers volunteer themselves online in blog, messageboards and review sites. The advantage of using consumer-generated content to generate insights as to consumer tastes is that it really does give you an honest view of how the consumer feels - as the opinion has not been elicited by a leading question from a market researcher. The companies who use our reporting are somewhat shocked by how rude consumers are online, but once they have recovered from their immediate defensive recoil, they find the honesty of great value - and of course the same consumers are just as rude about the competition! [hat tip to Flemming for spotting this!]

Recent figures from the IAB indicate that UK online advertising has reached £2bn. This number has already outstripped radio and newspapers and is chasing down television (at £3.9bn). The internet’s proportion of ad spend in the UK is the highest in the world.

It is worth a second look at the trends hidden in the figures. The online advertising total was up 42% year on year. Paid search, however, grew at 52% (above the trend). Display ads grew below the trend at 35%. Display ads - which were the dominant form of advertising during the internet bubble - now represent only 22.6% of the total advertising spend.

The reasons are not hard to find: an excellent click-through rate on a display ad is 1%. Most click-through rates are far lower. The web surfers who click on a banner are poorly qualified as prospects. They may become customers, they may not. Even back at the height of the dot-com boom, frustrated ad analysts were writing columns like this - failing to find any way of showing that online advertising had any impact on buying decisions. It is still hard to track the impact of online display advertising and advertisers have found that frustrating.

Compare paid search: here customers have qualified themselves as having an interest in the topic chosen by the advertiser. It is a far more effective way of capturing monetisable online transactions and product searches (58% of the total £1.2bn is now going on paid search). But paid search remains a medium for calls to action, not for branding. It is very hard to give much of a flavour of your brand in the haiku-like format of a Google paid search advertisement. For that you need to find a way to connect emotionally with your audience, to make them feel happy, sad, excited. This remains a huge challenge online.

An upcoming conference organised by our friends at Search Engine Strategies looking at advertising through social networks. Clever approaches here seem much more likely to drive brand value than paid search. If I become the “friend” of Lily Allen, I am clearly qualifying myself much more as a potential buyer of her future output. The same goes for anything entertainment-related. But it is much more of a challenge for brands which are not entertainment related. Social networks pose them exactly the same problems as normal web pages. They either have to post a banner or sponsor an event. They can’t rely on pull, because (as sellers of motor insurance for example) they can’t compete with the Arctic Monkeys. No one on a social network like MySpace will publicly identify themselves with a functional brand - however useful they may find it - in the way they might with a star.

So where do brand builders go? The answer is that they need to identify their own target networks. Every brand has its own universe of key authorities, people who do spend their time talking about motor insurance or pension provision. We have recently been working for the car rental giant Avis Europe alongside our colleagues at UK digital agency Web Liquid. One of the things we helped Avis Europe to do was to identify:

a) who was talking about them and in what terms; b) who was talking about car hire/rental in general; c) the key authorities with whom they needed to connect;

This work identified those who could be thought of as Avis’s own “MySpace” - that is: a community of people who hire cars, talk about car hire and are authoritative on car hire. Our work enabled Avis Europe to identify the key topics that car renters were concerned about, and to help align their product with the needs of that market. We showed them who were the key authoritities in “trustworthy car rental”. Where they sat in that in conversation, and who they needed to impress to be talked about in a more positive way. We identified the key hot topics of those influencers - what language they were using, what their concerns were.

As a consequence of this work, the marketing team at Avis led by Xavier Vallée and Rob White, and the customer service team led by Eibhlin Payne and Stephen Spiers have been doing a lot of product and service development in the background and they have just now begun to talk about that in the form of a blog wetryharder.co.uk. The aim of the blog is to open a dialogue with the marketplace.

This kind of approach sets a benchmark - in our opinion - for what online brand building needs to become: a process of engagement with the online marketplace.

1. You find out what your brand is - by listening to the way it is discussed, by monitoring and measuring those conversations. How important are you? What are your key strengths, your weaknesses? What are your supporters saying? What are your detractors saying?
2. You start acting on the insights, improving the product, becoming if you like more like the best self you can be;
3. You start - very cautiously - to talk about what you are doing, trying to attenuate your voice not to the slogans of the marketing department, but to the words of your consumers;
4. You measure how you are doing. What is the change in sentiment around your product? Are you now preferred to your competitors? On what grounds?

Then you repeat the process. Slowly, and in lock-step with your customers, you build your brand. This process is not just about good market research, or good advertising: it puts both to the service of creating an impregnable place for your brand at the heart of the most valuable place you can be: the place where you solve problems for your customers.

I meant to blog at greater length about the ICWSM, which was very enjoyable and instructive. One often finds oneself in that “shall I write about this, or just do it?” dilemma. So I just did it … got talking to a number of clever people about the problems that they and we are experiencing deploying software to do these complicated things we do, and about their solutions and ours.

Things I learnt:

UMBC in Maryland under Tim Finin have a kick-ass team of graduate students. Much respect to Pranam and Akshay …
Twitter is great!
There are some cool betas doing sentimenting for blogs and news (check out textmap)
No one has cracked sentimenting satisfactorily for message boards
As message boards represent c. 85% of the volume of commentary of most of the brands we work for, this remains an issue …

We are a lot closer to solving a number of knotty problems as a result of the conference, though. Congratulations to Nicolas Nicolov of Umbria, Natalie Hurst of Nielsen BuzzMetrics and Matthew Hurst of Microsoft Live Labs inter alia for organising it.

Mark Rogers will be attending the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media in Boulder, Colorado between 25th-28th March.  And blogging about it if a broken arm permits!  His GSM phone is +44 7866 369181 if you would like to catch up.

Mark Rogers is going to be at SES London this week, giving a talk about how brands can make sure that they get their own messages out online, even (or especially) during major crises. If you plan to be there and would like to meet up, please get in touch through the website or call the office on +44 (0) 20 7793 1575.

When we first speak with a brand manager or a PR person they normally ask us these questions:

“What are people saying about my brand in blogs?”

“Can you help me monitor that?”

We say: we can help you monitor blogs, but first you need to do to help us define the questions you want answered. Monitoring blogs, review sites and messageboards on its own gives you large quantities of information, but few answers that can help your business. It is easier to make a business case for spending on online research and analysis if you can be pretty specific about the question that you need to have answered and about the relationship between that question and the business’s bottom line.  These are the questions that we suggest the client starts with: Question 1: “Why do people choose my product?”

Question 2: “Why do people choose my competitor’s product?”

Question 3: “Why do people recommend my product to their friends?”

Question 4: “Why do people recommend my competitor’s product to their friends?”

Questions 1 and 2 may seem at first blush to resemble questions 3 and 4. But actually they are dissimilar. When someone recommends a product they will often choose a reason that says something about themselves. People will rarely say: “I chose this product because it’s cheapest”, but they may often say: “I chose this product because I care about the environment”. Conversely, why people actually buy a product is often around a combination of product features, reputation and price.

(Reputation and price are in some measure inversely related. Products with good reputations generally achieve that reputation by good service. Good service costs money and although consumers are tempted by cheap offers, they know that “free broadband” generally carries a cost in poor customer support. We recently completed some detailed research in this area which shows that brands with good customer support can keep their prices higher for longer than their competitors. )

All these questions are answerable from online research, and we can put numbers against the characterisitics of a product which are most likely to drive adoption. Those numbers have direct benefit to a key hiearchy of stakeholders within the company:

a) the product managers suddenly know which aspects of the product are key to marketing success (and which need most attention);

b) the marketing managers know what is the key product strength to push in relation to the corresponding weakness of a rival’s product;

c) the word-of-mouth marketers and PRs know which messages are most likely to drive viral adoption amongst users and can devise appropriate campaigns.

The government has rowed back from its commitment to spend £50m over three years educating the young people of Britain about sexual health. There is a quiet epidemic of chlamydia amongst the young people of Britain. The UK has one of the highest infection rates in the world, with over 1% of 16-19 year olds being infected. Untreated chlamydia can cause infertility in young women. This decision not to spend this arbitrary sum on advertising is to be applauded. It is very ill-advised for anyone - let alone a taxpayer-funded government department - to pledge to spend a certain amount on advertising over a certain period of time. Spending money on advertising does not magically equate to changing attitudes or raising awareness. The government should instead commit to a measurement such as raising the awareness of the issue, or the incidence of young people seeking advice and then the outcome can be measured. Announcing that you have a big budget for advertising simply advises the advertising professionals that you have more money than sense.

However the good news on the budget has not been followed by shrewd allocation of the budget for the campaign between the various media.

The word on the grapevine when this campaign was first mooted a year ago (we heard about it via a PR company who asked our advice about getting the message out online) was that this campaign was not planned to involve a significant online spend but was going to be dominated by a TV campaign.

One ad has been released to the press. It shows good-looking teenagers getting off at a club. Their designer clothes are branded “gonorrhoea” or “chlamydia”; the commentary talks about “sexually transmitted diseases” and invites the audience to wear a condom.

The concentration is on TV and the information available seems limited. Stories in the Guardian and the BBC which routinely list useful links can’t find a website to link to and instead link to the Department of Health website, which does not even list the campaign on its front page. The top link today is from social search site Connotea where it featured under the “UK” tag, largely thanks to the medically-minded Connotea user Ojcius.

The PR company we spoke to suggested that the public relations budget was likely to be small, around £50k at the most and mostly directed to advising the press about the TV campaign. They wanted to know what they could do online. We advised that the budget allocation to the internet should be far higher, since it offered an excellent opportunity to reach the target audience with high quality information. Why the internet, they asked? Well, even the government’s own watchdog Ofcom has noticed that young people are watching less TV.

This is what a recent Ofcom survey said:

Television is of declining interest to many 16-24 year olds; on average they watch television for one hour less per day than the average television viewer. … Instead, the internet plays a central role in daily life; more than 70% of 16-24 year old internet users use social networking websites (compared to 41% of all UK internet users) and 37% of 18-24 year olds have contributed to a blog or website message board (compared to 14% of all UK internet users).

The news that the campaign creative (above) was aimed at magazines is particularly contrary, given that recent research has shown Internet use gaining year on year at 17% across Europe and magazine readership falling 7%.

Finally: persuasive research has shown that young people take advice on sex not from the government or the media, but from their friends. They don’t stop having sex or wear condoms just because they are asked to. Surely this was an opportunity for a campaign exploiting the fact that many young adults spend their leisure time not watching TV but talking on Bebo, MySpace or LiveJournal?

We don’t expect government communications experts all to be using sophisticated word-of-mouth measurement tools such as our own, but we do expect them to be a little more clued up about their target demographic. This seems a tremendously old-fashioned campaign. BTW Please contact us if you can find the website for this campaign. Searches on “chlamydia campaign” and even the campaign’s tagline “I’ve got Chlamydia” come up blank.

Nathan Gilliatt, writing in his Net-Savvy Executive blog reports on a recent case where Hasbro’s tracking of Amazon product reviews alerted them to a choking-danger from a popular toy. The product was swiftly withdrawn. The article observes that the level of monitoring required to stay across Amazon reviews is high, but that the intelligence can be vital.

Gilliatt comments that without RSS feeds from the review pages, monitoring Amazon reviews is hard. Hard, but not impossible. We monitor review sites like Amazon for a number of clients. The intelligence they offer on competitive strengths and weaknesses within a product area is hard to over-estimate.

On Wednesday I presented at a fascinating training morning run by e-Consultancy’s Craig Hanna along with Blogging4business’s Matthew Yeomans. The agenda was to educate the audience about blogging as a phenomenon and to give them a sense of what it could teach them about their own customers and how they could use blogging and other social media tools in marketing.

The speakers were Andy Budd of Clearleft, Heather Hopkins of Hitwise, Debbie Weil, author of The Corporate Blogging Book.

There were some great case studies presented and interesting stories from the floor. Heather wrote it up here. I am afraid I missed Andy Budd’s presentation, but my favourite moments were:

Heather’s account of the huge impact of social networks on e-Commerce (it is as important as search) and her observation that 2% of Amazon purchase traffic comes from blogs. It doesn’t sound like much, but Yahoo! only provides 3%.

Debbie’s account of how marketeers are trying to use social media, sometimes well and sometimes poorly … she used an hilarious parody GM Chevy Tahoe ad, which was submitted in response to an online promotion. (Can’t find a link, but here is an ABC report) I talked about how brand messages are mediated by search, and how that means that the brand has to compete for thought space with journalists, competitors, regulators and bloggers. Thus …

The upshot is that you have as a brand a central duty to find out the words that are being used about you, particularly in the context of links, and try to make them as relevant to your core brand promise as possible.

BTW: After I read what Heather had written about what I said, I sent her the following mail, explaining the points I had been trying to make about links:

I am addressing a CBI conference this week in Birmingham, UK, where the agenda is to discuss Crisis Management and digital media.

When we established Market Sentinel two years ago we thought that online monitoring and response would be a leading part of crisis management. As time has gone on and we have learnt more about crisis response, we now have a much clearer idea of what works and what does not. Onlinetools have a part to play, but they are more effective in crisis prevention and in dealing with the aftermath of a crisis than they are in managing the crisis itself.

The nature of a crisis

A crisis rarely comes out of the blue. Normally it is something which was previously an “issue” - poor earnings, a problem with a product, a safety worry - which suddenly flares up. In principle the web is a great medium for addressing such issues before they get to the crisis stage, but in practice this rarely happens (more on that below).

When such crises arise the management of a company has an imperative first to act and only then to speak. When they speak they do well to speak to the nearest mass media, radio, TV and print - ideally simultaneously. Such statements should of course be carried on the website or blogsite, but that is not the first outlet for them. Most media outlets will put the full text on their news websites in any case.

When a crisis happens the senior management of a company would naturally be well advised to monitor the response to their words. PR company Weber Shandwick recently reported that a large majority (61%) of business executives were sceptical about responding to bloggers, even if they had their facts wrong. They instead highlighted fixing the underlying problem. The communications professionals should perhaps be exercised by the response to the message, but in practice - again - their time is better spent talking personally to key stakeholders, answering questions and getting the message out.

There is, however, a huge opportunity for using the web to speak directly and in detail to smaller stakeholders where call centres can simply not cope. For example - is your laptop battery one of those which is likely to explode? Here is a link to the webpage.

The nature of the web

The web is an accretive, not a narrative medium. It helps to think of the web as a palimpsest of information, where new information does not quite efface old information, but gradually becomes more prominent, thanks to the impact of new links, new ways of looking at the old information.

Search engines react to changes in corporate reputation only slowly, as the consensus around a topic changes over time. Google indexes only part of the web, and indexes disproportionately the pages that change frequently. Often the key pages in corporate reputation management belong to influential but staid bodies like institutes of safety, or regulators, or tax authorities.

This means that it is only when the immediate firefighting of the crisis is out of the way that the web comes into its own. Perhaps the brand has sustained some damage. How much damage and from whom? Who needs persuading of the error of their information?

This is the time when the tools that could usefully have been deployed earlier, in the pre-crisis, issue management phase of the problem can be deployed. Here it is useful to benchmark corporate reputation in relation to an issue, to identify key stakeholders who need to be communicated with, on or offline, to monitor those stakeholders, to analyse their own networks of influence and to work at understanding how knowledge flows through the group.

So, I am in the lucky position of not having a crisis on my hands, what should I do? First: write down the issues that might become crises; second; note what I am doing to keep an eye on them from a communications perspective; third: ensure that I know who the key authorities are in relation to these issues. Understand them, listen to them, monitor them. When they start talking about these issues, you know that the issue has moved one step closer to becoming a crisis, but you also know where to address news of your response.

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.