For the casual person, the more emails you receive, the more popular you are: normally be a boost to your ego. You’d expect that popular bloggers will be thrilled by this as a recognition of their popularity but 300+ “PR Spam” emails a day can be a little much.

Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, is one journalist/blogger that has got fed up. In addition to filtering and blocking out emails, he has made the addresses and domains of these ’spammers’ public in the bid to shame them. This sparked a wave of imitators the most recent being a wiki of PR Spammers by Gina Trapani, of Lifehacker.

Tom Foremski has announced he will only accept pitches via Facebook as has Robert Scoble. Both went as far to say they’ll only listen to their list of friends on Facebook. Bad news for hopeful PRs. On the other hand short ‘twitpitch‘ messages on Twitter are being hailed as the new way of getting bloggers attention without infuriating them.

Stowe Boyd, who coined the idea term twitpitch, has certainly found it effective for him during his recent visit to Web 2.0 Expo. Together with Brian Solis, they are pushing for the idea of MicroPR, where PR and marketing pitches get more personal.

The trend suggests PR will have to change tack in getting their message out. As Jeremy Toeman observes, “relationships are more important than ever”. Knowing who to target with your message will be key to the success of future PR campaigns.

Chief constable Richard Brunstrom of the North Wales force launched a blog on Monday this week. On BBC’s PM radio programme he said:

“We deliberately didn’t tell anyone about it. We just wanted to do it quietly and see what happened. And look what happened. Two days later I am on national radio talking to you.”

The PR power of blogging, particularly during this time of year, when the domestic news agenda flags, is truly phenomenal.

But Brunstrom is by no means alone. There are many police blogging. “David Copperfield’s” is the best of them, and it links to most of the other good ones.

The BBC’s coverage of this contains the note: “Mr Brunstrom’s blog will be in the form of a frequently-updated online journal.” So. A blog, then.

This is a simple, useful “how to” from Boris Mann on how PR and marketing professionals should interact with bloggers:

• Use permanent links (and make them intuitive)
  
• Provide product information (as much as possible)
  
• Project personality (don’t be a robot)
  

The full link is here.

(via Steve Rubel)

Julian Smith of Jupiter Research highlights the increasing influence of blogs in a piece for the BBC website in the context of the WeMedia forum. He mentions Market Sentinel’s Dell case study as an example of evidence showing that bloggers can be influential.

“For marketers,” Smith writes, “this has the potential to significantly impact brand communications if consumer content refers to experiences with products or services that are incongruous and misaligned with official marketing messages.

“When a company’s marketing story differs from the one being told by online consumers, a credibility gap will emerge that could have dire consequences on brand perception and favourability. “

Charlene Li gave an interesting and wide-ranging keynote Friday morning at the New Comm Forum. She took a 30,000 feet look at social media, with particular reference to blogging, aiming her sometimes impassioned comments at a broad audience.

“Social media is all about ceding control to build the relationship with the consumer. They won’t put up with anything else, as the processing power has moved to the edge of the network, the consumer has been empowered by it.

“Look at my own situation - I can work anywhere. The rest of my team works remotely from me. I am displaced.

“What has made this possible? Cheap hardware, for one. Have you seen this $200 computer? Incredible. The impact of RSS - I don’t have to go looking for information, I can subscribe to it. It finds me. Sites like Trip advisor[travel reviews], Blogger, Wikipedia, eBay, Google and services like Bit Torrent [file sharing], the Linux operating system show this in action. Technology has moved towards the “people”.

“Like anyone, I trust recommendations from friends and family first, followed by online recommendations way ahead of other sources. Brand loyalty is declining. It is down from 59% to 54% in two years between 2002 and 2004 in Europe. It may not sound like much but 5% over two year is a major decline. The new technology has empowered communities, not institutions.”

Li mentioned as case studies some work done by Umbria about mobile pricing plans, analysing customer complaints online and using them to create a more consumer-friendly offering. She cited the website istockphoto, which derives its inventory from user-generated photos, and mentioned Burpee seeds, who have given their business a huge fillip just by shrewd use of RSS feeds of seasonal offers.

“Brands are being defined by the communities that accept them. For example on Bob Lutz’s famous GM blog, there is a Community-driven conversation about the Solstice” Li reported an exchange between commentators on the blog …

“Guy one: I can’t wait to own a Solstice: it’s a chick magnet of a car

“Guy two: What about us family guys?

“Guy one: Get rid of the kids.

“The phenomenon of Digg [tech-focussed news where the item’s prominence is driven by social bookmarks] derives from the same motive. If you are a corporation, you have to let the customers become the brand. This is what Nike ID have done with their software which lets you design your own shoes, and then encourages you to let other consumers vote for your design. Similarly with CNet, they have taken the decision to window other sites’ content

“From companies I hear from corporations a lot about the risks of ceding control - the fear that the employees and executives will say something bad: ‘We can’t have negative opinions on our site’

“But the point is that constructive criticism should be welcomed. Sure, you don’t need abusive comments, but it is better to have your brand advocates engage you directly with their constructive criticism, than have them do it behind your back. People say: ‘We’ll lose control of the brand’. I say: ‘You already lost control of the brand.’ They say: ‘People will delete the RSS feed.” I say: ‘Do you really want to send unwelcome emails, instead?’ People say: ‘We’ll get sued.’ I think those risks are easily manageable.

“So, how does your company get involved with all this? First: decide how involved you want to be with social computing. At a minimum listen to what is being said in message boards and on the blogs. Test the waters and immerse yourselves in the tools. It’s a new mindset and you are not going to get the hang of it straight away.

“Take the case of Dan Entin: he blogged that he couldn’t find his favourite deodourant (Degree Sport, as it happens). A sharp-eyed Unilever employee spotted the post got in touch, advised him on local stockists and then gave him a box of the stuff. He blogged it, naturally. That is a huge PR win for Unilever.

“I would argue that companies should focus on the relationship, not the technology. It is not so much about blogging or about podcasting … it is about the relationship with the consumer. Technologies will come and go, but the relationships will outlast them.

“For companies my advice is: start small and prove the business case. It’s a mindset: it will take some time. It took eight days to set up the small block blog. If you want to get your feet wet I would suggest that a recruitment blog is worth having. You always want to attract new talent to your company. Or at the very least ensure that your press releases are in RSS, or that when you do an earnings call you make it available as a podcast. You don’t have write new stuff necessarily. You probably have some existing speeches from executives that you can repurpose.

“The key thing to consider is to let you cusomters tell you when you are doing it right and also when you are doing it wrong. And then measure engagement, measure frequency of visit, length of stay, links. And benchmark your position before and afterwards.

“I hear about return on investment: Typepad costs me $15 a month and I have got $1m of business off it in the last year

“In conclusion: what does it all mean:

“Social computing will move into the enterprise. Wikis and blogs are perhaps even more effective internally than they are externally.

“Consumers want to create their own applications. Jeff Bezos said that Web 2.0 was all about computers talking to other computers. That makes it easier for consumers to use applications to create new applications of their own. For example you can take Google maps and overlay something else

“I predict that Community-based political systems will emerge, where people who share common views will seek out candidates to represent them.

“Finally social computing will become like air, as it becomes part of everyone’s experience, it will disappear …”

To Paris yesterday to hear the great David Weinberger, by the special invitation of Guillaume du Gardier, now with Edelman.

David Weinberger was one of the editors of the Cluetrain Manifesto and thus has a legitimate claim to be at the heart of the philosophical shift that underlies the rise of consumer-generated media, and the transition of public relations into “public relationships”.

Weinberger is now at Harvard Law School’s Berkman centre for the Internet and society. As he spoke I made some notes on my PDA. This isn’t everything he said - it is everything that he said that I thought was interesting. So not an impartial account at all - and please mail with corrections!

Weinberger:

“If you want to understand at how the internet has impacted information look at Wikipedia. It has 994,000 articles in English alone. I mean, Encyclopedia Britannica has 32 volumes and contains 65,000 articles. That’s not just because the editors decided there are only 65,000 things in the world that are interesting enough to write articles about. It is because of the sheer costs of paper and printing, and shipping books about the place.

“And the Wikipedia is not edited at all, in the conventional sense. No single person decides what’s in or out. Famously, there are articles about the use of the umlaut in heavy metal - something that would never find its way into a conventional encyclopedia. The Wikipedia approach to knowledge management is that the originators don’t manage it at all. They allow people, members of the public to decide what’s relevant, and what’s not.

“What the Wikipedia is to knowledge management, the blog is to personal expression. Everything is allowed. Tonight, though I would like to talk about what a blog is not. A blog is not about advertising …”

Weinberger used the Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit blog. He pointed out that this was not a blog in any meaningful sense of the word. It was not a true expression of someone’s experience. It seemed to revolve around two people arguing which of them liked Juicy Fruit more.

“I mean - even the guy from the advertising agency doesn’t like Juicy Fruit that much … Anyone from Juicy Fruit, here? No. Good. I mean, come on.

“A blog is not about cats. I hear that a lot from people in marketing. People blog about their cats, right? In fact one of my neighbours in Boston really answered that the other day. If I want to blog about my cat, who are you to say that I can’t do that. I should be able to blog about anything that interests me. And in fact, there are many blogs about cats. But that is not the point. A blog is about whatever I want it to be about. It is my agenda, and not yours.

“A blog is not about journalism … although some journalists blog and some bloggers are increasingly being hired as stringers by the news media. The worlds of blogging and journalism overlap, but they are distinct. Bloggers distrust journalists because they suspect them of being corporate whores serving some kind of hidden agenda from the news organisation’s proprietor. Journalists distrust bloggers because they suspect bloggers don’t check their facts (right! and newspapers do, I suppose?) and that they are single issue merchants and cranks.

“Blogging is not about 1 to 1 marketing. 1 to 1 marketing in blogs often doesn’t work, because one of the 1’s isn’t really a 1. It is a big corporation. How can I have a conversation with Wrigley’s, or with Ford? The fact is that blogging is about a conversation. Blogging is a new social space. My weblog is me. It is my body in the new public space.

“One of the key things about blogging which distinguishes it from the stuff that’s gone before - the marketing messages on the one hand, and the conventional journalism on the other - is the freedom to write badly, the freedom to make mistakes. Making mistakes is a sign of authenticity. It is a sign of being human. Of course we are all going to make mistakes. It establishes intimacy. And on the internet pretty good may be good enough. “

Weinberger went on to talk about links:

“Links are little acts of generosity. They are saying: don’t stay on this site, visit this other site. The web is based on links. The web is links. But look at the home page of the New York Times (registration required). It only links to itself - oh, and to advertisers. Journalists talk about bloggers being narcissistic. That’s narcissism. The New York Times home page.

“In the old model, businesses thought of themselves like a fort. They controlled their brand, they released only the information they wanted. But now the fort has holes in the walls. People are having conversations about those companies that the companies can’t control. The fortress business model has been overtaken. Now our customers know more about our business than we do. And the customers trust other customers to tell them about our business more than they do the marketers. You cannot control your customers by the selective release of information. Customers are not there to be managed. We trust Google, craigslist, Robert Scoble and Jonathan Schwarz because they are there for us. They are for us.”

Weinberger talked about Howard Dean’s election campaign, which he was involved with as an election strategist.

“The thing that characterised the Dean campaign was its openness, the sense of involvement that it generated. And typical of that was the way that they got this 31 year old kid Matthew Gross blogging. Traditionally the campaign messages are tightly controlled by the candidate and by the press officer. This time Matthew Gross just blogged the whole campaign, talked about it the way he saw it. It caused a sensation, got huge buzz.”

Weinberger on branding:

“Branding - as a metaphor - is drawn from what you do to a cow with a red hot iron. And that is still - mostly - the way it is done. Branding is done by someone to your customers, the way you might brand a cow.

“And yet business is evolving. You start with brand and you move towards the idea of reputation and then the idea of relationship. That means that every business is going to be involved in blogging one way or another.”

Weinberger on trust:

“Blogging is best - or at least very good - if taken internally. The blogosphere operates as a vast, amorphous focus group - a defocus group. It creates a sense of trust. I feel that this is my company. That is like the relationship I have with Google. I feel that Google is my company, although I don’t own stock. “

What should companies do?

“Public relations needs to turn into ‘public relationships’. Companies need to listen, to audit, to engage, to give up control to their employees. Companies need to develop a blogging policy - not rocket science, just saying that blogging employees need to observe the same standards as anyone else - keep corporate secrets, don’t run down the corporation. Fundamentally companies must try to sound like a human being, to be like a human being. Engage, don’t defend, be transparent, and link, link, link, link, link. “

What mistakes do companies make?

“You don’t know more than your customers. Your customers know more than you. Don’t be boring. Take risks. Blogging is about opportunity, about connectedness, about breaking down the walls.”

Weinberger then fielded a few questions. What would he say to corporations who worried about loss of control:

“You would better ask: do you want people to talk about you? That is the question. If you do, you should blog.

“Thinking we were in control was magical thinking, it was delusional. People have always talked about us, we were just deaf.”

An article in the New York Times (requires free registration or use Bugmenot for a one-time password) profiles how Wal-Mart have taken on their detractors with a pro-active PR campaign, run by a number of ex political campaigners.

The PR campaign emphasises the Wal-Mart positives (good value, local employment) and looks to off-set a campaign of detraction from pressure groups like Wal-Mart Watch, run in part by trade unions who oppose the company’s employment practices and who cannot get recognition from the company. (Note their website’s heavy use of email newsletters, syndicated news, its blog and comment pages) The trigger is a new documentary entitled “Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price” by Robert Greenwald. The documentary looks systematically at Wal-Mart negatives - the effect on smaller local businesses of a Wal-Mart opening up, their healthcare policies and employment policies.

Key quotes:

A confidential 2004 report prepared by McKinsey & Company for Wal-Mart, and made public by Wal-Mart Watch, found that 2 percent to 8 percent of Wal-Mart consumers surveyed have ceased shopping at the chain because of “negative press they have heard.”

To keep up with its critics, Wal-Mart “has to run a campaign,” said Robert McAdam, a former political strategist at the Tobacco Institute who now oversees Wal-Mart’s corporate communications. “It’s simply nonsense for us to let some of these attacks go without a response.”

The impact of the negative sentiment in slowing Wal-Mart’s growth is a classical demonstration of Frederick Reichheld’s net promoters theory. This theory maintains that as the proportion of your detractors grow, your growth is curtailed and that a decline in your net promoters index (the number of your promoters minus your detractors) is strongly predictive of a stock price decline.

It would be interesting to track the impact of Wal-Mart campaign, which is run by Edelman on Wal-Mart’s online net promoters index.

Thanks to Flemming Madsen of Onalytica who suggested we blogged this.

Forbes magazine has devoted a sensational cover story to bloggers who set out to damage people and brands. Since the piece itself is password-protected, here is how it kicks off:

Web logs are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective. Their potent allies in this pursuit include Google and Yahoo.

Blogs started a few years ago as a simple way for people to keep online diaries. Suddenly they are the ultimate vehicle for brand-bashing, personal attacks, political extremism and smear campaigns. It’s not easy to fight back: Often a bashing victim can’t even figure out who his attacker is. No target is too mighty, or too obscure, for this new and virulent strain of oratory. Microsoft has been hammered by bloggers; so have CBS, CNN and ABC News, two research boutiques that criticized IBM’s Notes software, the maker of Kryptonite bike locks, a Virginia congressman outed as a homosexual and dozens of other victims–even a right-wing blogger who dared defend a blog-mob scapegoat.

Forbes’s writer Daniel Lyons point out that first amendment rights protect many writers who are simply out to settle scores, or in the case of “Pamela Jones” - the writer of Groklaw - take a partisan line on SCO’s case against IBM over Linux. Lyons suggests that Jones may be an IBM mouthpiece.

The article is written in a sensational flack versus counter-flack style, but both it and the indignant response from bloggers are worth a read.

(via Micropersuasion)

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.

Morgan McLintic of Lewis PR reports on a breakfast seminar addressing the impact of blogging on corporate reputations.

Highlights of the day: if you want to blog make the content fresh, relevant, and honest; do NOT invent a fake person to blog on your behalf. The cosmetic firm Vichy France did this before changing their mind and allowing real consumers to get involved. The results can be seen at “Le Journal de ma Peau”.

How often do search engines crawl the web? A report by Dirk Lewandowski, Henry Wahlig and Gunnar Meyer-Bautor of the Department of Information Science at the Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf, Germany looked at websites with daily updates and concluded that many were not crawled more than once every 20 days. There are specific issues identified at Yahoo, and to a lesser degree MSN which often seem to have out of date caches.

The study was undertaken using the expression “Helicopter crash in Iraq”, and looking at updates from Reuters.

The implication of this for communications business professional is that even with daily updated content you cannot be sure that your content will be found by any search engine.

Unless you are using RSS and blogging techniques to ensure that your content is published to as many intermediary sites as possible your story may not even be indexed by major search engines within the news cycle. The implication of this study is that even if a PR professional puts up a press release on their own site and on e.g. PR Web, it might not be being indexed by the major search engines, and is therefore unlikely to be found the 75% of users who use search engines to find information about companies.

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

Apple have admitted that there are problems with screen quality on the new Apple Nano and offered a product replacement programme. Despite retailers criticising the company’s stance on the issue as “arrogant”, this action was somewhat delayed. Commentators attributed Apple’s decision to the campaign by Matthew Peterson’s “flawed music player” which had created negative buzz about the product in the loyal Apple community.

Can the PR industry address bloggers directly and if so how? Edelman and Technorati are to collaborate on a survey on the subject. Bloggers like Jeremy Zawodny are already expressing wariness of this. Zawodny complains of being spammed at his personal email by irrelevant press releases. (Do no PRs use RSS?) As Charlie Kondek points out, the more blogging migrates to the journalistic mainstream, the more widespread this approach may become.

Chris Edwards has published a long and thoughtful piece about our Search is brand white paper.

He makes one point that calls for a clarification - yes the stats were UK only. We are planning a wider survey in due course.

He also makes two points which call for a response:

1) the report counted everything that was might be seen as damaging to the brand as “negative”. He mentions the fact that a search on Dairylea brought up a reference to an historic product recall. This is true. We assumed that anything that would diminish the public perception of the brand was negative.

2) Chris questions whether search engine optimisation and blogging are enough when a brand is deep in the mire, as in the case of the Kryptonite lock. We would answer that the Kryptonite case and the recent issues with Land Rover instead demonstrate a couple of important things:

a brand under attack in the blogosphere has to respond early. If a blogger has raised a valid problem, then it is important not to ignore the problem and hope the blogger will get bored and desist. Blog attacks are public and remain on search engines forever. If the problem is a real one, others will find the attack and link to it.

the brand has to address the problem. There is no point in planning a sophisticated Google-bombing, SEO-ed up to the gills, widely syndicated response that doesn’t take away the original pain. Only if action has been taken on the problem, and the company has publicised that action, will the links go to the new source of authority. For example the “how to get a cash refund for my Kryptonite lock” page.

We would argue that SEO and blogging are both useful tools in making a corporate response public. If there is a problem that effects a small number of consumers, then the brand has nothing to lose by creating a well-indexed page which comes up on Google when a description of that problem is entered as a search term, and making sure that all stakeholders in the company know about that page. Ideally it would be part of an FAQ.

Blogging is an informal way of dealing with issues major and minor and getting the word out. “We screwed up. We have decided to give you all your money back or offer you a free upgrade. Here is what you do. Email us here if you are stuck. By the way, we are building a better version of the product applying the lessons of this experience.” This is an approach that is much more likely to win back lost trust and loyalty than putting out a press release written in legalese, or Google-bombing your detractors.

Market Sentinel is currently pitching to a large company with a prominent detractor. Two thirds of the traffic his campaigning site is getting, he says, comes from people putting the words “[product] problems” or “[product] complaints” into Google.

The company’s customer service FAQ is absent from the top ten results of this search.

This effectively means that the detractor is doing the job of customer service for the company. He is qualifying the customer service experience, and providing the answers to the consumers. This is not a healthy situation for the company concerned.

This is anecdotal evidence for something we all experience. A couple of days back I hired a Smart car. The highly-sophisticated, semi-automatic gearbox stalled and left me marooned in teeming rain in heavy traffic. The rental company couldn’t explain the problem and struggled to find me with a replacement vehicle. When I came home I put “Smart Car” gearbox problem into Google and found

http://www.atomised.org/smartcar/faq.php

Yes, it’s the unofficial FAQ - not authorised by Mercedes but highly useful and entertaining. It turns out that either I wasn’t pressing the brake, or the brake microswitch was faulty. Good for me to know, good for the rental guy to know.

Brand owners have two options to make good use of of customers (and maybe resellers) putting their problems into Google:

1) provide a highly-functional, highly indexed FAQ

2) find a way of harnessing their community of users to provide this kind of customer service (think http://share.skype.com)

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.

Constantin Basturea writes drawing our attention to a piece by Danny Sullivan in Search Engine Watch querying the basis of our recent survey. It’s a point that’s echoed here with the suggestion that might have skewed the results.

Danny Sullivan repeats the searches for the world and gets different results, but then wonders if we used Google UK. This was clearly stated in our survey. It was a survey of ACNielsen’s top 50 UK grocery brands and “Google UK’s top ten search results” as the Net Imperative piece Danny linked to makes clear. The brands are in the main UK brands, like Kingsmill Bread.

It would be useful to repeat the process for the US and for the world.

(Incidentally: the survey date was 6th June. Market Sentinel repeated the exercise just before the publication of the press release and white paper and got broadly similar results, but they do change from day to day.)