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    Are you involved in the conversation?Do you know anything about WebPR, blogging, or Online Reputation Management? How the modern-day consumer interacts with the Internet has changed the public relations arena forever. To survive you need to be clued up on what this means. Chapter 10 will detail how WebPR, Online Reputation Management and social media can strengthen your company's presence, build your brand online and drive traffic to your website.

Online Conversations Are Happening All Around You
Online conversations are taking place every day in the form of consumer generated media (CGM). This Internet content is constantly evolving, sparking new ideas and inspiring people! Although public relations has traditionally focused on the media as written by journalists, the most trusted sources for modern consumers are ordinary people reporting their experiences.

The use of social media (blogs, forums, etc) has provided the consumer with a voice that easily reaches other Internet users and elicits their responses - a voice that allows them to contribute to the already noisy conversation around them.

Companies need to both listenand respondto this growing conversation. Coming up, we will be looking at methods to monitor your brand on the Net, to attract the attention of consumers and to monitor their responses without overstepping the mark. Remember - people like to be listened to, they hate to be silenced.

First the Listening: Online Reputation Management
The days of letters being written by disgruntled customers expressing their disappointment are long gone. Brands, these days, often don't even know that their customers are disappointed. Is it because they're not expressing their feelings? Not by a long shot!

Consumers are expressing their views more than ever, they're just doing so via a different channel - they have moved online. Smart brands are watching consumer generated content and listening to what their customers are saying. But the rest haven't woken up to the fact that 'listening' is vital - and not doing so can undermine a brand's very survival. So LISTEN! Monitor the Internet for conversations about your brand. After all, you can't react to something you don't know is happening.

Web2.0 and Consumer Generated Media
The Internet is increasingly populated by content generated by consumers themselves in the form of blogs and forums. This shift in the way people interact with the Internet - and the control they have over its content - contributes to the phenomenon known as Web2.0.

How Online Reputation Management Works
Online Reputation Management(ORM) is a vital component of any PR strategy because people talk about your company online - the good and the bad! This can make or break your business. Keeping your finger on the pulse of what is being said by putting the relevant damage-control strategies in place and capitalizing on positive comments is imperative for the survival of any business in today's hyper-connected world.

ORM involves monitoring the Internet for conversations about your brand and even your competitors' brands. This is necessary because while it's impossible to 'control the conversation', you can influence it if you are already a part of it.

Quirk's ORM tool comprehensively gathers online mentions of a company and channels them to a dedicated team to measure the relevance, credibility and impact of each mention. A company's ORM strategy can furthermore be broken down by category keywords to monitor the performance of individual business lines. ORM allows you to identify strengths and weaknesses in your offering - both against each other and against competing business lines.

By gaining awareness of brand attacksand service problemsin real time, you are positioned to respond. By identifying groups of customers who have had the same complaint and indicating that the problem is being addressed, ORM can stop a potential haemorrhage of customers.

Depending on the seriousness of the attack and the credibility of the source, news of what has been said should travel to a different part of your organisation. For the most serious cases, senior management should be alerted. Less serious mentions - as well as praise - can be forwarded to marketing or PR departments for information and to drive budgets.

In cases such as Dell Hell and Kryptonite, failure to respond to product problems that had been identified and demonstrated in the blogosphere cost the companies millions in lost goodwill and revenue.

Heavy-handed or dishonest responses are guaranteed to make the situation worse. Bloggers must be responded to on their own terms - transparently and honestly but also quickly.

10 Rules to Recover from an Online Brand Attack
These 10 rules to recovery should provide a practical approach for brands facing an online threat.

1) Humility
Before you can recover from an online brand attack you have to be aware that your brand can be attacked - no matter how big it is or how untouchable it may seem.

2) Listen
Once you have a clear understanding of the scope of the possible effects of an online attack and are committed to maintaining a good reputation online, you're half way there. Next you've got to understand how the process of consumer complaints has evolved.

3) Act immediately!
One of the easiest ways to solve the majority of brand attacks is to respond quickly. A brand that shows it is listening and does indeed care will go far when it comes to ensuring a solid online reputation. A conscious reaction is the only way forward - acknowledging what has been said and reacting accordingly.

4) If what they're saying is false...
If the mention of your brand is factually incorrect, in a friendly tone, send the blogger (90% of the time it will be a blogger) evidence that they are wrong, ask for removal or retraction of the entry, offer to keep them informed of future news, and only if no action is taken by the blog author then add a comment.

5) If what they're saying is true...
If it is true, learn from the "Dell Hell" phenomenon. If the mention is negative but true then send your side of the story and try as hard as you can to take it offline.

6) Keep the negative pages out of the search engines
Keeping more people from reading negative things about your brand is imperative. What you can do is knock them off the first page of the results with basic SEO topped with some social media page setups such as Squidoo and MySpace or forum posts to mention a few. Keep adding pages and links until you've forced the offending pages out of sight.

7) Maintain communication
If you aren't an active member of the online community it tends to be a little harder to recover from an online attack. If your company doesn't have a blog, start one. Participate in industry forums and chat rooms. Build genuine credibility as a member of these conversations and you'll find that people will have more respect for you and your brand.

8) Engage in the conversation
Keep your brand in the face of consumers by engaging in the conversation. This could be done by making use of blogs, communicating with customers and being as open and honest as possible.

9) Care
If you truly care what your customers think then most of this will come naturally. That's all people want. They give you their money, they just want some good service and respect in return.

10) Be prepared
No brand is immune from an online brand attack. The best brands have strategies in place to immediately identify a reputation crisis and respond to it quickly enough to stop the negative word of mouth spreading.

Bottom line - by making bloggers familiar with your voice, you will be better placed to respond to criticism. Consumers can spot last-minute corporate fire-fighting - they should know and trust your voice already.

What About ORM Across Your Sector?
ORM can also be used to monitor your competitors for the same product issues and reputation attacks to which your company is susceptible - allowing you to identify new business opportunitiesand drive new product developmentin your own company.

This is achieved by applying the same ORM techniques to your chosen competition, then deriving scores for comparison. The integrity of this data is ensured by applying exactly the same judging criteria to mentions of your company and your competition.

This provides two important pieces of management information:
- how well your products are being received and reviewed
- how effective your PR and marketing spend is, as well as areas where it could be redirected

The second of these will allow you a much tighter control of external PR and marketing agencies - are they delivering what they say they are? It will also provide an essential barometer for timing launches and announcements. Does your announcement require an existing wave of popular support to succeed or can it be used to draw a line under a period of negative publicity - or, indeed, capitalise on the reputational issues being experienced by your competitors.

Sector-wide ORM lets you know where you are.

Then the Talking: Getting Your Message Heard
Blogs and forums are accessible to all. This is both the root of the threat they pose to corporate reputations and the opportunity for engaging that threat. Consumer generated media must be engaged in order to:

1) Respond to others
Consumer generated media can and must be responded to. Web 2.0 is based around conversations, and if a company is being talked about it belongs in that conversation. By staying informed and putting solid brand building and crisis management strategies in place, your business will not go down the route of so many companies that have lost their reputations online.

2) Build your own voice
Many companies already have a presence in the Web2.0 sphere. By establishing your credibility online, you are better positioned to respond to future criticism and establish long-term trusting consumer relationships through online article syndications, press releases, feature articles and blogs.Online Article Syndication, Press Releases, Feature Articles and Blogs
Once you have listened to the online conversation taking place across the Net, you are equipped with the necessary information to actively engage in the 'talking' side of the equation. WebPR collectively stands for the ways in which you can get your message out there.

Online Article Syndication
A primary tactic of WebPR is online article syndication. This means contributing articles to online article directories, from which they are picked up and republished on other sites. A few of the better directories include Ezinearticles, Goarticles and Article Alley.

Because the articles contain links and keywords relevant to your site, the benefits for search engine marketing are excellent. But the strategy won't work unless people want your articles - so they need to be broad, informative and not just thinly-disguised adverts. Remember, we're in the PR chapter here - not marketing.

Yet, each article will also contain an About the Author section which could contain up to three links to your site and most article directories will allow you to include a backlink in the body of the article as well.

The aim is for the article to go viral and get republished on many web and blog sites in the weeks after they are published. But to ensure your site remains the search engine authority on the article's subject, it should be published and indexed there first.

So, online article syndication not only allows you to introduce fresh, optimised content to your site but enables you to generate a type of viral backlinking occurrence as well.

Online Press Releases
The same principles apply to online press releases. Online press releases should drive traffic to your site (your website is not a fancy brochure - it is a marketing tool that needs visitors to become customers). To achieve this, press releases need to be search engine optimised to contain related key phrasesand links.

Many journalists simply reproduce the copy of a well-written press release. It is therefore essential that press releases be optimised for keywords and links, as these will come into play for search engine marketing when the story appears online.

Feature Articles
A feature article is another vehicle that allows your brand to jump further onto the value bandwagon: offering you an opportunity to become the dominant opinion leader in your industry.

For example, if you sell holidays to Cape Town, your online marketing efforts will greatly benefit if your target market considers you a leader in this field. This is where 'value-content'comes in. Articles containing information for the potential traveller are value-adding and therefore attract links naturally. And, if published on a third party site, should carry a link back to your own website. This drives site visitors who are automatically predisposed to your brand, and therefore are more likely to engage and buy your product.

Blogs
Yet another critical aspect of the 'talking' side of WebPR is your voice in the blogosphere. This can take on many forms. For example, your company should have a 'blog' and your colleagues should be encouraged to blog. But perhaps more important is listening to what other bloggers say about your brand and then commenting, and responding further where appropriate. There have been numerous examples of brands cut to shreds by ignoring the blogosphere.

The key to an effective WebPR strategy is balancing the two sides: 'listening' and 'talking'. The opportunity to pay intimate attention to the market, and participate in a conversation that drives perception - and ultimately determines your client base - is unique. It is an opportunity that consumer-facing companies simply cannot afford to ignore.

About the Author

The services offered by Quirk eMarketing include everything from the conceptualization of a comprehensive online marketing strategy, through to the implementation of the various tactics, like WebPR and ORM, needed to make that vision a reality.