In his 1937 novel Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck wrote a paraphrased line about “the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” Nearly any business leader will tell you this is a true statement. In today’s technology-savvy world, things that go awry can often times create a publicity snowball effect — both positive and negative — in the mind of the consumer, influencing more and more stakeholders as word spreads like wildfire. At Get Page One, we believe reputation management strategies are a proactive approach to the handling of crisis; identifying brand supporters and developing a feedback loop for communication with publics.

Reputation management once existed as a sub-genre of public relations (PR) personnel in the media industry to create or manage spin and shape perceptions. Because of the real-time communications technologies of today, reputation management has taken on a unique significance in the marketing repertoire. Consumers are flocking to the Internet, taking the water cooler conversations to social media sites, such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and blogs, expressing evangelism for the brands and products they love, distaste and distrust for those they do not. And it’s not just happening to giant corporations. Small and medium sized organizations are just as susceptible to positive and negative feedback on the Internet. And because this conversation is taking place at lightning speed, ignoring it is not an option anymore.

Of course, it’s always great to be prepared when things go “awry,” and the need for help managing your brand’s reputation doesn’t require a crisis the size of a British Petroleum oil spill. Small customer relations issues, packaging or service problems can turn a seemingly minor dilemma into a major setback that may spread throughout the social web. A proactive approach to monitoring and managing these quandaries can turn a negative into a positive. Conversely, reputation management is not just about handling negative conversations. Encouraging and responding to positive mentions by consumers through social media marketing can enhance brand reputation in the same way.

In days past, coping with consumer perception meant having a journalist at your disposal, a public relations professional on your staff and spending thousands on advertising to help modify public opinion. Now, the consumer is the journalist, social media professionals are your public relations managers and two-way feedback is replacing the expense of one-way advertising. And since we are keen on quoting writers today, poet Oscar Wilde once wrote, “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” Search marketing and social media services help get you talked about, and reputation management from Get Page One helps manage that conversation.

What is the value of a customer? It is an important to many business owners. Last week, we discussed how both search marketing and social media can provide several benefits including driving awareness and providing communications channels for customers. And through efforts to reach out to existing customers and new prospects via the Internet, search and social can have profound influence on purchase decisions. However, going beyond the immediate to thinking long-term, there is another way of looking at the bottom-line value.

Bringing in new customers is typically an immediate and necessary goal for any organization. Customer retention and reputation management can lead to enduring success. However, over time, customers have their own intrinsic value beyond simply an initial purchase. Yet, the question remains – what is that value? Are we measuring our long-term efforts at search and social media marketing to uncover their true potential?

Customer lifetime value (CLTV) is typically an average of costs incurred, relative to the benefits (profits) received from attracting and converting a prospect to buy a product or service. Retaining customers and influencing them to buy more and to buy more frequently over their lifetime relationship with the company is an important measurement to consider. The formulas for calculating and measuring CLTV are too long and complicated to cover in this blog. There are many books and websites that can help understand and calculate CLTV.

However, search marketing and social media fit into CLTV in very unique and strategic ways. Driving awareness of new products or services, upgrades, special offers and package deals via search and social media can affect long-term profitability. Connecting and measuring sales conversions through these channels can also illustrate the viability and return-on-investment resulting from using search marketing and social media marketing as an influence and awareness technique.

The trick is to set up proper measurements and connect the dots as a customer follows the path through the sales funnel and over the lifetime of the relationship with your organization. There is an old saying in business circles that we believe applies – ‘You cannot manage what you don’t measure.’

Many C-Suite executives and marketing managers know both search marketing and social media are important. For some organizations, much of a customer’s initial awareness about products and services is likely to derive from search engines, social media or both. Yet, in terms of their affect on the bottom line, the thought of allocating substantial dollars to these channels may sometimes be a tough decision. The challenge reflects bottom-line thinking; getting the mind around where search and social plug-in to a business can be puzzling. Although, when we uncover the various benefits and connect search and social with business objectives, we begin to see a clearer picture of the overall importance of social and search.

Location, location, location. This cliché is true for real estate and for brick and mortar operations. It is also true for the Internet. If we use our Yellow Pages today, it’s often as a fire starter; otherwise, it just sits collecting dust in a drawer. Today, the search engine has effectively replaced the Yellow Pages for online users. To be found, location in the search rankings is becoming almost as important as physical location and in some cases, more important. Restaurants, for example, are discovering that Internet traffic can very well lead to foot traffic.

Numerous organizations get new business via referral from existing customers. Interestingly, many referrals now are made via social media rather than around the water cooler. Additionally, customer retention has become a significant focus with social media marketing, by augmenting and adding customer touchpoints that are more relevant and more frequent than the once-a-year sales call or monthly newsletter. This “top-of-mind” strategy using social media not only builds product or service awareness, but also creates a more consistent brand message through customer engagement.

Conversations are happening about brands all over the Internet, and reputation management can affect the bottom line for a business in both positive and negative ways. Consumers seeking information via the Internet often get their first impressions of that brand by what they discover via search or social media. Thus, it’s vitally important for a company to participate in online conversations and boost the positive while mitigating the negative.

When businesses consider search and social as important aspects of their marketing that directly touch the consumer, the benefits and justification for adding search and social to the marketing budget are much more clear. In essence, connecting search and social with everyday operations can provide significant value to a company’s bottom line.

Technological innovation between search engines and social media seems to have taken somewhat divergent paths in recent years. While search engines and social media have seen some integration, recent changes by Google adding a Google social search feature could make the blend between search and social even more relevant.

At Get Page One, we’ve monitored the evolution of search and social, and we are excited about the future prospects in technology and relevance to business. Because many organizations bring in new customers through a combination of online visibility via search marketing, SEO and word-of-mouth (or word-of-web), the latest innovation from Google can possibly be a boon to business.

Google Social Search, as reported by Mashable, feeds information from your social graph into search results. The information shown to the user stems from shared connections and shared information linked to Flickr, Quora and Twitter, social feeds with which Google integrates. In other words, if one of your Twitter friends shared a link to Get Page One, the share would show annotated below the search result.

Marketers and businesses realize the importance of how consumers share information via the social graph, including the trust they have in the recommendations of their Internet friends. Google Social Search adds an element of both visibility and word-of-web.

With the advantages come potential disadvantages. If your organization happens to be experiencing a public relations crisis, the negative publicity might not only feed the search engines, it may also feed more negativity into the social graph, snowballing when picked up in a Google search. At Get Page One, we can help you prepare for and react to an online public relations crisis via our reputation management services.

Despite any disadvantages, advancements between search and social media provide a unique opportunity for companies to extend their reach and influence.

We know that search engine optimization and search marketing do the dirty work of creating brand visibility online. Web marketers strive to hit top pages of search engines on Google, Bing and Yahoo. What many marketers and brands sometimes miss happens to be the human influence on the overall search process. This is the blend of both traditional search behavior and the ability for influencers to have an affect on search rankings.

Getting Social

At Get Page One,  your organic SEO, search marketing and paid search-advertising programs are hard at work tapping into consumer behavior, making your brand findable through search engines; however, there is something else hard at work about which you may or may not be aware.

The social media aspect of search is increasingly having an influence on page ranking. And while some of the information on how much influence social lends to search algorithms is vague, Google and Bing both factor social into the mix.

Influencers

The ability for social media to affect search rankings stems from influential users sharing links. This is especially true with Twitter. Shared links via tweets with respect to the overall influence of the user provide authority to the pages being tweeted. The closed system of information from Facebook is more difficult for search engines to calculate the influence of a user; yet, Facebook is still a factor.

Social Media Marketing

Many organizations who learn that social does impact search think that simply having a presence in social media will affect their page rank. Others are concerned about reputation management issues on the social web. As the gap between traditional search and social closes even more, it pays to have more than a simple Twitter account and Facebook page.

Outreach and influence from a brand can breed outreach and influence from authoritative users who can lend a helping hand to your SEO efforts. They, in turn, not only lend a human influence to search, but in essence, can become de facto brand marketers as well.

Google Me lets users fill out their very own profile, and it was released just a few days ago. Fill out enough information on it, and it’ll likely show up at the bottom of the first page of results when someone searches for your name at Google.com.

Another online profile? Yawn. Well, hang on a second. Google Me is useful for online reputation management.

If you do a Google search for your name, what comes up on the first page? Maybe it’s a mix of results for several people who share your name, maybe it’s all about you, or maybe nothing useful comes up. If you’ve never thought much about what shows up when someone searches for you, we strongly suggest that you start paying close attention to this. Whether you’re applying for a job or you’re an established professional, people will search for your name on Google. And you can bet that they’ll look at everything that comes up on the first page and will judge you accordingly.

For this reason we can’t stress enough just how important online reputation management is. The best thing you can do is start working on your online reputation right now, making sure that what comes up for your name on that first page (and, even better, the next couple of pages) of results is positive and factual. A false, inaccurate and/or harmful piece of information someone posts online about you, your product or your company can seriously damage your reputation. Don’t wait around to make sure your first page of Google results is factual and positive.

So take the time to make a Google profile. It takes only a few minutes, and it’s certainly an easy way to get that last spot on Page One filled out with good information about yourself.

Just don’t forget about the other first-page results.

Barack’s Not a Muslim

You may have seen recent news about the Barack Muslim rumor. As a result of this and other smears, Obama has set up an “internet war room.” Rather than a place for Matthew Broderick and War Games, this internet war room is actually the site for a different kind of gamesmanship – the gamesmanship of reputation management.

You see, internet marketing isn’t just for blind-sided businesses and celebrities dogged by smarmy rumors. Even presidential candidates are susceptible to the powerful (and frankly, ridiculous) waves of hearsay that often stir the murky waters of the internet. In Obama’s case, he’s been plagued by false claims that he’s a terrorist, a Muslim, and simply unpatriotic. Apparently he isn’t fit for the Oval Office because he didn’t wear an American flag on his lapel for a few debates. That’s where American politics has sunk. If only the Founding Fathers could see us now. Poor Barack.

Muslim communities should be pitied as well. Despite what you may have heard, the Koran is not a manual of suicide bombing techniques, and there are many fine, peaceful Islamic communities around the world. Judging all Muslims based on Al Qaeda is like judging all Christians based on David Koresh and Jim Jones. The Barack Muslim rumor is not only false but racist.

In any case, Obama’s internet war room has been established to practice reputation management on the Barack Muslim rumor and other blather — a sub-field of the search engine optimization that we do every day.

A Free Offer to the Barack Muslim Rumor War Room – And to You

We’ve been pretty darned successful with reputation management and search engine optimization. You can see some of the numbers on our homepage. So we think we have a compelling offer for the Barack Muslim rumor folks:

Please contact us for a free SEO analysis and assessment of your reputation management needs.

But the raw truth is that this offer isn’t just for presidential candidates. If you’ve got questions about SEO and/or reputation management, you can contact us too. For free. Not a bad deal, huh?

Barack Blast-Off

Barack Muslim rumor news articles indicate that the presidential hopeful’s reputation management section will be staffed by a “crack team of cybernauts.” We at Get Page One find this description particularly amusing.

Time for me to put on my internet helmet and enter the cockpit of my netsurf ship. The tubes are calling.

When you blog about something for SEO purposes, link to it immediately, with relevant text, from social media websites that do not utilize nofollow links.

Don’t wait for someone else to do it. First indexed by Google is often first ON Google

Well, crud. Digg is down as well. Now what the heck am I going to do today? Better yet, what are YOU going to do today?

Twitter is Down. I’m getting a 500 internal server on Twitter, and my twitter finger is starting to twitch. I’m not really sure what to do now … just sort of sitting here staring at the screen … Do I call the police? The National Guard? Barack Obama?

Twitter Having a Ruby on Rails Scalability Problem?

Theories abound around here of why Twitter is down, though the prevailing one is that it’s Ruby, and that from our Ruby on Rails programmer. There is an inherent Ruby on Rails scalability problem, and it’s causing me, and millions more jittery twitters some unease.

“Twitter is Down” Timekiller

Ok, since Twitter is down, and you might have some time to kill, why not comment here on one of these questions:

1. Why is Twitter down?
2. What do you do when you can’t Tweet?
3. What horrible worldwide implications will the Twitter outage have?
4. What will we do if Twitter never comes back up?

… what’s that? Twitter’s back up now? um … ok, gotta’ go now, you can catch me on my Twitter about SEO, but you feel free to hang around here and answer the poll