In August of 2005, Mississippi took a direct hit from Hurricane Katrina which wiped out telecommunications and power for miles inland. Hancock Bank's Gulfport headquarters was damaged; they had no electricity, no phones or internet, and a dislocated staff. During the days and weeks following the storm, GodwinGroup's Jackson, Mississippi, office became the communications arm of the bank. We identified the information that needed to be shared as quickly as possible, and we worked with media outlets throughout the Gulf South to share the bank's messages with their customers, employees, and other locals displaced or otherwise impacted by the storm. Those who remained evacuated away from the Gulf Coast were reached with television news crawls and radio reports that Hancock Bank was waiving ATM and other fees while the bank and its customers faced the crisis of the storm's aftermath. Those who returned to a coast still without basic utilities restored found Hancock Bank.

For post-Katrina communications, GodwinGroup resurrected a theme used once before by the bank after Hurricane Camille in 1969: Together We Rebuild. Tables and RVs functioning as teller lines and lending offices were identified by signs and banners produced by GodwinGroup. T-shirts, buttons, and stickers were also produced and driven down to the coast to help identify where help and a friendly face could be found. On a broader scale, our agency PR team arranged a live interview with Hancock Bank's CEO on MSNBC's Squawk Box just days after the storm. The CEO's message, broadcast using Godwin's undamaged Biloxi office, was the first positive communication to the national news media since the hurricane hit, and Wall Street responded well to the bank's news of expected recovery on the Gulf Coast.

As a result of GodwinGroup's communication efforts on behalf of Hancock Bank, our client-agency relationship has grown stronger and deeper, as have our long-cherished ties to the Mississippi Gulf Coast and people of Mississippi. For our work during and just after the storm, Hancock Bank and GodwinGroup achieved several recognitions. In 2006, GodwinGroup received from the American Banker's Association two national awards. One was the Inspiration Award and the second was the Customer Acquisition Award. The Customer Acquisition Award was based on the bank's phenomenal growth right after the storm including 30,000 new accounts, an increase of over $1.5 million in deposits, and a stock price increase of 44%.

1. Follow trends and news in your industry and write about them.

Scan the trade publications and websites looking for trends.  Two similar events is a coincidence, but three could be an early indicator of a trend.  Writing about the trends and news in your industry will not only snag the attention of search engines, it will show your readers that you’re making it easier for them to keep up without spending as much time reading.  Blogs about recent news are often reposted by readers to their personal social media sites, a powerful boost to readership.

2. Give advice

Blogging about how your readers can better manage their company gains interested viewers.  Whether you give advice about hiring, cost-saving tips, or tapping new markets, people are always looking for new ways to improve their company.

3. Bring in a guest blogger

Having a guest blogger is a great way to inject excitement into your blog.  If you can employ several guest bloggers, you’ll be able to reach even more viewers and bring more regular readers to your blog.

4. Incorporate pictures/video

Incorporating pictures and video is a great way to keep your readers interested.  Adults watching video online has doubled from about one-third in 2006 to about two-thirds in a recent study by the Pew Internet and America Life Study. Giving a visual to your readers provides a change of pace to your usual copy and the opportunity to introduce a more complex topic that needs additional explanation through diagrams or audio.

5. Write about what you’ve learned

Blog about your personal experiences within your industry and how they have shaped your business philosophy.  Give your readers confidence that you’ve had similar experiences and you’ll keep them coming back for more.

1. Enhances your search engine optimization so interested prospects can find you easier.
2. Demonstrates your expertise in your industry to build your reputation.
3.  Provides an outlet for reader’s opinions so you can create a dialog and build a relationship.
4. Attracts potential customers by offering information of value regarding decision making about your industry.
5. Brings recent industry news to light as a service which positions you to be a helpful resource to viewers.
6.  Draws positive attention to your company by offering a trusted voice.
7.  Promotes creativity by posing challenging questions people want to address.
8. Advances digital marketing campaigns by delivering self-evident proof of the power of the medium.
9. Informs others about your industry to create interest in its products or services.
10. Challenges you to be an industry leader by forcing you to keep pace with the changes and trends.

What are your experiences with blogging and its value your company?  Have you discovered other reasons to blog?

In digital media your readers are not readers, they are skimmers.  People viewing your digital media writing will be more easily drawn in by short phrases and bullets points, not long passages of copy.  Be conscious of the key words and phrases used throughout your writing, providing both guidance to the reader and a boost to your SEM. This post contains 100 words.  Although it could have been more detailed, it made the point.

ADOTAS – Last month I met with a network of crisis communications and public relations professionals to discuss the topic of online brand reputation management. This network provides expert counsel and services to clients in areas ranging from crisis communications and strategic planning to public relations and public policy.

In preparing my presentation, I discovered the work done by this group parallels a lot of the same type of work WebMetro provides clients as part of online brand reputation management services. In short, we both:

• Evaluate threats and crisis situations
• Provide intervention and counseling services
• Provide services for short-term flare-ups
• Implement long-term strategies

Although we address situations from different communications mediums (e.g. TV, radio, investor relations vs. search engines, blogs, forums), the goal is the same — shape the public message.

During our meeting we discussed many online brand reputation management topics. We started with defining the role of online brand reputation management and how it how it performs two strategic tasks.

First, we discussed how it should be integrated into existing marketing, advertising and public relations campaigns to support a brand’s existing major corporate initiatives such as:

• Increasing sales revenue
• Acquiring additional market share
• Launching new products or services
• Promoting or championing a new idea or solution
• Increasing customer retention

Second, these positive placements can simultaneously be employed to protect the brand in the event of FUBAR (fouled up beyond all repair). Yes, FUBAR happens and it happens usually at the most inopportune time.

For example the owners of a company divorce and this impacts the valuation of the sports franchise (i.e. Los Angeles Dodgers). Cars suddenly accelerate faster than home prices in Los Angeles resulting in decreases in sales and revenue (i.e. Toyota). Public companies restate earnings due to accounting errors which reduces the market price of the company stock. Financial companies reward employees with outrageous employee bonuses in a market of severe economic downturn and high unemployment (i.e. Goldman Sachs).

These companies lose public trust. Of course, you can always have trouble with your golf game resulting in losing millions of dollars in major sponsorships.

Next we discussed the famous quote from Ben Franklin — “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” — as it relates to online brand reputation management. I shared with the group how situations are much less traumatic for the corporation and significantly less expensive when online brand reputation management is integrated into an existing public relations campaign.

Nonetheless corporations are run by people and people make errors in judgment, some more egregious than others. Unfortunately, corporations are in the public eye and since we live in a world of user-generated content, brands are getting attacked. Once attacked, unfortunately it can be a nightmare to diffuse the situation.

Unlike crisis management situations in the past, where sentiment changes overtime, the internet and search engines digitally document these events forever. For example, today if you enter the keyword “chappaquiddick” into Google, you will be immediately reminded of the traumatic events that occurred in 1969 — some 40 years ago and way before the Internet was born. We see Wikipedia entries, FBI documentation, images and numerous news stories accounting the events of that evening.

Some 40 years later, enter “Eliot Spitzer” into Google and we find similar event documentation of the prostitution scandal that disgraced the reputation of this former politician. Thanks to modern technology we have the entire event chronicled with video.

These are clearly individual stories but corporations have their issues as well. Most recently BP is reeling from a disastrous oil spill now unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico. Unfortunately containment efforts so far have largely failed.

The impact of this disaster is uncertain on many levels. There are huge environmental issues at stake as the oil has now spread close to major wetlands in the United States. There are economic issues for Louisiana businesses (i.e. fishing, shrimping and tourism) that rely on the Gulf Coast for their livelihood. Of course, there is also the economic issue of the cost of the cleanup for BP.

If the event couldn’t be worse for BP, allegations are now appearing regarding issues of budget cuts that may have contributed to the disaster. The blogosphere has taken hold of this issue and the rants and accusations are beginning to unfold.

Clearly this brand reputation management issue has resulted in an extremely volatile and reduced stock price and thereby valuation for BP.

Brand reputation management issues have many significant effects at corporate levels. Here are other examples:

1. Lower sales and revenue (e.g., violence in Mexico is leading to a significant reduction in vacation travel more than the H1N1 virus outbreak of 2008).
2. Decreased stock price/valuation/market share (e.g. ethical fiascoes at AIG, Enron).
3. Reduced customer retention (e.g., Microsoft Vista compatibility issues, JetBlue forcing customers to sit on a tarmac for hours, Dell off-shoring customer service).
4. Increased customer acquisition costs (e.g. Toyota).

These issues have serious financial repercussions at the corporate level and can be documented in public entities. Unfortunately others are much more difficult to quantify but often have similar effects on the corporation.

In many corporations, key personnel leave the organization for stable competitors. During a crisis company morale typically nosedives leading to significantly reduced office productivity, higher rates of employee illness and stress. When reduced morale drags on or does not turn around, it results in higher turnover of rank and file employees.

History has shown us the need to integrate online brand management into our marketing, advertising and public relations campaigns. Whether you work for a major corporation such as IBM or McDonald’s or a small to mid-sized business, we are stewards of our associated businesses. If we want our businesses to succeed tomorrow, we need to plan for that rainy day today with online brand reputation management.

ADOTAS – Google recently launched a new reporting feature in AdWords called Search Funnels. Until this new report was available, Google only reported on the last keyword clicked resulting in a lead or sales conversion.

For example, a consumer begins a search by querying and clicking on Keyword A. He visits the advertiser’s website from Keyword A but doesn’t convert. A week later, that same consumer searches Keyword B as a result or an effect of Keyword A, visits that same website and converts into a customer this time.

Google AdWords would report the conversion occurred as a result of Keyword B without showing any relationship to Keyword A.

While tracking the last click is helpful, it often misleads advertisers in understanding and appreciating the entire paid search buy funnel. In many situations, Keyword A helped place the website in the initial consideration set for that consumer. Furthermore, in many situations, if the advertiser had not bid on Keyword A it would not have secured a conversion with Keyword B.

Without Keyword A being a general, nonbranded term such as “root canal” the consumer might never have found branded Keyword B “Long Fang DDS”. Although Dr. Fang is widely known as a preeminent dentist in the community, he was not top of mind for this consumer. (Note to reader: I made up the name Long Fang DDS to create a visual context readers will remember.)

Unfortunately advertisers like Dr. Fang could not track this attribution effect. As a result, advertisers would travel one of three paths. They:

1. Made no changes based on a gut feeling and with no data that Keyword A helped or assisted the conversion of Keyword B.
2. Lowered the bid (e.g. lower max cost per click, lower position) for Keyword A without knowing it aided in a conversion. Lowering the bid would likely reduce the conversions of Keyword B since Keyword A assisted the conversion.
3. Paused Keyword A in their campaign to their complete detriment. Pausing Keyword A would typically create very efficient paid search campaigns but would also result in lowering total conversions leading to lower overall revenue.

Using WebMetro’s proprietary search marketing technology to measure attribution, my experience throughout the years has found that general, non-branded keywords such as “root canal” often contribute or assist in the conversion of a branded last click. Sometimes, it occurs as much as 30% of the time.

This means my clients would not likely have received the branded conversion unless I was bidding on and tracking the association between Keyword A and Keyword B.

Now with Google AdWords Search Funnels advertisers can begin to understand and better appreciate the buy funnel. The new reporting system is a great advancement for advertisers. Search Funnels are created by tracking when a consumer clicks on a keyword in the advertiser’s AdWords portfolio. If that consumer performs other queries after that initial click, Google will track that behavior. If that consumer eventually converts on a keyword for that advertiser, a funnel report is generated.

The report is helpful in showing keywords in the funnel even if the consumer did not click on that advertiser’s ad each time. This activity or search funnel is tracked for 30 days.

In my opinion Search Funnels is a huge step forward for advertisers and Google should receive kudos for integrating such campaign intelligence into its platform. Search attribution is critically important for advertisers. If you are not routinely examining such data, you are leaving lots of revenue on the table.

That being said, Search Funnels is far from perfect, especially in three areas:

1. It does not share the exact keyword.
2. Funnel is good for only 30 days.
3. No integration between organic and paid search.

It Does Not Share the Exact Keyword

Search Funnels shows a list of overall keywords used in a funnel. Advertisers really need to know each and every keyword in the funnel. If the advertiser does not know the exact keyword, the advertiser cannot make informed decisions about which keywords to keep and which keywords to remove from the portfolio.

Funnel Is Good for Only 30 Days

For many low-cost consumer goods such as a book or music download, 30 days is plenty. However, as the price of goods increases the sales cycle is likely to extend beyond 30 days. This is especially true with B2B sales. With many of our B2B clients, it is not uncommon for the conversion cycle or search latency to be 120 days or more.

No Integration between Organic and Paid Search

As an SEO, I’d love to believe that people only click on organic and never click on paid search results. Of course, if this was the case, Google would not exist and their stock price wouldn’t be over $500. The truth is people click on ads and they also click on organic listings.

While channel preference exists, advertisers need to understand the big picture — how does organic integrate with paid search and vice versa. My clients love to see our campaign integration reports showing how paid search keywords assist in the conversion of organic keywords and vice versa.

Regardless of its drawbacks, Google AdWords Search Funnels is a nice advancement for advertisers. On a Quality Score scale of 0-10, I’d rank Search Funnels a 7.

This past month I had the opportunity to speak with a prominent executive coaching group in the Los Angeles area on the topic of “Digital Marketing in 2010.” This group consists of CXOs (e.g. chief executive officer, chief marketing officer, etc.) for their respective companies. They meet regularly to exchange information and help each other navigate through the ever-changing business landscape.

I was stopped in the elevator after the presentation by one of the attendees, a chief operating officer for a chain of Mexican restaurants. He thanked me for the presentation and commented how valuable he found the information and discussion.

He then said, “We discussed 15 different strategies today. My company has implemented some of these strategies with mixed results. Some campaigns worked well and others not so much. What is your recipe for the best digital marketing mix?”

I explained the best digital marketing mix is a lot like making salsa and so I asked, “What kind of salsa does your restaurant make?”

He responded, “We make many kinds of salsa and pico de gallo. We have traditional tomato-based that most people are familiar with and we have lots of variations such as mango, tomatillo, or jicama and black bean. Of course, then we have salsas that are hot, mild, medium and sweet. We have salsas with all sorts of chilies and peppers such as jalapenos, habanero and serrano.”

I responded, “Exactly. The type of salsa you make depends upon what you are pairing it with. If we are having chips and salsa, a medium heat salsa is probably just fine. However, if you are having salmon — the mango or apricot salsa best complements the fish.”

I continued, “Likewise, the same applies to digital marketing. SEO is a great long-term strategy typically for general keywords. An SEO campaign is probably best thought of as a great mild to medium salsa. It should inform customers that you offer many types of salsa via the general terms. You really don’t want the SEO campaign to be too hot as it could turn off prospective customers.”

“For most clients paid search acts like the heat from a jalapeno or habanero. The monthly media budget acts like a heat throttle — the more chili added — the more heat produced, resulting in more traffic. Paid search often provides opportunities for fast ROI and rich targeting opportunities. It complements SEO, enriches reach, and helps the targeting of keywords not yet matured in an SEO campaign.

“Campaigns like social media and contextual advertising allow you to offer the salsa variations of mango, tomatillo, or jicama and black bean to customers beyond the search engines. These campaigns allow you to acquire new customers and traffic that interact on websites such as newspapers, blogs, forums, and social sites like Twitter and Facebook.”

I responded that the optimal digital marketing mix is a lot like making your own secret salsa recipe. The first step in the recipe is to define your goals, objectives and budget. How is the salsa to be used? How many people do I want to feed? How hot is the salsa?

Next, evaluate how each of the strategies can help achieve goals and objectives. The strategies are the salsa variations, reach and how the heat is controlled.

Once the strategies are evaluated, you have your secret salsa recipe. You can now understand what the optimal digital marketing mix should be based on your goals, objectives and budget.

The chief operating officer chuckled but understood the analogy. He then asked, “What is your recipe for tamales?”

ADOTAS – While attending a recent trade show, I provided “live” SEO site assessments for a number of companies. A typical live SEO site assessment involves a brief Q&A about the goals of the site with the company followed by 10-15 minutes of targeted SEO research and analysis. My SEO research and analysis examines core on-page and off-page optimization ranking factors including site architecture, page construction, content, link popularity and web server configuration.

For the most part, the companies assessed were following SEO best practices for achieving high organic rankings as well as maximizing traffic opportunities. However, looking back over the trade show, I recall a number of companies that were not following SEO best practices. Without naming any specific brands, let me share three bad habits discovered in my site assessments that are not-so-best SEO practices.

1. More Domains the Merrier

Most companies I met at the trade show had multiple domains. Owning multiple domains is a good thing as it protects against trademark infringement and supports a reputation management campaign.

As a best practice we recommend clients purchase multiple combinations of their company name, product names and common misspellings. With each domain name, we also recommend clients purchase the various different extensions (e.g. domain.net, domain.info, domain.org) as well as the country codes (e.g. domain.ca, domain.co.uk). Once clients have purchased these alias domains it is also a best practice to either park the domains or implement a 301 redirect to the primary domain if there is no plan to make them live.

While most companies adhere to these best practices at the trade show, I found a company that did not. In my audit I discovered a company had 27 live domains. The problem was each of these domains shared the same content and shared hosting on the same server. This situation created two SEO problems simultaneously: duplicate content and domain spamming.

Although duplicate content is not a ranking penalty, it tends to suppress organic rankings. In addition with 27 domains all sharing the same content, this company risked the search engines interpreting this behavior as domain spam and could result in getting banned. Since the search engines value unique content and don’t like spam, I provided the company three recommendations:

1. Create unique content for each site to support a reputation management campaign;
2. Redirect the alias domains to the primary site via a permanent redirect (also known as 301 redirect); and
3. Implement a No Index, No Follow instruction for the alias domains

2. Blocking the Spiders

Next up for an SEO assessment: a company that redesigned its website about 3 months ago. The marketing director proudly showed me the website’s new navigation, video testimonials and blog. While the company loves the new site, its traffic was dropping and requested an SEO assessment to see if I could identify the problem.

As part of our Q&A, I asked if they had removed pages from the site and transferred link popularity from the old site to the new site. The response, “The redesign kept all the existing content and URLS and it was essentially a ’re-skinning’ of the site to refresh the look and add elements such as video and a blog.”

I then checked Google’s index for the company and found that Google was displaying only 50 pages of a website that had over 300 pages. I examined the Robots.txt file for the site and immediately discovered the problem. When the company launched the new site, a robots.txt was uploaded that inadvertently informed the search engines to exclude the site from indexing. After a few times of accessing the robots.txt file, the search engines started dropping the previously indexed pages from their index –which correspondingly resulted in a drop in traffic. Not good.

It turns out that blocking the search engines from crawling a website is not uncommon. Two years ago we had a client that did this – accidentally, of course. Within four weeks, Google dropped 800 pages from the client’s index. In this situation it was very difficult to find the problem because the client implemented the do not index command on interior pages of the site via the content management system and not on the robots.txt file.

In general it is a good best practice for sites to implement a Robots.txt file on the web server. This informs the search engines of what files and directories to index on the site and which files and directories not to index on the site. In the past couple years the Robots.txt file application has been extended to include reference to XML site maps to support site indexing.

3. Expiring Domains

During one of my assessments I found an e-commerce retailer whose website and SSL certificate were about to expire in less than 30 days. Once the domain name expires, the website will drop from the global DNS and appear as if the website no longer exists. Of course, once the SSL certificate expires, a whole bunch of other interesting things can happen.

Further research discovered the retailer’s domain was registered to the design agency that built the website. Unfortunately this company was no longer doing business with the design agency. As a result they did not know if the domain would be automatically renewed or simply expire.

I explained that search engines like Google look at the domain registration as part of their ranking algorithm. Sites with long domain registration periods such as five or more years are perceived to have more value as the domain will not expire soon. This makes good sense from an organic ranking perspective. Why would Google want to rank a website as a top website that will expire in three to four weeks?

While these three examples sound really basic, I continue to see these types of not-so-best practices occur with big and small websites several times a year. Best practices are just that: best practices. Even basic best practices are critically important to SEO campaigns — as evident with these three site assessments.

ADOTAS — At 3 pm on a Friday,  I received a phone call from a public relations agency regarding a crisis management issue.

Within a few days, the local press would release a negative story about the agency’s client. Apparently, a former employee was going to air some dirty laundry regarding the sales practices for the well-known service company. As it turns out, the less than stellar statements are true. Two years earlier, the company hired a talented young sales manager that was looking to move up quickly.

In order to compensate for a soft market, this sales manager devised and recommended his sales team implement a few sales methods that violated industry best practices. Initially the sales team employed these practices sparingly but over time they became a crutch for the group. As the market slowed, this company continued to have higher than industry average sales in a down economy, which caught the eye of industry watchdogs and so begins our story. Now the company is being investigated by the local district attorney’s office and possibly federal officials.

The public relations agency asked how fast we could implement an SEO reputation management campaign to suppress the pending negative news stories in the search engines. I responded that technically we could start today but the reality is it was too late – as the damage was already done.

I explained that the negative press cannot be removed. Instead, we would employ a three-tiered strategy to position positive mentions ahead of the negative mentions.

Tier 1: Inventory Client Web Assets

First, we would take an inventory of the client’s existing web assets. Ideally a client will have a minimum of 3 or 4 web assets (e.g. corporate portal, product sites, and corporate responsibility site).

Tier 2: Positive Third Party Web Assets

Next we would develop an inventory of websites that mention the client in a positive reference. These could include but are not limited to local print outlets, TV websites, radio stations, third-party press rooms or investor portals, and press releases. Preferably we can identify 5-6 third-party web assets that can be leveraged as part of the reputation management campaign.

Tier 3: New Web Assets

Finally, we assess how many new web assets need to be created to occupy the top 10 organic listings in search results. If we have 3 client-owned assets, 5 third-party websites, this totals to 8 positive mention web assets. This leaves a minimum of 2 web assets that must be created and quickly promoted in the search engines.

I explained the initial process of inventory analysis would take a few days to perform. And, the work was just beginning. Once identified, we would need to aggressively promote those sites with on-page and off-page optimization (e.g. link development). I explained that with Tier 1 and Tier 3 assets, we could perform both on-page and off-page optimization. However, with Tier 2, we would likely be limited to off-page optimization techniques without access to the content on the sites.

The optimization process would take from a few weeks to months before suppressing the majority of negative mentions on Google and the other search engines.

“Months?” cried out the representative from the public relations agency.

“Yes, months,” I responded. “Depending upon the number and intensity of the negative mentions.”

“Worse yet,” I stated “it will be expensive. My team will need to drop what they are doing today and spend the weekend performing the inventory analysis. Once they find positive mention assets, they need to immediately start promoting those assets while simultaneously developing the actual SEO reputation management campaign in parallel.”

I explained to the public relations agency that had we implemented an SEO reputation management campaign before the crisis, this event would be much less expensive and frankly less traumatic to the client. Chances are we would have had 7-10 positive mentions already well ranked for the clients brand name. In the event of bad press, we would be chasing 2, 3, or 4 mentions in the organic rankings not 10.

Near the end of the call, the representative of the public relations agency chuckled as we discussed next steps. He stated, “I guess the old idiom applies to SEO reputation management. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

The Internet is driving increased consumption of news, a survey shows, but newspapers can take heart in being the most trusted medium.

News consumption in the United Kingdom rose by 20 percent in the past three years, according to new McKinsey research.¹ Average consumption has risen to 72 minutes a day, compared with 60 minutes in 2006—an increase driven almost entirely by people under the age of 35 (Exhibit 1). Two-fifths of those in this age group said they felt the need to be the first to hear the news, compared with just 10 percent of people aged 55 to 64.

This need for immediacy is reflected in younger news consumers’ choice of media: they overwhelmingly prefer to get their news from television and the Internet (Exhibit 2). While television remains the most popular medium across all age groups, only the behavior of consumers 55 and older prevented the Internet from jumping from fourth in 2006 to become the second most popular news source today. Instead, the Internet is now in third place, just behind newspapers.