RepEquity Blog

It’s no secret that the social mediasphere is “the place to be” in 2010; many of its buzzwords have been burning up the Internet for a few years now. But, as we’ve pointed out before, the online literati have only recently begun to really develop the kind of framework and metrics that you might expect to surround such a powerful means of personal and corporate expression. The rapid rise of social media resembled a land rush, with few participants taking a step back to build a lasting foundation. That’s changing.

We’ve detailed some of the interesting ways to quantify social media. That’s a fascinating process – field of study, even – that’s still in its infancy. But before that, before we worry about tracking and placing a value on fans and friends, there’s a fundamental question we ask our clients and companies: who are you?

In other words, what’s your style? And that’s exactly the question at the heart of an excellent post over at Mashable, which breaks social media styles down into five distinct families and comes to a conclusion that is both common-sensical but overlooked all too often:

The lesson: Ensure that your engagement style matches your company’s brand, goals, and general attitude. We took a look at the top five engagement styles that currently dominate the social web. Which are you?

This should be the first question any company asks itself before launching a social media campaign. Without this singular guiding principle – essentially a mission statement – efforts can be wasted. And it’s important to define yourself before diving in. Without an identity that makes sense for your brand, the social media community will back away; today’s savvy consumers will be turned off by incongruity.

Tripp Donnelly, CEO of RepEquity, appeared on FOX News this past weekend to discuss a variety of issues involving online identity, including the legal issues involved in claiming a domain name associated with a specific individual:

It’s been the ultimate question facing an entire industry since social networking exploded a few short years ago: how, exactly, can we put a dollar figure on this?

Nearly every major American company with a meaningful consumer base and a coherent online strategy is somehow active on Facebook, Twitter, and the like. Some do a much better job than others, but there’s certainly a sentiment out there that goes something like, “Gee, we ought to be doing this… so we’ll do it.”

There are a lot of brands out there driving real consumer engagement, and coming up with creative ways to take advantage of the social network ecosystem. But what’s it worth? The biggest problem we encounter when attempting to answer this question is a simple one: how to frame the question itself. A pair of recent studies determined to discover the value of a Facebook fan prove how difficult it still is to quantify social network behavior. From the FairWinds Blog:

Virtue, a social media management company, put out a study recently that revealed that Facebook fans have a value of $3.60 apiece for big brands.  The company based their valuation on how many impressions a wall post receives given the number of fans a page has.

Meanwhile, at GigaOm:

An average fan is apparently worth about $136.38, although for some very successful social marketers the value can be dramatically higher, while for some less successful companies it can be virtually zero.

Now those are a couple of very different valuations. The first number is, as the excerpt mentions, based on impressions; in other words, the value of reaching eyeballs.  That second number is essentially derived from conversions; the dollar values were drawn a survey of purchasing behavior by fans of the top 20 brands on Facebook. There’s interesting symmetry here that resembles a Google AdWords campaign – are we after impressions, or conversions?

Clearly, the answer will depend on context, and the specific goals of a company or brand. The specific numbers here – $3.60 vs $136.38 – are far less informative than the divergent framework of these two studies. They’re both perfectly legitimate ways of looking at the problem, but probably don’t stand up as well on their own as they would if we could merge the results in a customized way that makes sense for an individual company.

So what is a Facebook fan worth? Something, that’s for sure.

It seems George Clooney isn’t the only one.

The Pew Research Center recently released the results of a study examining Internet users’ habits when it comes to checking up on their own online reputation through search engines. The trends are unmistakable. 57% of all users have conducted a search on their own name, and that number shoots up to 65% of users under the age of 30. The highest single group of self-searchers are college graduates, at 70%.

MediaPost Publications has a good summary of the data, including some thoughts on what this trend means for the online marketing and advertising industry:

At one time people called the act of Googling yourself on a search engine a vanity search or ego-surfing. Now it’s a matter of self-preservation. The practice has long been a part of managing brand reputation, but individuals have learned the value of keeping track of information being collected and posted online about them, too. A study released this week could give advertisers insight into targeting paid search and display ads through behavior and social graphs.

Will the possibility of advertising on terms as targeted as an individual’s name raise some concerns among privacy advocates? The increasing amount of attention being paid to search trends like this one definitely raises the stakes on our online reputations.

Lest we forget that the Internet is not powered entirely by tweets and friending, Small Business Trends has a nice explanation out today regarding the value of the more “traditional” blog. The conclusion:

Though it can be attractive as a SMB owner to let social sites like Facebook or Twitter become your dominant Web presence, it comes with a high cost. The less time you spend building content and authority for your site, the more you make yourself dependent on tools that may one day fall away. And if Facebook or Twitter went away tomorrow – would you have enough seeds planted to attract your audience?

The article makes some great points against putting all your eggs in a basket owned by someone else, and some equally salient points in favor of building your own authoritative web presence that does not rely on the whims of the rapidly evolving social media space.

At RepEquity, we tend to take this a step further. It’s crucial to develop a multifaceted approach to online reputation management – one that includes full immersion in the social media world, but also stakes out more permanent territory. As Small Business Trends points out, you want to be able to exercise full control over some of your online properties; the advantages include strategic link-structures, credibility as a thought leader, and the ability to create great content that supports your brand.

However, simply launching a single blog shouldn’t be the final step. We advise our clients to build out a handful of additional “microsites” designed to augment a primary corporate or product site. Our team can generate unique and meaningful content for each of these secondary destinations, which then become a valuable part of the overall ORM program. One blog can help build credibility and improve your visibility… but two or three additional microsites can cement that credibility and dominate the search engine landscape.

It’s all about diversifying.

FairWinds Partners, a leading Internet strategy firm, released a new white paper this week detailing the importance of social media for businesses and brands. Specifically, they focus on building the right kind of online foundation by grabbing the domains and profiles most valuable to your identity, which is at the heart of the RepEquity social media strategy:

With these kinds of numbers, failing to at least secure usernames in social media sites simply is not an option—the question is, how does a company work to develop a clear social media strategy? For FairWinds, the connection between domain names and usernames is clear—they are both critical digital assets that protect and promote a company’s initiatives online.

What follows is an in-depth case study looking at some of the most powerful brands in America, and how they’re using social media to fully engage their consumer bases. It’s a good read, and worth the download.

Just in case you needed another reason to get proactive about your online reputation… there is now federal case law on the books that further drives the point home.

Last week, US District Judge Robert Cleland ruled in favor of careeragentsnetwork.biz, a “gripe site” set up by a solitary dissatisfied customer. The Career Agents Network (CAN) filed suit based on both trademark claims and the accusation of “cybersquatting,” neither of which were enough for Cleland to strip First Amendment rights from the aggrieved party:

In his decision, Judge Robert Cleland said that CAN’s case “must fail” because the company did not provide evidence that White had intended to profit from the domains. He did acknowledge, however, that White made some attempt to damage CAN’s business by climbing the search rankings, but that it was only to warn other potential customers—an action that is protected under the First Amendment. Because White’s websites didn’t represent themselves as the real company websites for CAN and they provided accurate contact information, they were clearly gripe sites and did not infringe on CAN’s marks.

Given the specifics of this ruling – and seen through the lens of RepEquity’s years of experience in this space – it becomes clear that almost every “gripe site” out there falls into this newly defined protected class. Very few sites that are thrown up by an angry customer intend to make money on their own; even the fact that the owner of this particular site used aggressive SEO tactics to promote his negative message wasn’t enough to convince the judge that there were commercial motives in play.

The lesson here is clear. A single peeved individual has the right – and certainly the opportunity, given the ease of web design – to establish a damaging presence online by piggybacking off of an established brand or trademark.

The strategy to combat this is two-fold: first, grab any and all domain names that might relate to your company or your name. And on a larger scale, a fully developed online reputation program will build a defensive perimeter that makes it much more difficult for a “gripe site” to gain visibility and prominence in the search results.

Without taking these precautionary steps, you might find yourself battling for significant traffic with one loud Internet soapbox.

By now, skepticism about the revenue potential of today’s most popular social networking sites is a well known bromide. Sure, the doubters say, go ahead and push your membership and your traffic into the stratosphere, but, in the end, how does that make you money? Translating usage and eyeballs into dollars: it’s a problem facing the likes of Twitter, Facebook, and every other star in the social universe.

But a report from the most recent issue of the Economist argues otherwise, pointing out that social network advertising is not only growing in importance, but also effectiveness:

Why are the networks becoming more popular when their click-through rates are so low? One reason is that advertisers are being drawn to the leading sites by their sheer scale. “Facebook’s audience is bigger than any TV network that has ever existed on the face of the earth,” says Randall Rothenberg, the head of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB)…. The other reason more money is heading the networks’ way is that some advertisers are seeing a great return on their investment.

While the Economist article focuses mostly on the growth potential of advertising on social networks, it also includes a telling graph that speaks to the entire field of online reputation management. Take a look:

What jumps out there to me is the incredible relative strength of online sources as compared to traditional advertising. Clearly, “friends recommendations” dominates the chart, and that’s an indication of how important viral messaging can be. But brand websites, community forums, and editorial content are all also found online and subject to the rules of ORM.

The lesson I’m taking away from the Economist’s study is that everything we do in the world of ORM has a significant impact on people, and is essential in building trust with the consumer.

Google introduced another new addition to its suite of products this week – an add-on to certain organic results dubbed Social Search:

From a rep management perspective, this particular stage of Google’s social search isn’t likely to have much of an impact. For starters, it’s only part of the search experience for people logged into a Google account (iGoogle, Gmail, etc). It also really doesn’t delve too deeply into any of the social networks it targets; Facebook’s privacy policies are going to limit most of what the spiders crawl.

We already advise most of our clients to maintain profiles on all the major social networks as a defense mechanism, if nothing else. The internal workings of Facebook currently ensure that only the bare bones “public” profile ever gets indexed in the first place, which is actually ideal for a professional looking to exert a degree of control over his or her online reputation. Sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter already perform very well in typical organic searches. The new Social Search only underscores the importance of being out there, but being smart about it.