StepRep Blog

There was a story in the New York Times about Belkin paying people for writing positive reviews.  This was an interesting story to me.  Apparently, a Belkin employee was paying people to write favorable reviews on sites like Amazon.  The general reaction was very negative and a  general concensus was that this represents very poor reputation management practices.  But I began to take a more critical look at this and wondered how it was really different from other forms of advertising.

1.  How is the intention different from a company paying for an ad in certain media and claiming a poor product is very good?  Consider a company that has consumer reports, community feedback and perhaps even internal research which confirms to them that their product or service is poor.

2.  How is this different from an infomercial where a well know personality is paid to endorse a product or service?

3.  Is this different from a company paying a subject matter expert for a product review.  Consider different types of marketing arrangements.  Sometimes an expert is paid money for a review and sometimes there is a mutual co-marketing arrangement in place.

4.  Consider companies that pay people to send business their way on a referral basis.  Have you ever been to a place like Cancun Mexico and if you ask someone directions to a restaurant or bar, they give you a business card of a place with their initial on the back.  They are paid a referral.

5.  What about sites that just sell ads and link to ‘great services’.

I guess the key question here, is what actually makes advertising and promotion reputable?

This week on SEOMOZ.org, Rand Fishkin and company discussed reputation management in a couple of posts as it pertains to SEO (search engine optimization) strategies.  First, I should note that to many experts in the search marketing industry, SEO is a term that describes a much broader set of goals rather than just optimizing content for search; rather it’s a whole philosophy for web design and marketing that balances search, user experience and brand perception.

In a post called “The 6 Goals of SEO: Choosing the Right Ones for Your Business“, he lists SEO for reputation management as one of the goals.  First he explains what SEO for reputation management means – basically it involves trying to get positive comments about you or your company ranked in search engines above any negative comments.  I should add, for people that generally have positive information about them online, it involves getting the most relevant and desired references ranking as high as possible.

This can be a challenging process and the obvious need in this work is the ability to save and categorize online references about you.  This is a simple but important feature that we’ve added to our reputation manager (StepRep).  Today, you can set up Google Alerts, but you have no way to save or categorize results in an organized way.  Placing the valuable references on your StepRep profile, helps provide crawlable links to those references and thus helps to promote them in search.