Blogs, Search and Reputation Management

From Search Engine Watch:

"According to Converseon's study of the top 20 search engine listings for the BusinessWeek 100 brands in July 2005, 39% of the top search listings were derived from consumer-generated media such as blogs."

The full article focuses on defensive use of SEO and PPC marketing to counter consumer-produced media that contain messages negative to clients. It champions the power of press releases. It even suggests creating an in-house corporate blog, using repackaged content to make it easy to produce.

It summarizes much of what I dislike about one manner of practicing reputation management:

• Fixate on critics instead of building relationships with your best advocates.
• Draw a sharp line between "us" and "them."
• Counterattack instead of engaging.
• Treat content as a commodity rather than recognizing its value to constituents.

The article reflects a war room mentality. And no matter how nice and shiny the public face, your customers, partners, vendors and employees intuitively know you're in the bunker.

Anyway: Blogs often come up in my discussions with clients. Now that mainstream business magazines are publishing stories about them, marketing people have questions. So without getting into the lengthy subject of whether a company should blog I'll toss out a simple idea: Blogs can be an excellent component of a proactive search engine optimization strategy. Done right, they're search engine friendly and can help you establish favorable search engine rankings. But even better, blogs can take the next step and engage, influence and persuade if...

... if you understand the medium and respect it.

But that doesn't start with the goal of keeping customers from knocking down the bunker door.

[11/9/05 note: My original post suggested that some of the practices outlined in the article are "conventional." In retrospect, I think my phrasing was inaccurate and I've edited the post to reflect what I had in mind, which is that the practices are one manner of reputation management.]