Brand Protection: Social Media and Search

Posted by testing on November 9, 2007

Over the past while many SEO and Online Marketing agencies have started to offer Social Media marketing as part of the the marketing mix, on further inspectation they all seem to be promoting the same product, Brand Protection.

So what is Brand Protection?

We all know that there are 10 natural listings on the first page of a search engine and we all know that a brand usually ranks in postion 1 and 2 for the branded terms, what about the other 8 positions?

For some brands particuliarly in the travel industry bad pr is always floating around on trip advisor and other review sites and for some brands this bad pr occupies some of the position of the first page of the search results.

In terms of a brand trying to deliver a message to new and existing visitors it must be able to control the messaging that is displayed on the search engines, a brand can’t say how good it is, people don’t believe self promotion. What new visitors are looking for is reveiws and testimonies meaning that the brand must control the messaging on postions 1 throught to 10.

How can this be done?

By using social media networks such as Wordpress, Xanga, Facebook, Bebo and Myspace to name a few, brands can interact and engage in conversion with customers through these channels. By promoting these channels in an effective way via customer feedback and special offers the brand pages on these social networks will start to rank in the natural listings with in the search engines and start to rank above the review sites and bad PR.

Does it work?

On many occassions we’ve been contacted by clients asking for this service although we never really called it brand protection and in many cases we succesfully promoted social media sites to out rank negative PR.