Fused Nation – UK SEO Blog

Not long ago, I posted about online brand protection but I thought it was worth expanding on some of the areas touched by the post.  Having recently just launched a new brand myself and also have the pleasure to work with several clients in the process of developing their brands, I’ve seen “brand search” markets in various stages of development.

Although this process has close ties to traditional marketing, there are aspects that are very unique to the Internet.

What’s the same?

• Influence – your brand and how it is perceived can have a huge impact on your business.
• Ignorance – many businesses ignore the impact that brand perception has on their business.

OK so what’s different about the Internet?

• Opportunity – regardless of the size or scale of your business, you have the opportunity to positively affect how your brand perception.
• Turnaround – the speed at which the perception of your brand can change on the web is phenomenal!

Perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself a little here – let’s take a practical example and look at various aspects of it and how they impact a hypothetical business.

Business A is doing well.  Offline and online, it has a strong presence and within it’s industry, and all is going well.  Customers of Business A are Internet savvy and as the business grows, more and more custom is generated through Internet sales.

However, as is the case for most businesses from time to time, an order goes wrong and a customer gets pretty upset!  Being a somewhat “principled” individual, this person takes upon himself to make his feelings very clear using various online discussion forums, blogs and websites.

The result?  When anyone searches for the company name on Google, MSN or Yahoo, these less-than-flattering comments are listed in the top 10 results.  This drives away potential business (as people research the company prior to purchasing their product) and has become a major thorn in the side of Business A.  With no legal recourse to have the pages removed, Business A must dedicate resources to ring fence their online brand presence.

What mistakes have been made?

Well the obvious one is pissing off the customer in the first place – clearly this isn’t intentional – mistakes happen and it’s just unfortunate that the disgruntled customer has taken things so far.

But the major mistake that Business A have made was not to take their online brand presence seriously from day 1.  It’s not until something bad happens that they needed to react to the problem.  They should have proactively protected their online brand presence from early on – this would have protected them from the loss of business they have suffered by losing out on potential business.

That’s enough for today – will post some later on, exploring how Business A could have ring fenced their branding from day 1 to avoid potential bad publicity online.

MG