Marketing Pilgrim

By Michael Gray

Search engine reputation management (SERM) is a growing discipline under the larger umbrella of search engine optimization (SEO). If you deal with client services, and you don’t already have at least one reputation management client, chances are you will in the very near future. The more tools or options you have at your disposal for this type of project, the easier the task will be. In this article I’m going to look at one of those tools; directories.

Deep inside the confines of the Beal household, my wife and I often debate what motivates us–and others–to share so much of our private lives on Twitter.

We discuss the notion of being significant with each Tweet, and often joke about those that seem to Tweet as if their very life depended on submitting 140 characters every 5 minutes (sounds like an episode of LOST!).

After reading the Times Online, it seems that there’s some scientific foundation to our light-hearted conversations:

The clinical psychologist Oliver James has his reservations. “Twittering stems from a lack of identity. It’s a constant update of who you are, what you are, where you are. Nobody would Twitter if they had a strong sense of identity.”

Did you know that the visible portion of an iceberg only represents about 20% of its actual size? Beneath the water surface lies the other 80%. Imagine if the captain of the Titanic had that tidbit of information. Well the Internet is similar in many ways. The amount of the entire scope of the Internet that is still inaccessible to the engines and their crawlers is quite amazing. Even as Google indexed it one trillionth (with a T) web address last summer it appears as if there is so much more out there.

A New York Times article introduces this concept like this:

Beyond those trillion pages lies an even vaster Web of hidden data: financial information, shopping catalogs, flight schedules, medical research and all kinds of other material stored in databases that remain largely invisible to search engines.

Carol Bartz continues to shake up Yahoo! just 6 weeks into the role of CEO. The WSJ reports that this week could hold the announcement of significant managerial changes that will result in a more top down management style. The impact will be significant for sure especially since the organization is still trying to implement the changes made by Susan Decker and Jerry Yang (remember him?) last year.

At least Yahoo keeps things interesting. As I read the article and saw the changes that are being talked about (remember there has been no official announcement) I was a bit amazed at what wasn’t being done at the company presently.

We’ve heard it all before: a shady review site features negative reviews of your company, but (glory be!) they’ll remove them—for a price. It’s more of the same old song this week, but in a different key review site: Yelp. But they’re not taking the allegations lying down.

In a lengthy article generated from a series of interviews with local business owners (all with 3+ star reviews on Yelp), the (Emeryville, CA) East Bay Express levels some serious allegations against the local review site—offering to push negative reviews down on the page for a few hundred dollars, offering to remove negative reviews completely, moving up negative reviews for businesses that declined to use their local advertising.

This has been an interesting week in social media for sure. Most of the news has been generated around Facebook and deservedly so (I guess). So to close the week it’s only fitting that this story compares Facebook (in my opinion the new F-word) and Twitter. Over at Venture Beat the comparison of these two social media forces reads like the David and Goliath story.

Here’s the gist. According to Compete data from January Facebook had 68 million unique visitors while Twitter clocked in at less than 10% of that (6 million). Those numbers are pretty disparate for sure. What seems to be happening though is that Twitter gets an inordinate amount of press coverage compared to Facebook and the speculation begins.