SEM Blog

Some companies have the misfortunate of unsatisfied customers who just love to post online in a very negative tone. Whether there post is in your comments section of your site or on a review site, some of these posts can be powerful enough to hit the top ten spots on Google for your keywords or for your company. This can be a dissaster for a company who is not prepared, but by taking a few quick steps, you can make sure that you have any situations like this that arise completely under control.

The first thing you should do is set up a Google Alert for your company name. Set it to as it happens so that you can keep up to date and thwart anything that happens as it does. This can be overwhelming, so you may want to set up a secondary email for this project, but make sure to keep it checking very often.

Once your companies name pops up, stop by and check on what was said. If it’s negative, figure out what the issue is. Can you solve it? Has it already been solved? And most importantly, can you prove any of that? Once you figure out your answer to those questions, it’s time to address that person directly on the board.

Your goal here is to make the situation better. If you’ve fixed it, show everyone how you did and offer even more support or more free things. If you haven’t, do so, and provide contact info so it can get done quickly. If you can’t prove your company already did something, don’t fight it, give in, this site could bring all your hard work down.

The speediness of your post coupled with the proper tone can defuse a hairy situation and also give you a really good public relations image as this page gains more steam from the search engines or even just from the community already there. Having a bad post about your site on the front page can be instant death if not handled correct.

An alternative method, yet harder and still leaving holes, is to simply build up a blog for your site to out power those top 10 and just hope nobody goes further back. Not the greatest idea, but if you just can’t budge on helping those people, it’s better than telling them off.

The mobile market has expanded to the point where many people rely primarily on their cell phone. Almost all cell phones currently available are capable of receiving SMS text messages and accessing the internet. With the average consumer having their cell phone on hand more often then their laptop, this market is perfect for taking advantage of but also requires a bit of finesse or you’ll wind up turning your audience away.

Before you even start thinking about Mobile Marketing, I highly encourage you to become familiar with the Mobile Marketing Association’s (MMA) Best Practices Guidelines and their Mobile Advertising Guidelines to fully understand what’s considered acceptable protocol and what isn’t. Also, the Mobile Marketers Mobile Outlook 2008 is a great read for more detailed information on the topic.

The options are really limitless in this form of marketing as each day it seems that cell phones become that much closer to becoming a laptop. Starting with the basic SMS text messaging and MMS marketing, you have the option of providing one or two way communication with your audience. Your audience can opt in to receive your marketing material, respond back to you to request more or different material, and even submit information to you that you can use in a number of ways. Advertising on mobile sites is a viable option now as well and even google adsense has broken into that market. But it doesn’t just stop there, games and applications for your phone are full of advertisements and sponsorships and you paid for them.

Having been a big fan of the Heroes TV Show, I actually opted into their mobile marketing campaign which is fairly viral. I was sent at least one text message a week, offered a gateway to their WAP site, and even asked to reply back to them and help figure out clues for some mystery relevant to the show. It was very captivating in a viral marketing sense. Also, if you have frequented a bar recently, you’ll notice several of them have a tv screen advertising unit they call BarCast which lets you text and picture message their service and have that broadcast on the advertising board.

The options really are limitless, but the audience is a lot more thin skinned about how you approach the situation.

Pretty much all of the internet and that little thing attached to it that we call reality are completely infatuated with social networking in one form or another. The rate at which people interact through networks like Myspace, Facebook, and LinkedIn continue to grow on a daily basis. And of course you have to take into account how many blogs, social bookmarking sites (Digg, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us), and forums that people frequent day to day so they can catch a glimpse of how everyone else sees it.

If you stand back and look at the whole picture, what you see is a marketing dream. All it takes is one splash, something to captivate even one individual and spread like a virus through all of their avenues of communication. But unlike conventional marketing, you can’t approach viral marketing as straight forward.

The goal behind viral marketing is for you not to see it as marketing at all. In essence, the product or service being marketed needs to either be so appealing that it can explode onto the scene or you’ll have to attach it to something that already has. From there, your target audience is in the drivers seat and ultimately they’ll be the ones spreading your viral marketing or stopping it in it’s tracks.

Let’s take a look at two examples using a similar strategy:

Mountain Dew Commercial: An already well known product has been attached to a pop culture reference. You know it’s an advertisement, but until the Mountain Dew sign at the end, it’s just another Chuck Norris joke.

Will It Blend?: This is a series of videos dedicated to showing how insanely powerful this device is. Instead of paying for infomercial spots where they blend up a nice smoothie, they’ve torn through everything from an iPhone to GI Joe’s. They’ve cut out the obvious and stepped it up a notch.

Which method is actually the more successful of the two? Will It Blend has become so popular that every new video hits the front page of Digg the day it’s launched. But which of the two products are you more likely to buy? I’d say Mountain Dew.