Archive: June, 2009

I have been sending and enforcing Cease and Desist letters for a while now and I have observed that people can be really emotional when you let them know they may be doing something wrong. I will share a unique instance and I will provide some helpful tips to survive your own C and D experience.

“The $99, Do-It-Yourself, Heart Transplant”

With the popularity of do-it-yourself shows on Television and the internet, many businesses have adopted this ideology in their business, and tried to manage their online reputation management (ORM) on their own. This can be as disastrous as attempting the above heart surgery at home; some things are better left to experience.
Here are some common misconceptions and actual statements that I have had given to me as a reason to not use professional ORM services:

“I was thinking of paying some high school kid to manage my social media marketing for a couple of hours per day after they get home from school.”

If this is your plan for social media, perhaps you would let the person who is good at mowing grass also cut your hair? This analogy, while a bit extreme, correctly reflects the situation: Teenagers are great at taking overhead camera-phone pictures, and posting the pictures and writing “how they are feeling” on their favorite social media sites. Some may even be more technically proficient than just the average user’s abilities. Does this mean they will expertly manage, protect and promote your online business identity? Social media has the stigma of being wholly juvenile, while the reality is that when properly applied, it is also a powerful reputation management tool. Nielsen Online’s March issue states that Social networks and blogs are now the 4th most popular online activity. This now ranks ahead of personal e-mailing.  Social media and online communities also account for almost 10% of all internet time that is spent.

Microsoft has released with little fanfare the new Search Engine dubbed “Bing”. This is the replacement to the beleaguered Live platform that has just never caught on with internet users.

We have given Bing and test drive here at Metamend and are pleasantly surprised. The SERPs deliver a nice clean page of results with the option to view further information on the listing with the simple hovering of the mouse (on the right side of each listing). This keeps the listings nice and organized, however we are seeing some problems with this feature always working as it should using the Firefox browser (no surprise) – in Internet Explorer it works like a charm.

We are hoping that the clean results Bing is putting forth is a trend with the new Search Engine incarnations on the horizon – “Keep it clean and give me what I am looking for”. The balance between providing “suggestions” to users and the risk of over delivery to the human eye is a tough one to convey. This has been lost even with the mega Search Engine giant Google with Organic, Local, Video, and Paid listings splattered all over the page. Let’s hope Bing stays on track well beyond the preview (beta) release.