This document discusses changes in reputation management and public relations due to new digital technologies and social media. It notes that while core PR strategies remain the same, channels and media have changed, audiences can now communicate directly, and the news cycle is longer. It outlines levels of online PR engagement from monitoring to high-level integration. It also provides tips for online reputation management activities like using various tools to measure impact, engaging with influencers, and creating favorable or addressing unfavorable coverage through blogs, social networks, podcasts, video and other new media.

1. DIGITAL PRACTICE
CLICK TO EDIT MASTER TITLE STYLE
REPUTATION
MANAGEMENT – or what
the funk do I do now?
Ged Carroll
May 6,2008

2. It’s a World of Change, Isn’t It?
Some things haven’t changed:
• The tenets of strategy are the same as they have been for the past 5,000 years
• Clients are still ultimately measured on the performance of their business
• We still communicate with people ultimately in mind to be influenced
• Channels and media may change but the need for good PR remains constant
Some things have changed
• It has never been cheaper or easier to produce content
• Clients can disintermediate the media and communicate directly with their audiences
• Audiences can easily communicate with each other on a large scale
• We have new media vehicles
• The news cycle lasts longer – online news sources act like an echo chamber
We have analogues for all this things based on past experiences because
ultimately its how people chose to use them that we need to most understand

3. Levels of Online PR Engagement
• Monitoring: no engagement but active listening to what is
being said about the organisation and its peers – any
related issues
• Low-level engagement: as Monitoring plus response-led
online presence
• High-level engagement: as low level engagement, but
proactive approach, integration with other marketing and
customer services activities

4. WEX PULSE: MONITORING ONLINE – SILVER BULLET 4
• Vibrant dashboard for optimal view of
media coverage / buzz and
measurement
• Automated media monitoring for any
size business
• Secure integrated platform for improved
collaboration
• Clear snapshots of share of voice and
buzz trends
• Streamlined interface for easier
navigation

5. Measurement Silver Bullet (Or Not) 5
• Cision
• Attentio
• Market Sentinel
• BuzzMetrix
• Cymfony
• Biz360
• Factiva
• Brandimensions

6. Measurement
• It all goes back to objectives, but….
– Google
• SERP
• PageRank
– Google alerts:
• Ongoing monitoring
– Technorati:
• RSS-fed buzz with authority meter
– Yahoo! Site Explorer:
• Inbound links
– Website analytics

7. Working Out Where You Should Be
• Ask peers, colleagues and particularly sales
staff
• Look at influencers cited in the mainstream
media
• Look at back-links into existing web properties
and competitor sites
• Examine data from measurement tools
• Google blog search
• Look at their authority
• ‘Found’ influencers’ blogrolls

8. Getting Favourable Coverage
• Values:
– Honest
– Open
– Transparent
– Available
• Have great content
• Provide a provocative standpoint
• Real news or a great story
• Narrowcast rather than broadcast

9. Dealing with Unfavourable Coverage
• Acknowledge salient points within the coverage
• Offer to engage the author in person
• Provide data points and external references for
any rebuttal
• Plan ahead to push unfavourable content down
off the first 100 results on the SERPs and keep
it off

10. IP Issues
• Give online users the opportunity to use your
IP where relevant in a legitimate manner
• Image resource library and licence
• Outline what ‘fair use’ means
• Be clear in plain language what your
trademarks are
• Be polite and unthreatening in your
communications with offenders
• If you are still struggling with compliance go
direct to the ISP or platform owner
• Don’t put anything in writing that you
wouldn’t want to see published

11. Business Blogs
• Don’t start a blog without a commitment to
maintaining it
• Update at a regular pace
• Do have an understanding of the target audience
and how they interact online
• Think about the tone of voice: no marketing speak
• Companies are made of people: let their
personalities and passion shine through

12. Podcasts & Video
Tends to be one-way rather than two- Internal communications
way communications Education
Dynamic delivery Product walkthroughs
Audio is portable and flexible to Direct-to-customer communication
consume Crisis management
Video requires captive attention – Providing context on news stories
need to be respectful of the
audiences time
Content needs to be: original,
interesting, humourous
Two’s company – have a sidekick
Succinct

13. Social Networks
The best known forms of social software
• Think about your target group:
– Their motivations
– Their location
– Where they are in their life
– Be respectful of their personal space
– Think about how you can add value
– How do you engage beyond becoming a friend
• A source of breaking news

15. Micro media
• Is what it says it is
• Not all communications needs to be long form:
SMS
• Address cards
• Short messages

16. Virtual Worlds
• Virtual worlds, like all communities, have rules
• Activities within the community need to respect the
rules
• Pick a community that your brand will fit in with
and work with in the long term
• The most important thing is to think about
engagement rather than generating coverage
• Not that much use in reputation management

17. Search and Reputation Management

18. Stakeholders (human & machine)
• Search as the gateway to the
web
• A reputation engine and long-
term memory
• Stakeholders:
– General public
– Shareholders
– Peers
– Prospective clients
– Prospective employees
– Regulators
– Pressure groups and NGOs

20. How Algorithmic Search Works
1. Content acquisition
– Visits webpage, reads it, and
crawls links to other pages up to
4 layers deep within the website
– Consumes RSS feeds that
highlight new content and links
– Crawls a site map (sitemap.xml)
– Directories (DMOZ, Yahoo!
Directory)
2. Index web pages
– Everything the spider finds is
saved in the search engine’s
index
3. Algorithmic categorisation: sorts
through the Index and returns results
based on mathematical calculations
– Spam scoring
– Relevance
– freshness
– Topological relationship to other
sites
– Appropriate for vertical search?

21. Searching the Long Tail
Google, Live.com, Yahoo! and Ask algorithmic search
Social Local search
Search Maps
Bookmarking Yellow Pages
Services Mobile search
Q&A Comparison
shopping
services
Trusted web
Vertical search
(Google Scholar, Krugle, Scirus etc)
Recommendations
(Last.fm, Yahoo! Music)
Mainstream Esoteric

22. PR And Search
Three Scenarios for Search and PR
TRANSACTIONAL BRAND REPUTATION
Content creation / SEM
SEM/SEO Bookmarking Content creation
SEO SEO
•Traditional direct-
•Content: relevance, freshness •Purchase ad spots to drive
response online
marketing work and quality consumers to company site to
•Direct response •Provision for trusted web services communicate clients’ side of
•Highly measurable • (digg, del.icio.us) the story
•Very quantitative •SEO for corporate and product •Create content to flush ‘bad
•Specialist field •websites through collection of coverage’ off the first search
inlinks page
•SEO to maintain position
Specialists PR Agency Trusted advisor

23. THE UNITED NATIONS: STAND UP AGAINST POVERTY
NEED RESULTS
The United Nations (UN) engaged Waggener Edstrom Within 20 days WE…
Worldwide (WE) to provide global digital strategy, social
media counsel and public relations consultancy in •Targeted more than 343 influentials via three
support of the UN Millennium Campaign's "Stand Up digital press releases
and Speak Out" event on October 16-17, 2007. •Incorporated aggressive SEO that increased
impressions and clicks by 20 percent
The UN needed to create awareness and generate •Conducted blogger outreach that resulted in at least
interest for an event designed to highlight and reinforce 338 blog posts
the pledge made by governments from 189 countries to •Executed a Twitter viral campaign that created 25,000
the Millennium Development Goals, specifically to work followers
toward the eradication of poverty worldwide by 2015. •Contacted 290, 400 people via LinkedIn
•Garnered more than 9, 500 views on YouTube and
APPROACH UStream.TV
Global scope demanded an innovative approach to
unifying audiences across the world via their individual
Internet engagement points. Given the variety of
mediums and 30-day timeline, WE drafted an integrated
communications plan, vested in top social media
opportunities, that was strategically and quickly
executed.

24. O’Reilly Publishing & Web 2.0
• CMP Media with the knowledge and approval of
O’Reilly Media legaled NFP IT@Cork
• Hue and cry break outs in the blogosphere over the
course of 3 days
• O’Reilly Media step in and pick up the phone to Tom
Rafferty and agree that Rafferty can use the web 2.0
descriptor

25. http://e-consultancy.com | http://www.waggeneredstrom.co.uk/
http://renaissancechambara.jp
Any Questions?

26. Online Inspiration & Useful Links
• The Cluetrain Manifesto
• Wikinomics website which is based on and extends the book of the same
name by Don Tapscott and Anthony D Williams
• Collected papers and essays by danah boyd
• Notre Dame University:
Fifteen-minutes of fame: The Dynamics of Information Access on The Web (May 13, 2005)
by Z. Dezso, E Almaas, A Lukacs, B Racz, I Szakadat and A Barabasi
• OECD whitepaper on user-generated content
• Digital Natives Programme by Berkman Center for Internet & Society at
Harvard Law School
• Some suggested blogs and online sources to read sorted by subject area
• How to read RSS feeds in Outlook:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HA011750001033.aspx
• Pane-style readers: http://www.pageflakes.com http://www.netvibes.com/
• Online readers: http://www.bloglines.com/ http://www.newsgator.com/
• A regularly-updated RSS reader resource: http://blogspace.com/rss/readers

27. GED CARROLL
Waggener Edstrom
Tower House
10 Southampton Street
London, WC2E 7AH, UK
t-gcarroll@waggeneredstrom.com
+44 (0)20 7632 3800
www.waggeneredstrom.co.uk /
http://renaissancechambara.jp
WAGGENER EDSTROM WORLDWIDE OFFICES
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28. YOU INNOVATE. WE COMMUNICATE.
© Waggener Edstrom Worldwide 2008