Social Media marketing can be multi-faceted and brands can suddenly find themselves surrounded by this large passive audience talking about their brand and sometimes even thrashed. As a result Social Media monitoring has become a must for most major brands today. Brands have come to understand that even though they won’t participate directly in social media platforms people would still be talking about their brand. So what do brands do? Let people talk about their brand or go ahead and join in the conversation. Fionn Downhill of Elixir Interactive joins us today to share some of her experiences through the work she has done for many brands in the social media space.

Bob Tripathi: One of the starting steps for many companies is listening to conversations on Social Media like reputation monitoring and reputation management. Have you done any work or have had any experience with Social Media listening?
Fionn Downhill: We do extensive work in the field of reputation management in fact that is one of our biggest service lines. all brands should be monitoring their brands on social media as that is a great way to do PR and also that is where brands are being built and brands are being damaged. as much as it cost u to build a brand online all it will take is one vicious blogger to damage your brand overnight. it is important that all brand s are measuring some kind of sentiment analysis. This has really taken off in the last year or sop because of reviews and local google. Now they are pulling lot of information/results from local and social forums and blogs.
Now, thats only a piece of it. I see lot of companies calling themself reputation management but all they are selling is reputation monitoring. RM is not management and before you start  monitoring you need to have a strategy as to how you are going to manage the brand. so u need to have rmanagement strategy as to what kind of content you have it out there so when people start typing your brand name in search engines then you need to start monitoring and then another component you would need is how you are going to respond. So you need a response strategy too. So essentially, there are 3 pieces to it actual seo to manage the brand there is the monitoring piece and then how they are going to respond to it.

Bob Tripathi: I mean it’s easy for companies to go out and get a tool and start to monitor their brand. But one area I have seen companies struggle is they need a resource to manage their social media initiatives and unless you do not prove the value you just cannot go ahead and add a headcount. What do you typically recommend to folks in those situations?
Fionn Downhill: Well, we have seen the challenges we faced when selling SEO to the c-suite. Now, add to the fact that they need to do SEO for 20-30 different query results that they want their brand to appear positively and create a good perception for their brand. However, it is my experience that it is much easier for us to sell reputation management than SEO because they come to me with a problem and I have a solution compared to search where they don’t know they have problem. Huge difference there as they know they have problem when their brand is getting hammered in the social media space or got some really bad results in the top 10 on Google like maybe some former employees gone crazy on them or whatever. So I find reputation management easy to sell when they have a problem.

Bob Tripathi: I also think that people understand now that there is going to be some bad reputation floating around like comments, reviews and so on….
where do you see social media going in the next two years with search being part of it?

Fionn Downhill: I have been doing search from eight years with a focus on SEO and i don’t see the shift. PPC yes. the difference i see in Paid Search and SEO and also reputation management, which is also SEO,is that there are lot’s of tools for PPC. So when you go to a marketer and show them the returns on a given dollar it is far easier for them to understand. But you go to them and there are so many tools that can pretty much automate so many things and then all you are left with strategy. Where SEO needs to go is removing the mystery out of it. This way SEO will be less mysterious and people would understand SEO well. Now there are lot of tools and it is hot space now but what we need is SEO dashboard that looks a lot like a traditional marketing dashboard and provides them wih a solution. So if you go in and ask that we need four web designers and four programmers then you loose them. Whereas if you provide them with a solution that is cost effective and i do believe that we need to use technology better to sell SEO.

Bob Tripathi: For the benefit of our audience are there any tools you recommend?

Fionn Downhill: There are tools like Radian6, andiamo but the one i really use is Trackur by Andy Beal. It has got eveything that i need for the price and what my clients need. It helps us track and we have response strategy and it is at a great price. For SEO too there are many tools out there and we are in fact in the process of releasing a tool ourselves called Sycara. It basically measures the “health of your web site” and reports search engine visibility details.
Of course now we have many tools out there both free and paid but what we still need is lot of experienced SEO’s and there are very few around. Still. The future is in automation.

Bob Tripathi: Interesting. The future is in automation. Well, this was great and thanks for your time and sharing your insights with us Fionn.
Fionn Downhill: Thank you for having me.

No related posts.