Reputation on the Internet

In January, QSR explored the business concerns of a dozen influential industry executives as they headed into the New Year. One of the more prominent findings of the study was the considerable concern expressed over what to do about marketing. Tight budgets, increased accountability, weakening sales, and an ever-growing plethora of marketing platforms seemed to provide the perfect storm for strategic stupefaction and tactical confusion.

Thanks to modern-day technology, marketers must invest their efforts in not one, but two disparate and difficult consumer worlds. The first of these is the more familiar world of external reality serviced by traditional presentational media (i.e., television, radio, print, billboards, movies, event sponsorships, PR), relying upon variations of a classic “pile it high and point to it” approach. The second world is the hugely interior and interactive universe of Web-based media, where the customer-driven rules of marketing engagement are often as different as the Cineplex is from YouTube, and stadium sports are from World of Warcraft.

As recently reported in this space, it might be that television is far from a dying medium, but the Internet has also taken some mighty steps away from the cradle. Today the best research that money can buy tells us that the younger demographics who are the industry’s best customers spend about an equal amount of daily time watching the tube and being on the computer, and heaven help those of us in marketing who fail to get the difference.

At this moment a lot of the discussion about the unique and evolving influence of the Web is centering on the expanding notion of searches and specifically on the tactics of search engine optimization (SEO). Industry sources report that the top five Web search engines (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, Ask) handle somewhere in excess of 10 billion searches per month. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the general aim of SEO is to get my Web site listed as high in the search returns as possible, and is based upon the search engines’ guarded exploratory algorithms. These algorithms factor in such things as site content, the use of keywords, embedded links to other reputable Web sites, and, increasingly, anticipation of prior search behavior.

None of this might make a great difference to quick-service executives, who after all are not attempting (with the exception of heavy home delivery outfits like the pizza chains) to sell much of their product online. Even considering that the No. 1 local area search on the Internet is “restaurants,” there is still a tendency in the quick-service industry to view the Internet as an information source and brand-building medium rather than as a marketplace. People who want to know McDonald’s calorie counts or to see if Chipotle has a store in the area, for example, simply go to the parent company sites, and for the rest there are pay-for-click address links on local search pages.

That was all a suitable description just a few nanoseconds ago. The truth is that the billions of humans who have piled onto the Internet in the past decade have taken it way past the alternative-Yellow Pages stage. With an estimated 60 percent of Web users participating regularly in at least one social networking site, the Web has become an increasingly developed alternative world. It’s no longer strictly an information site but an interactive and very free-spoken community.

These days, the first thing a marketer must consider is that a search is rarely just a request for neutral information. A search, these days, is quite often an act of relating. In fact, the real growth in search influence is not in the realm of asking, but that of discussing.

It all comes into focus with the rat filmed in your dining room, or the unintentionally insulted customer, or the employee who quits his job on lousy terms, or simply the customer who thinks your competition puts out a superior sandwich. Marketers like to talk these days about the viral spread of an idea, but it’s no easy thing to draw a fence around an unwanted cyber infestation. The truth is that the Internet is learning tendencies from its users. New search algorithms are quite dispassionate when it comes to burying an under-supported other side of the story.

Nick Stamoulis, president of Web site development firm Brick Marketing, agrees that the key change in the Internet is its evolution from a count-the-clicks phenomenon to a relationship medium. His firm, he notes, is increasingly called upon for reputation management. Negative citations, deserved or undeserved, must be countered with press releases, blogs, and good PR that “slowly and organically pushes down the bad stuff off of the first search page.”

In agreement is Eric Enge, President of Stone Temple Consulting, a leading SEO firm.

“Conversations are taking place online about your business today,” says Enge. “Do you want to leverage the conversation and turn it into an asset? Or do you want that conversation taking place without you?”

Now if only someone could come up with the right metrics for this stuff.