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Bad-tempered bloggers can damage your business

Posted 17 April 2007 at 9:58AM by Simon Dickson in Doing business online

It's easy to forget that your internet presence isn't just what you say about yourself; it's what others say about you. A new study suggests that negative comments among the search results for a particular product or company can have a profound effect on what a searcher does next.

Search marketing firm Tamar claims that as many as 70% of 25-34 year olds would decide not to visit the site of the company they were looking for, if their search brought back negative comments, perhaps from blogs or discussion forums. And the next move for a substantial number would actually be to visit a direct competitor instead.

'Brands owners are only just beginning to actively manage their reputations online,' Tamar's Neil McCarthy told Netimperative, 'as negative comments in search results do drive potential customers into the hands of the opposition. Natural search optimisation should be part of an overall reputation management strategy to ensure negative comments are suppressed and your official links are featured more prominently.'

So whilst it's easy (and often entirely valid) to dismiss bloggers as people who need to 'get a life', don't neglect the fact that what they write tends to do very well in search engines; blog tools tend to have good Search Engine Optimisation built-in. And when a blogger receives poor customer service, they're very likely to want to tell the world about it.

What do you do about it? Although I don't like the word 'suppress', Tamar's suggestion of ensuring your own positive messages appear among the top search results is an obvious starting point. Play the blogging game yourself, maybe, and use those same tools to get your own messaging a bit further up the rankings.

But don't be shy about engaging with people who have written nasty things about you. They'll probably be pleasantly surprised that you're taking notice, and will often say so on their blog. Don't expect an emailed apology, or a comment added to the offending blog posting to win them over again, but it may do enough to dilute the poison.

Tags: blogs, criticism, feedback, search engine optimisation, tamar

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