In today’s real-time brand management world, separate teams often control strategy and channel tactics for SEO, PPC, public relations, online reputation management and social media. In many cases, however, out-of-box thinking and creative silo-breaking to cross traditional boundaries can yield sweet marketing fruit.

Today I’m going to explore the systematic use of paid channels like AdWords and Facebook ads as channels for intervening in quickly moving public relations incidents. Ads can play an important role as powerful tools for supporting the usual tactics of social media and reputation monitoring/management campaigns. I’ll cite real-world transient PPC mashup scenarios for your own brainstorming.

What is a transient public relations event?

Positive and negative short-lived incidents come at businesses in waves, and often require a marketer’s fast attention. Sometimes they’re planned and other times not. Examples include:

• The New York Times features your brand on the front page Sunday morning.
• Your construction project will block a major city street and the public needs information.
• A brand’s rockstar sports-icon spokesperson gets busted for driving under the influence.
• A Mayo clinic researcher announces a breakthrough in the effort to cure breast cancer.
• You just opened a new manufacturing facility, gainfully employing dozens of local citizens with good jobs.
• Your CEO was just invited to a business lunch at the White House.
• The local university’s women’s hockey team just won the NCAA national championship.
• Any event, either abrupt or planned, that falls under the seven classic nodes of public relations.

Just like classic works of literature, these examples of transient public relations events have beginnings, middles and ends. When these pre-scheduled or accidental ephemeral happenings rear their pretty (or ugly) little heads, we must deal with them, maximizing potential benefits and/or minimizing real damage.

When it comes to transient PPC, we start by boiling things down to straight business objectives by asking the following questions about the episode at hand:

• How does the event affect the public’s perception, aligned with or contrary to our brand’s business objectives?
• Is rapid communication required to serve our customers, dispel misunderstandings, celebrate a victory, diffuse anger, communicate crucial information, stake out positioning to preempt an expected response or reap the benefits of something wonderful? In other words does the transient event warrant a response, to our advantage or defense?
• Would instant keyword domination in search engine results (SERPs) by PPC, in Bing, Yahoo and Google, give an edge in propagating our brand’s message? Is PPC appropriate in this instance and can it be executed tastefully to the brand’s advantage?
• If so, what is the appropriate keyword grid? Should the PPC net be cast further than direct brand name searches?
• Where should the traffic go? There are those who believe that PPC traffic should always point to a brand’s website landing page. Sometimes, though, the best path to branding efforts is to vector traffic to public social media profiles, independent publishers, federal agencies, news stories, press releases or other reputable third-party sites that offer independent opinions or validation.
• Would a Facebook ad be tactically useful and fitting? With over 300 million users, certain constituencies are readily accessible to the savvy marketer’s guile via Facebook advertisements.

Implementing a successful transient PPC campaign

Responsible run-and-gun PPC starts with an open mind and pre-planning. Scheduled events, like the corporate charity ball, product release or new vice presidential hire are theoretically easy. Break down traditional big brand barriers and encourage PR, marketing, advertising and event planning stakeholders to organize PPC support ahead of time.

PPC support of “events of the unplanned kind” can originate as part of the normal reputation-monitoring report and react grid. As a general rule, keywords that alert the online reputation management team about positive or negative situations are reasonable candidates for PPC targeting. It’s normal for brands to judge a suitable response to evolving situations.

Here are a few examples of transient events that could warrant a PR response. I’ll break each possible PPC campaign down by trigger event, keyword grid, goal, alternate goal, message, alternate message, destination URL geo-targeting and run length.

Example #1 – Trigger event (unplanned): Mid-authority blogger writes a complimentary article about a brand’s products and links to lead generation page.

• Keyword grid: Branded terms, category keywords.
• Goal: Send quiet traffic to reward blogs that support the brand. Garner good will in blog community. Delight bloggers who probably watch analytics and monitor their reputation.
• Alternate goal: Drive secondary traffic from blog post we’re supporting, back to our lead generation page.
• Message: “Introducing the [blogName] blog.”
• Alternate message: Use of the brand name.
• Geotargeting: National.
• Run length: One week, with a goal of diverting 30% of our normal direct brand searches to this blog.

Example #2 – Trigger event (planned): Brand’s parent company is hiring 45 new full time employees in a community of 65,000 and plans to build a new factory.

• Keyword grid: Branded terms, name of city, city services, HR recruitment searches for factory’s skill set.
• Goal: Brand quality of life and company commitment to community, visitors, locals and potential employees.
• Alternate goal: Raise awareness of brand/company to locals plugged in enough to seek out city services by internet search.
• Message: “[Brand], Proud to be a member of our community.”
• Alternate message: “We’re hiring.”
• Geotargeting: Statewide.
• Run length: One month – two weeks prior to factory opening and two weeks afterward.

Example #3 – Trigger event (unplanned): Brand product results in a child’s death and a product recall.

• Keyword grid: Branded terms, “child’s name,” [cause of death]
• Goal: Reassure the public, clarify what products are affected, and provide vital information for safety.
• Alternate goal: Links for SEO, with a plan for diffusing unflattering keywords from news and other high authority sites.
• Message: Disseminate straight-up information.
• Alternate message: “[Brand] cares and operates in the interest public’s safety first.”
• Geotargeting: Statewide.
• Run length: Indefinite as defined by daily SERPs testing, analytics, buzz, etc.

Example #4 – Trigger event (unplanned): The New York Times features your brand on its front page Sunday morning.

• Keyword grid: Branded terms, keywords customers use to vet the featured product (e.g “[product] review” and “[product] information.”
• Goal: Brand the product/company as worthy of such acclaim, to folks searching specifically for the brand.
• Alternate goal: Secondary traffic.
• Message: “Check out [brand] [product] in yesterday’s New York Times.”
• Alternate message: “[Brand] is notable, legitimate and mainstream.”
• Geotargeting: National.
• Run length: 1-3 weeks.

Paid search campaigns can be a valuable weapon for influencing perception with transient events, which traditionally are associated with public relations. Though not always appropriate, instant prominence via paid listings in SERPs can be a useful arrow in the marketing quiver. To be successful with such campaigns, it’s important to communicate clearly with other departments and pre-plan goals and tactics.

If you’re not already tapping into social media, you should, as the channel offers brands tremendous opportunities to foster community and engagement. But many marketers jump into social media efforts with little more than a “cool” idea. This is a mistake. Not only could it pose serious implications for a brand, but it could also obliterate the value you sought to derive from social media in the first place. To effectively leverage social media, you first need to devise a plan. Here are five tips to help you get started.

Develop your vision. Get creative and develop a vision of what your brand looks like in social media. For example, will your brand be personified, or will it have a catchy tagline? Will the user get special deals or coupons if they connect with you in this space? What is the message you wish to have transcend the brand? During this process, be sure to think through the different sites you are interested in using, such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, and define how you envision your brand acting within these sites. Give thought to what you might tweet about, the discussions you might create, how to best use Facebook notes, or what to include on your YouTube channel. When the sky’s the limit—as it is in social media—it is essential to take the time to first create this vision.

Understand your goals. Outline what you are trying to achieve with social media and be specific about your goals. And note that jumping into the fray just because your competitors are doing so is not a valid reason. Instead, perhaps you want to leverage social media to interact with your customers, or drive sales, or simply to reinforce your branding efforts in alternative channels. Whatever the case, you first need to have clarity on what you are hoping to achieve so you can put together an effective strategy to get the job done.

Identify your success metrics. Decide how you will gauge the success of your social media efforts and the specific metrics you will use. For example, if the goal of your campaign is to create awareness for a contest that you are running, it’s important to measure contest and brand impressions, numbers of fans or followers, video views and interaction with the site. In addition to identifying your success metrics, be sure to have analytics in place so that you can track on-the-page site interactions and monetary value.

Define how you will communicate value. Identify the value you are offering your audience and how you will communicate it. In doing so, be sure to make the connection between cool and valuable. Why? Because while creative content generates initial interest, the communication of value will keep the discussion with your audience going longer. Regardless of the means you choose—maybe it’s a contest, or an exclusive coupon for fans or followers—be sure to give your audience a reason to stay connected. Not only will it facilitate engagement, but it will also boost the longevity of your social media effort.

Integrate your efforts. From the outset, you should plan to integrate your social media efforts with the rest of your marketing initiatives as it can produce a symbiotic effect. For example, by integrating social media with your offline programs, you can create “buzz” for the launch of a new commercial, or solicit feedback about your latest magazine feature. Likewise, by integrating social media with search, you can leverage SEO tactics to help your social content rank in the search engines, build a PPC campaign to capture the demand created by you or your competitors and leverage optimized press releases to promote your efforts.

Identify sufficient resources. Give thought to the effort and resources necessary to launch your social media initiatives and keep them going. Remember, just showing up in social media won’t suffice. Instead, you need to continually update your presence on a daily basis. For example, you can’t just create a Facebook fan page and walk away from it. You need to invest the time necessary to leverage it as a creative means to interact with your audience and expand the conversation. As you develop your social media plan, make it a priority to identify who will be responsible to update and outline communications with your constituents. Otherwise, your social media vision will get stonewalled.

Social media is a growing channel that offers brand marketers creative ways to interact with their audience and keep the conversation going, but getting started requires more than a cool idea. To derive the most value from it, you first need a plan, and these tips should help you get started.

Achieving and sustaining top ranking visibility for your brand on important organic terms is increasingly getting tougher. This is because natural text listings no longer rule on the search result page. There are many other elements that appear sometimes ahead of or intertwined with the natural results, including local listings with a map, shopping listings, latest news, top blogs, images, videos and even book reviews can appear. Google calls these mixed result types Universal search; others call it blended search. These other elements can push what were once top performing organic listings into second or third page positions.

Consider these keyword examples:

“Desktop computers”. The natural listings are intertwined with three shopping listings. If you want your brand to show in the number one spot, you have to compete with the shopping listings that will appear above you.

“Pizza delivery”. Three natural listings on top, followed by seven map listings. If you are a pizza shop showing 4^th in natural results, you are below the fold.

“Refrigerator deals”. You’ll see a forum with a description and four forum listings intertwined in the SERPs before you even get to the organic listings.

“Ghost”. If you’re looking for a product named with a word with multiple meanings, such as “ghost,” you may find several videos and image listings beating you out.

Just as SEO has finally become a commonplace tactic in the online search marketing mix, we now find that the evolution of the layout of the SERP requires a new approach. As brand marketers, we need to re-think our strategy for how to achieve top visibility for our brand on our major terms on the free SERPs.

I think of this as a new opportunity to be found in a growing class of page elements. Here are four new things that you need to do to accomplish top visibility for your brand using the page elements to your advantage:

Determine your true rank. To determine your true page rank, look at the page layout of the actual page for each of your important keywords—the terms where you need your brand to be identified at the top. Natural ranking reporting tools will not provide you with this information. You will need to study the actual SERP by either running searches by hand or by deploying an organic monitoring tool that offers true page ranking. Identify the order in which your page(s) appear in the overall page ranks. Your page order will be impacted by the other elements that exist on the page. For example, if you are #1 in the natural listings, but there is a map ahead of you with seven listings on it, than you are in position #8 on the page—not #1.

Design a strategy based on the elements that are topping you. Once you identify the page elements that are essentially topping you on a result page, you are ready to develop new strategies. For example:

• If there is a map above you, then you will need to combine a local strategy along with your natural SEO to regain your top position on the page.
• If there are shopping listings ahead of you or surrounding your listings, you may find that you are not in the mix. To gain strength here you will need to determine how the shopping listings achieve top rank on specific phrases, and tailor a comparison shopping engine strategy. Sometimes this can be as simple as a willingness to pay more, or may be more complicated and relevancy or popularity driven.
• If there are video or image listings beating you out, you need to add an image/ video SEO strategy to your game plan. This should include uploading your own brand-oriented videos to YouTube.
• If there are blogs on the page and you are not a major mention, you need to gear up your social media strategy.

Constantly monitor the effectiveness of your strategy. Non-text universal search results sometimes can impact rank faster than traditional SEO. For example, in the case of time-sensitive elements like news or blogs, up-to-date fresh information may beat you out. For this reason, you need to monitor true rankings more often than you do for “regular” SEO. I suggest that you monitor your rankings daily, but if this is too overwhelming, try once a week.

Don’t forget geotargeting. You should engage in this exercise for each of the major markets where you generate leads or sales because the page layout can change depending on the searcher’s market.

With the holiday season upon us, now is the time to engage in this new strategy for your most important keywords—the terms where your brand had better appear on page one of search results.

When naming products, it’s always prudent to investigate potential online marketing challenges and pitfalls before launch. Failure to do so may preemptively damage your marketing team’s ability to cast an appropriate branding net.

Traditionally due diligence surrounding the naming process involved trademark search, category and creative considerations. Now that’s no longer enough. Crucial naming decisions must also include rigorous SEO, social, reputation and paid search analysis. Here’s a checklist of factors to take into consideration to assure your product name is search-friendly from the outset.

SEO matters: What words do customers use?

Mining fairly absolute demographic research, regarding how customers ask for things via search, is a timeless foundation. For more than a decade advertisers have had excellent perspective regarding users’ search vocabulary. That said it’s astounding how many well-meaning folks waltz into our office with new product names without nary a regard for easily available data!

Say your product is a business or package about fixing automobiles. A quick look using any number of free keyword tools, reveals that “auto repair shop” is a much more popular concept amongst searchers than “car repair shop.” In fact, pretty much any comparison between “auto” and “car” including clarifiers like “manuals” and “estimates” skew decidedly towards the word “auto.” While it’s obviously important to also target potential customers who prefer the word “car,” it makes sense to name the product itself using the word “auto.”

Include category names & partials when possible

Since any product’s name itself is often cited as anchor text in reviews, rants and blog posts it is often beneficial to include a category in the actual product name. First instance, consider calling your new pole vault product a “Mambo Track & Field Stick” or “Mambo Track Stick” instead of just a “Mambo Stick.” This helps solidify the product’s place in-category as associated links roll in. Partials are beneficial too, as Google likes an assortment of relevant anchor text pointing at your site.

Identify social media profiles that are already taken

There can be significant SEO and social ramifications if a malevolent soul squats on your product’s name in social media properties. In fact one of the first places we look to solve reputation management issues are social media profiles in Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Knowing about profiles in more obscure sites that focus on a niche can be useful as well. It’s essential to evaluate the social profile landscape as one chooses a product name.

The word “Triton” has been used by many product names over the years. It will probably be used for others, where the category of products and services is unique under trademark law. We use a service called KnowEm to check user names to see if any have been taken for our proposed product name. Note that while many communities don’t have a “Triton” user, Twitter does. For us, that’s enough to invalidate a proposed product name.

Determine whether there’s existing reputation baggage

A new product should start off with a clean slate. A decision to create another “Triton” product in a new category (or any name similar to or including pieces of others) starts off with the baggage of all Tritons’ that have gone before. Even though the bad sentiment surrounds other products that only contain our new name, count on some users dismissing a product out-of-hand at first gape, without taking the time to differentiate.

Check searches for your product’s new name on “[name] sucks,” “[name] horrible” and other words people search with when they’re mad. Choose product names that leave baggage at the door.

How competitive are the organic SERPs?

Say someone’s considering naming a new restaurant “Blue Fondue” and everyone loves the name. Though there are no apparent eateries by that name on the first page of Google search results, there is some of out-of-category competition to complicate things.

In this case the web design company-competition is only slight, with some but not much authority, so good SEO will bear fruit and place our new restaurant on page. Don’t forget to check Bing and (yes, at least for now) Yahoo.

Try to avoid ambiguity, even if clever

Should a sleek new wine-category refrigeration device be a wine “cooler” or “refrigerator?” Well, the research is a bit fuzzy. There is a popular bottled drink category called “wine cooler,” the keyword also means refrigeration device and the research is therefore not conclusive.

In the old world we’d be tempted to call this thing a “wine cooler” for the double meaning cute factor. In the new world we might not want to take on “wine cooler” SEO, not because it could not be accomplished, but because the stress is optional.

Don’t neglect YouTube!

Depending on which stats you believe, YouTube is the second or third most used search engine in the world. To not check YouTube SERPs for competition is reckless. Here’s the “Triton” search. Let’s not call the thing a Triton, OK?

Can you secure the literal keyword domain?

Lots of evidence suggests that exact match keyword domains are the fast track to ranking even in competitive SERPs. As a standing rule, we don’t encourage clients to create new product names where unless the literal domain is available.

At very best, failure to consider search when naming products can make the marketing process unnecessarily difficult. Worst-case scenarios include difficulty ranking for the product’s name and other lost opportunities.

Obviously, using well-trodden names as a component of a new product’s moniker is a more risky proposition than making up new names. One solution that works well is to make up names like “The Mighty Rankinstanker” or “My Fuzzy Mistbinger.” :)

In addition to traditional category, creative and legal people, engage your search team early in the naming process of a new product to maximize chances for overall marketing and promotional success.

I often write about what you can do to protect your brands when it comes to the major search engines: Google, Yahoo and Bing. But did you know that the second most popular search engine today is YouTube? (according to Hitwise, ranking ahead of Yahoo search). You can buy self-service advertising on YouTube through its “promoted videos” advertising system, which is great and easy to use. Beware, however: if you are trying to protect your brand, “promoted videos” can seem like the wild west revisited.

Ads run on YouTube in much the same way as they do on the text based search engines. On the left side of the screen is “organic” content and on the right is “paid.” You’ll find two types of paid ads on YouTube: “promoted videos” which are ads to generate traffic to videos, and text ads from Google’s content network which generate clicks to web pages.

If you pick any major brand and plug it into the search query box on YouTube, you’ll likely see the “promoted videos” advertisements. You will also notice that the majority of brand owners are simply not yet using this channel—instead non-brand advertisers appear. Here are a few examples:

• WalMart: only non-brand advertisers appear for the terms “walmart” or “wal-mart”
• Best Buy: only non-brand advertisers appear
• Target: Target owns its ad space and only official Target ads appear. Nice job Target!
• Amazon: only non-brand advertisers appear
• McDonald’s: only non-brand advertisers appear.

I could continue, but I think it’s pretty clear that we have a new frontier ahead of us. As with traditional search, you need to deploy a strong brand strategy to promote your messaging above all other advertisers. And just as with Google’s paid search, it’s very easy to advertise using some other brand owner’s name.

Here are a few things that you ought to be doing to solidify your messaging around your own brands on YouTube.

Create rich meta data. This applies to the “organic” side of the YouTube search results. Make sure that the keywords and text that you use to describe your YouTube videos match the keywords on which you want to be ranked within YouTube search results so that consumers can find you.

Become a YouTube advertiser. Just because you’ve loaded videos into YouTube does not mean you will be found or noticed by searchers. You ought to advertise in the same way that you do paid search with the general search engines—to protect your brand. Identify the brand phrases that are most important to you and buy ads that will be triggered by those keywords. You can do this by buying ads on YouTube’s promoted videos product mentioned above. You can add an additional layer of coverage by buying ads on the Google content network and picking “YouTube” as your site selection.

Monitor YouTube search results. Just as you would with paid and organic search on the major search engines, monitor the search results pages of YouTube to see who is listed for your brands and phrases. Take it one step further and watch the videos to see what type of content appears on your brand terms. You may find old commercials, or spoofs of your brand or company.

Monitoring tools for YouTube

Google Alerts. Just as when new content is added to Google’s web index, Google Alerts will send you alerts about new video content on YouTube. However, the alerts are only about new and popular videos, and aren’t limited to YouTube. This information will not be sufficient to tell you who is advertising or appearing in the organic listings on your brand phrases on YouTube. So this is not my favorite method.

Search manually. You can run searches on YouTube.com yourself and hit page refresh a few times to see who shows up on the right and left side of the pages.

Video monitoring tools.. While they’re not here yet, I predict tools will evolve to support video monitoring on YouTube and other popular sites in the not too distant future that will be the next wave in brand protection and monitoring.

Track volume. Track the volume of impressions and click traffic you receive on your brand phrases—this will help you if you have a lot of possible brand variations (e.g. types) to weigh which brand variations merit the effort. Google and YouTube provide reporting and you can also use third party tools to track video ads—and that’s a topic unto itself that I’ll save for another article.

Marketers nearly all agree that properly published recurrent content feeds, pumped into  social channels and Google’s index, serve SEO, branding and public relations stakeholders alike.

Social media channels are huge: 300 million people use Facebook and Twitter alone. Figuring out how to share content and be a good citizen in these networks is easy. Techniques for building distribution networks can be also be quickly mastered. That said, sourcing existing business communications, to facilitate the transition from “traditional” brand PR to social PR, requires planning, guile, guts, commitment and skillful execution.

Brand distribution networks

Social media pros (and tons of everyday users) know how to wire up personal distribution networks spanning Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube and other feeds and feed readers. This simply means recruiting a group of users, spread across social platforms.  Give your brand’s “friends” a reason to subscribe to social feed(s). “Social feed” means any content stream where “submit” means publishing by an RSS feed users can subscribe to. In addition it’s great to publish permalinked posts of feed items, for indexing by mainstream search engines.

If 5,000 total unique friends subscribe to a feed, each of them averaging 500 unique friends themselves, then the second degree of separation is 2.5 million users.  The theoretical third degree is 1,250,000,000 (yup, that’s 1.25 billion). “Viral” means sharing content your friends think enough of  to pass along to theirs… and so on. It only makes sense as a PR channel.

Here are some examples of personal distribution network nodes: LinkedIn users can subscribe to and display feeds in their profile. Blog posts can be pulled into Facebook profiles as notes, which are indexed in Facebook organic search.

Try displaying your Flickr stream headlines in LinkedIn. Google Alerts are available by feed and can be used to populate blog sidebars, Twitter search feeds, etc. Don’t forget Google’s mainstream search engine results. If your feed also publishes to a blog, the posts can drive keyword traffic—always a good thing.

Where should feed content come from?

Nearly every brand has numerous daily human-to-human communication feeds, both in-house and outbound. The marketing department talks to customers, support folks to struggling or unhappy customers, PR to journalists and lots more. The intersection of social media and PR is about distributing these existing channels to subscribers surrounding seven classic nodes of public relations:

1 – Media relations. As long as there have been individuals and crowds to listen, there have been reporters.  Since brands rarely want journalists to hate them, maintaining relationships is important. As other writers deem your news meaningful, they’ll subscribe to your news feed.

It surprises me how many mentions and links our blog has received without our promoting individual posts. We’re lucky because writers consume our feed and watch for material that will interest their readers.  The same can happen for your brand.  Feeds are essential for media relations.  Poll every potential stakeholder in your company, from PR to tech, and organize funneling any news to be published by feed and permalink.

2 – Community relations. Most brands “live” somewhere. The cities they live in (and market to) comprise their physical communities.  Since social media sites are communities too, reaching out is a process that helps solidify the public’s perception of a brand.

Where the brand truly reaches out to community, it’s important to discuss any initiatives online. If a new factory raises environmental concerns, speak directly to issues.  If your parent company  helps build a city food shelter or supports lymphoma research, share the heartfelt story online. The public eats that stuff up.

3 – Customer relations. Brands have to keep customers or they cease to be viable brands. Customers as a rule are a snarky lot.  To keep them happy, reach out without fail to preempt concerns; listen, provide crucial information and serve their needs.

Publish serialized FAQs, debunk myths, ask for feedback and offer more channels by which to interact with the brand and contact brand owners.  Social media networks are awesome conduits to listen and hear customers.  We all know that one malevolent user can takes a beef public and ruin out day. Be prepared to meet and great customers on their terms and publish matters important to them via social media.

4 – Internal relations. At first glance internal relations seem like a private affair. However that’s not always the case. Feature cherished employees in public feeds and serve worker populations with any important information suitable for public consumption. We’ve seen posts, as mundane as where .edu workers park their cars, result in organic traffic which converted.

It’s interesting to note how internal relations can cross over to community relations.  Sometimes individual employees take on personal causes on their own. Engage them as emissaries of the brand’s parent company to reap the benefits of mutual support.  Publicizing employees’ actions above and beyond the call of duty rallies other employees and piques community interest. Whole families engage and there can be a lovely ripple effect.

5 – Human interest. Did someone use your product to rescue a cat from a tree or fish a diamond bracelet out of the bathroom drain? Maybe a founding family member passed away and their story speaks volumes about brand integrity. Inquiring people want to know! If someone survived cancer, climbed Mt. Rainier or won the lottery, humans love a good story so stay aware of hyperbolic content in whatever topical niche’ feel your brand is known for.

6 – Crisis management. Bad things happen to good brands. Recalls, riots, explosions, failures of executive character—you name it—things can go wrong.  Many crises require the quick broadcast of information to serve and contain damage to the brand.  These days there can even be SEO benefit to serving crisis-content in feeds.

Links received from fda.gov, irs.gov or fbi.gov, though damaging at first, can be effectively channeled after incidents wane. One site we work with made massive SEO strides after a PR disaster because of link juice provided to the whole site.  We diffused semantic damage on the inbound anchor text and distributed power deep into the site.  Effective use of content, fed to the public, can help spin gold from garbage.

7 – Investor relations. If your brand’s parent company publishes a public annual report, there’s a good possibility that periodic teases, report schedules and other salient financial data will matter to someone, or possibly to many.  Investor relations are an obvious place that publishing by feed could be useful.

The next old PR thing

There’s near consensus amongst marketers that publishing recurrent content feeds, pumped into social channels and Google’s index, serve SEO, branding and public relations stakeholders alike.

Keep in mind that what worked yesterday in person, in many cases, essentially works the same way now online—just on a larger scale with better analytics. Also there’s no doubt that information moves at the speed of light in modern social media.

Ask, “What communications already emanate from our brand that might serve, inform and delight users, even to the extent of viral proclivity if published properly.”  Look often to classic public relations nodes to source business feed content.

A company’s brand is its cornerstone. Given that, building your brand requires a balance of marketing efforts across various channels. Fortunately, search and social media are great ways to build your brand today.

Social media’s role in branding

More than ever before, a company’s brand is influenced by what consumers are saying about it online. Blogs, search engines, and social media sites have a strong impact on public opinion. Unlike the past where marketers could push their brand messages to consumers, the control has flipped and consumers are actually driving the opinion of brands. Considering that, social media can help marketers engage with users and become involved in the conversations taking place about their brand.

The Harpoon Brewery—one of my favorite brewers in the Boston area—is a perfect example of a company doing exactly that. They have a Facebook page, and notify all of their fans about the availability of their seasonal brews and any happenings at their different locations. Their Facebook page allows other Harpoon fans to interact with each other and discuss topics of interest. This is a great example of how you can boost your brand and build your customer base by simply interacting with consumers.

How search contributes

But this idea also applies to organic search. How so? Marketers can tap into it as a means to build brand awareness on keywords that are important to their target audience. The key to success for this channel is creating engaging and timely content centered around keywords that are relevant to your business. 

The Gatorade G campaign from this past winter is a great example of how marketers can use search in this way. Perhaps you recall the black and white ads that featured famous athletes?  As their images silently scrolled across the screen, an unseen announcer asked “What is G?”   

When I came across the ad, I had no idea what it was about, so the first thing I did was search for that keyword phrase. I immediately found an organic listing from a marketing publication on the campaign, a YouTube listing of the commercial, and PPC advertisements from Gatorade. This is a powerful example of how marketers can leverage search to reinforce their offline advertising to increase their brand presence.

Search and social media can be highly effective means to help build brand. To best capitalize on all that they have to offer for this purpose, follow these tips:

Create engaging content. You must have content on your site that users will connect with. This will keep them coming back to your site, and also make bloggers and webmasters more apt to link to it. The more links that you have pointing to your site, the more likely you will rank highly within the search engines.

Create timely content. You must have content that is constantly updated and relative to what is happening right now. Understanding what topics your customers are interested in, and then shaping your content strategy around that will help you get in front of users that are searching on those terms and very timely keywords.

Encourage user interaction. Whether it be a forum or a blog comment section, allowing users to discuss your brand will not only give you a firsthand look at what you are doing well and what needs to be improved, but it will also provide you with content that is naturally optimized to keywords that users associate with your brand.

Update regularly and often. Your social media outlets should be constantly updated in order to provide that constant branding message. The updates should be relevant and be a way to start a conversation between your customers.

Listen to your customers. Read your followers’ posts to see what is being said about your brand. If the comments are positive, think of ways to promote these things to potential customers. If they are negative, look at them objectively and figure out how things can be improved.

Promote your social campaign. Remember this old saying:”If a tree falls in the woods and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” If no one knows about your social media campaign it has no impact. Bbe sure to promote it on your website and through other marketing campaigns.

Ultimately, brand building requires efforts across many different marketing channels, including search and social media. Smart marketers will leverage the two to reinforce their brand and interact with their customers.

Unfortunately, affiliates do not always abide by the rules and requirements of your program.  For example, you may specifically prohibit keyword sponsorship of your best terms or your brand terms. You may look to keep your affiliates from co-promoting you alongside of your competitor(s) on the same landing page, you may have restrictions on paid search regarding rank, or you may have restrictions on ad copy (e.g. affiliates cannot use the phrase “official site” or make superfluous claims about your product).   These terms may be explicitly defined in your affiliate agreement, but regardless of your contract, your affiliates want to make money and that is inspiration enough to break or bend your rules when it suits their needs.

The good news is that the affiliate industry is trending toward recognizing that these issues exist and need to be resolved.  I attended Affiliate Summit East earlier this week in New York.   I was pleased to see two sessions specifically dealing with issues of compliance and regulation of affiliate marketing activities.

Hot topics in marketing compliance and enforcement. This session dealt with the complexities and liabilities of false advertising, affiliate advertising practices and enforcement of the laws and regulations in the USA.  Speakers included a representative from the Federal Trade Commission, a law firm and several industry insiders.

Bullet-proofing your affiliate agreement. This session was conducted by an attorney who explained  the varieties of business rules that are important to lock down in your affiliate agreement in order to protect yourself from liability, enable the merchant to control commission payments when the affiliate is out of compliance and to control affiliate messaging and marketing efforts to stay within the boundaries of the law.

There is also an emerging trend in the industry among the top affiliate networks who either offer or are openly talking about offering network quality services to their largest brand customers.  Some are considering options for their smaller and medium sized customers as well.  Overall, the trend seems to be pointing to a desire to provide merchants with more control over the quality of their affiliate programs.

The good thing is that you are in control when it comes to defining the rules and requirements of your own program.  Without rules in place, you put your ad dollars in jeopardy.  Examples of issues that will confront you in the event of your affiliate quality is out of control:

Increase in CPC If you are battling your affiliates on your key terms, you run the risk of driving up your CPC as you essentially compete against yourself.

Decrease in ROI. When a consumer clicks on your affiliate’s ad they receive a cookie that will give the affiliate credit for any sale that occurs within the cookie expiration time frame (usually 7 or 30 days).  If the consumer also clicks on your PPC ads, and winds up buying something, your affiliate will get credit for the sale—not your marketing department or agency.  When this occurs, affiliate sales can under-value your keywords so that the revenue is lowered, causing an unwarranted appearance of decline in ROI for specific keywords or media properties.

Decline of your good will. In this instance, messaging is key.  Being shown on the same page with competitors, or allowing affiliates to promote old offers, or to make false or grandiose claims will diminish the good will of your brand.

A carefully crafted affiliate legal agreement is important to your success in avoiding channel conflict, to ensure your CPC costs are contained and that your ROI is not falsely deflated.

Despite the economic quagmire we’re in, consumers’ brand expectations are up – especially when it comes to corporate responsibility. Given that, marketers should capitalize on these expectations by leveraging their corporate responsibility initiatives as a means to boost brand reputation in the search results.

Why you should care

In slower economic periods such as we’re experiencing now, corporations have a responsibility to consumers to set the standards of conscientious decision-making and giving. And while some stakeholders may question the benefits of the time and money spent on corporate responsibility initiatives, consumers and investors view responsible brands as trustworthy, and are willing to put their money where their perception is.

In fact, 85% of global consumers still expect companies to maintain or increase their charitable contributions during recessionary times (Eric Mower and Associates “Cause Marketing and the Economy Poll”). Today, customers are turning to their trusted brands in hopes that they will provide a solution – or a helping hand – to the causes they cannot contribute to themselves (due to lack of time or financial constraints).

Understanding the value

Today’s headlines are rife with economic woes and bleak outlooks. One way to stand out from the negative headlines is to highlight your company’s corporate responsibility programs, such as community and environmental initiatives. By promoting such efforts, you can reinforce positive brand awareness for your organization in the search engines.

For example, a global B2B software giant promotes success stories about how their products have helped design sustainable buildings. By capitalizing on press coverage and viral messaging, the company has achieved considerable presence in the search results for green initiatives, and is now perceived to be an industry leader in green design.

Yet some companies miss the opportunity to effectively leverage their corporate responsibility initiatives for branding purposes. Financial institutions are a perfect example. While they have been harshly criticized for their response to the credit market as customers panic, many of these same organizations actively participate in social giving programs through housing assistance and community outreach groups. However, few people know about their efforts. This is a big missed opportunity for them.

But capitalizing on your corporate responsibility initiatives can do more than boost your brand in the search engines; it can also help with damage control. Given the current media climate – where news outlets and bloggers jump on the chance to report every hiccup that can be spun into a global crisis – one bad customer experience can turn into a CEO’s nightmare once captured on video and uploaded to YouTube. Given that reality, marketers can leverage their corporate responsibility initiatives to mitigate such negative press.

Making it work

Leveraging corporate responsibility initiatives to boost brand reputation is a smart move. Follow the below seven tips, and you’ll be well on your way to doing exactly that.

1. Choose relevant causes

   If a big-box retailer plants a few trees, it won’t make headlines. However, if this same retailer donates children’s clothing to war-torn nations, people will notice. Stick to social and environmental programs that make sense for your industry. Understanding your customer base can be crucial in choosing a cause.

2. Go Green

   Sustainable business practices mean stable growth to consumers and investors. In today’s oil covered headlines, environmental efforts show visionary leadership and long term strategy rather than short term gains. “Greening” your organization – from supply chains and production lines to the executive row – also conveys confidence in the future success of the business. Green is now a lifestyle, and consumers expect this from their trusted brands.

3. Lend a hand; earn a link

   Even when we volunteer for something, we still want to benefit from it, whether it be self-fulfillment or resume building. Let your company’s benefit come in the form of an external link. Encourage partner charities and green programs to link back to your company website. It’s a free way for these organizations to thank a key partner. These same links can also drive additional traffic to your site.

4. Lighten up

   When other marketing channels go “dark,” social awareness promotions can be a cheap way to stay in the news. Issuing a press release to the wire is not only a low cost publicity tactic, but also an easy way to increase your branded rankings. In doing so, you give customers an opportunity to learn about your initiatives as they shop online or compare customer reviews.

5. Show off your best assets

   Sell green building products? Sponsor animal adoption charities already? Make sure your website clearly links to these vital programs and offerings from the homepage. Not only does this help customers find more information, but it also strengthens internal linking credibility. Structure promotions and giveaways around green holidays and social fundraisers.

6. Give customers and employees a reason to be proud

   When corporations demonstrate social and sustainability leadership, customers are less likely to blog or tweet about negative experiences. Satisfied clients and employees produce credible testimonials. When resources are tight, this is an easy way to generate new content and freshness on-site. In fact, 68% of consumers say that in a recession, they would remain loyal to a brand if they support a good cause (Edelman Good Purpose Study).

7. Tweet and blog

   Holding a fundraising event? Invite millions through Facebook events and watch your brand advocates spread the word. Tweet when new guests RSVP or activities are planned. Tag pictures of the last sponsored beach cleanup on Facebook to encourage employees to share with friends and contacts. Keep the charity events fun for more interest. These social activities can be a free and easy way to increase organic rankings.

In an economic environment where accomplishing more with less is an absolute necessity, marketers need to capitalize on every asset they have, including corporate responsibility initiatives. Doing so is a great way to boost your brand reputation in the search results.  However, failing to capitalize on the opportunity is tantamount to squandering a valuable asset.

As you may know, Google recently loosened its policy in the USA related to the use of trademarks in ad copy text, which went into effect on June 15, 2009. The big question is: has this change resulted in an increase in trademark use? The answer is yes.

The Search Monitor tracks and monitors trademark sponsorship and use in ad copy across all of the major search engines for brand holders. We recently conducted a study to determine the impact of these recent trademark policy changes. The results indicate that there has been an increase in trademark use across all of the major search engines.

The study discussed below is a look across several verticals at the change in the number of advertisers who sponsored or used trademarks in ad copy text before the Google June 15^th policy change, and after the June 15^th policy change.

The early results below show an increase in each category, across all search engines. Here is a preview of the current findings by vertical:

A small number of brands were reviewed for the above analysis consisting of brand holders which we suspected are not currently using a trademark monitoring tool and therefore may not be proactively monitoring and pruning abuses.

The above study is just the beginning of ongoing analysis needed to measure the impact on trademark use by unauthorized advertisers, including changes in the number of competitors engaged in the practice, the impact on impressions and/or click share, the impact of affiliate marketers engaged in the practice, and the impact on cost per click.

Does the new policy allow advertisers to engage in unauthorized use?

The short answer is no.

First, Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and Microsoft Advertising each have slightly different policies which you can find in their help documentation, and are further explained online by various white papers, bloggers, and columnists. You may be able to sponsor terms freely on one search provider, and not be allowed on another, so check their policies.

Second, the study above shows a big jump in keyword sponsorship of branded terms. This result is interesting because Google did not change its policy with regard to keyword sponsorship. Google has allowed keyword sponsorship for quite some time now. However, the recent policy change which specifically impacted use in ad copy, seems to have encouraged a surge in advertisers sponsoring brands as keywords. Yahoo and Microsoft Advertising did not issue a change, and yet seem to be impacted as well.

Third, just because a search engine allows the practice, does not mean that the law agrees with them. It seems that advertisers think there is an opportunity to use trademarks more freely, which may not be the case from a legal standpoint. The test from a legal standpoint in the USA and abroad is two-fold: (1) is the use considered ‘use in commerce’? To this question, it seems that the concensus legal view is that sponsorship of brand terms or use in ad copy text is a use in commerce; and (2) is the use likely to confuse a reasonable consumer as to the origin of the good or service? To this question, the answer depends on the facts surrounding the use.

For example, if the ad copy or ad leads to a website that looks quite like the brand-holder’s site or has replicated elements such as color, stylization, or logos, then it is more likely to be deemed to be confusing versus a website that has a unique brand and is espousing a competitive comparison.

The key is not to rely on the policy of the search engine but instead to rely on the law of the land in which you engage in business.