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By now it’s no secret Nestle is having some issues with their social media, one of the most talked about is their Fan Page fiasco. Greenpeace began the process with a report on Sinar Mas (whom Nestle used) harvesting palm oil , which is having a direct impact on the rainforest and orangutan populations . In March of this year, Greenpeace released a video depicting a man “taking a break” by biting into an orangutan’s finger (the video might be squeamish to some). Nestle promptly had it removed from YouTube, but it didn’t stop Greenpeace from posting it on Vimeo where it went viral. From there Greenpeace supporters flooded Nestle’s Fan Page and well, here we are today. Recently the dust is starting to settle, a little anyway, but there is still a lot to learn from what’s happened. I had the opportunity to talk with Marketing Pilgrim’s Frank Reed, about a few things to take away from what’s happened and how to prevent bad PR getting the best of you online. How did Nestle ruin their online reputation? Were they even ruined? In this day and age I wonder if it is possible to totally ruin your online reputation. People have short memories and are generally forgiving. In the case of Nestle there will be many who learn of Nestle’s efforts to make the palm oil situation right but the apparent unwillingness of many of the social media “protesters” to let them tell their story could actually end up working in Nestle’s favor. What could Nestle have avoided and did any warning signs appear before hand that could have alerted them to remain cautious? Well, if Nestle was aware of what their supplier was doing then they certainly were moving forward at their own risk. It would have made a great story for Nestle if they had identified the issue, ended the relationship then told their story. Whenever it looks like you have been “found out” there will be a price to pay in the online space. When are some constructive ways to respond to negative comments? Stay on message and don’t truly engage. Many negative commenters are looking for a fight. Stay on message. Keep telling the message that is moving toward a resolution and don’t “take the bait” to get into a shouting match. You’ll lose. Should people respond to every negative comment they receive be it on Facebook or other outlet? And if a negative comment is received should the comments be deleted? You should never delete negative comments unless they are truly defamatory to you or another or are obscene. Hopefully, you have put a clear policy together and made it available to participants as to what would cause a comment to be removed. If not you will look suspicious in removing anything from a platform that is intended to be open and conversational. Nestle did say that any pictures of their doctored logo would be removed. As for every negative comment being handled? Probably good to acknowledge the comments though and ask if they are willing to engage offline. If it starts to look like a “flame-fest” it is good to bow out gracefully and call for reasonable discourse. You are the site / brand owner after all and it is your turf so you can make the rules. Most people will see a reasonable attempt to handle an unreasonable person enough effort to seem genuine. Would you advise a dose of ‘reverse SEO’ for the negative comments? Reverse SEO can have a negative connotation especially if your problems and the responses from your audience re-warranted. What companies should be doing, however, is creating as many different outlets of information for the engines to “feed on” about the brand thus making it less likely for other results to float near the top. Google has a commitment to balanced results though so you better make your alternative offerings strong. Is it too late for Nestle? Should they just start over from scratch? It looks like their Facebook page is wrecked for now but this furor should die down especially if they have attended to the issue completely. The trouble with their Facebook page is that it has become a place where others are grousing about issues that aren’t even related to Nestle thus possibly killing any chance for that particular iteration of their Facebook presence to recover. They should consider a “do over” on that one area but once again this tactic will have its supporters and detractors as well. What are your top 5 things people/businesses can do to avoid having their reputation damaged online? 1. Keep their noses clean. Do good business and problems will be few. 2. Handle yourself professionally. No matter how bad the attack it should never warrant you dropping to the attacker’s level. It cheapens your image. 3. Provide many options for the engines with a variety of mediums like YouTube, blogs, alternate sites for specific data. 4. Be transparent. Admitting an issue will do much more good than harm. Covering it up and getting defensive though? Bad move. 5.Take the action that allows you to sleep at the end of the day knowing you did the best you could to be open, honest, transparent and available. Each situation will define these actions differently but work the moral compass angle. Frank Reed is the owner of FT Internet Marketing, Inc ( www.frankthinking.com ) that provides Internet marketing, social media, online reputation and copywriting services to the SME (small to medium enterprise) market. Frank is a daily contributor to Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim and writes weekly for Mike Moran’s Biznology Blog . He does other stuff too so give him a call. Three days after this interview Nestle has posted an open letter to Greenpeace . It seems they are starting to move, or appear to, in the right direction. In addition Nestle has also created a second Fan Page , which seems to be geared more towards the United States audience in order to move away from the mess on their original page. And a third Fan Page which seems to be focusing more on their care to the community and environment. I’d like to ask you the reader, your thoughts on the new release from Nestle and what do you think these new Fan Pages will do for them? Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Nestle, Palm Oil and Social Media, Oh

Good quality analytics (such as Google Analytics or another paid analytics software packages) provides good and very useful information. If you pay attention to it you could very quickly increase the overall efficiency of your website. You just have to look at the numbers and list to what they tell you. The proof is in the pudding as they say and if you ignore your analytics information you could be missing out on a great deal of potential business and traffic. Here are some basic areas for you to review in order to find any holes in your website and to help you decipher data that you learn from your analytics: Conversions: In case you don’t know, a conversion is a completed action on your website, such as lead, sign up, sale, etc.  The most important factor (I think) to learn from your analytics software is the conversion data.  Understanding and learning about how and where you conversions come from can help you make much more educated and better SEO, PPC and Social Media marketing decisions.  I can’t tell you how many people I still speak to think that the best goal for an SEO campaign is rankings or positioning.  Sorry to break it to you, but it is not.  Increasing conversions (and visitor growth) should be the starting goal(s) of your SEO and search marketing efforts.  I won’t get too deep into that as that is not the main point of this post J Bounce Rate: Whether you are looking at this overall or down to a single page if your bounce rate is really high try to figure out what is turning people off from that web page. It could be a variety of things depending on your business so take a deep look at your page. Is it too much info? Or a lack of info? Do you have too many ads on that specific page? It could also be a combination of all these items. It might just be that your page needs to have a serious over haul.  Bounce rates vary for each client and industry but understanding what yours is and try to improve your bounce rate is very important. Visitors: When you start to really get into advanced SEO techniques you will need to understand even more so where all of your visitors are coming from. Visitor quality is just as important as visitor growth. You never want to rely on just one stream of traffic because if that stream dries up so does your business. You have to understand where your traffic is coming from because often times it might be from an area that you least expected it to come from. Analytics information allows you to find new locations along with locations of where you might be able to place yourself to find new traffic. Keywords: Analytics information will tell you what keywords your website traffic is using to find your website. This is a potential to really open things up for you as you grow your business online. As new keywords develop you can capitalize by finding new variations on those specific keywords and using them throughout your website. You have to look at your analytics information very closely otherwise you won’t find those windows of opportunity to help improve your SEO and overall search marketing efforts. Analytics keeps your approach to marketing your website efficient and smooth. It is all about finding opportunities that could already exist right in front of you. Data and information that you can get from your analytics allows you to find those areas where you can really maximize your efforts in the online world. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Advanced SEO Requires Good Analytics

Recently Google put up an experimental search suggest feature for Google Maps to make it faster and more accurate to find places, businesses and points of interest as you type your search.  But this was only available for Google Maps in Germany, China, Hong Kong and  most recently Taiwan. But now, Google has just made this search suggest feature on Google Maps to 10 more domains and 8 additional languages, including on maps.google.com. Suggest for Google Maps was built on locally relevant stock of knowledge to get the most useful suggestions depending on where you are zoomed into Google Map. In addition, Suggest for Google Maps also give you additional information including business addresses to help you find and select the best and most exact business or location that you may be looking for. If you’re anywhere in these regions -  China, Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Netherlands, Russia, Spain, Taiwan, United States, United Kingdom, you can now use the said feature. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Google Maps Search Suggest Available in More

The Internet has turned into a great local business marketing tool in the past couple of years.  While local businesses have not yet adopted these tools into their marketing strategies, the technologies are moving forward with or without them.  The convergence of Search, Social Media and Mobile Marketing is bringing business information with products and services into the hands of the local consumers. Having had Internet business experience for the past 16 years, I can tell you that this is probably one of the few times where we can put all the local business marketing puzzle pieces together and see what marketing tools we have available over the next 2 – 3 years.  Let’s review each one so we can see how the come together. Local Business Listings In short these are the interactive yellow pages of the Internet. Interactive because as a business owner you can update and manage these listings at search engines, social communities, 411 web sites, GPS/Mapping websites and basic business directories.  They are also interactive because consumers can post their experience they had with your business, products or services.  In order to get started you need to claim, update, monitor and manage these listings at multiple local listing websites.  Don’t have the time resources?  Don’t worry, there are companies that provide local business listing management services. Local Business Listing Marketing vs. Data Services As a business you will want to seek out companies that provide the marketing services.  The companies that provide basic data services only push your information out, but they do not help you protect your listing from being hijacked or for that matter manage your listings for marketing purposes with various types of content like coupons, events, QR codes, consumer reviews, coupons and citations.  The marketing services have a higher cost to them than the data services, because the marketing services are more effective and do more for your business. Consumer Reviews This will be the first time that most local businesses dependent upon the local consumer for their revenue will need to manage their public relations.  Consumer Reviews are not just about other consumers seeing the information, but too many negative reviews will adversely impact your website ranking position in search results.  This is no longer about just consumers posting their frustrations to a website or blog, but directly into your local listing.  As a business you will need to closely monitor these reviews and also begin to engage customers that have positive experiences to post their information as well. Local Listing Coupons and Mobile Coupons The Local business listing gives the business the opportunity of posting their coupons, offers, and discounts.  They are then available for consumers to find through web searches and through their mobile devices.  While this is not available through all local listing websites or available for free, this is in no uncertain terms the demise of the traditional coupons. Events If you promote your business then you will want to use the Events promotion tool within Local Business Listings.  You can include Specials, Events, New Products, general News, pretty much any alert you which to make the local consumers aware of so they can find it through a web search or a mobile search. QR Codes These small square bar codes will allow you to program them for consumer to scan using their mobile devices.  The code will then do whatever is programmed to them.  For example, a coupon, discount, offer, event, website link.  You can also use them on business cards, websites, traditional ads, store window, and much more. Citations This tends to add a level of complication for most businesses.  If you’re familiar with the idea of inbound links, this is very similar only this time is not necessarily just about a link, but your company name, address, city, state, zip, phone and many other aspects that are related to what is known as HCards to include your longitude and latitude of your business address.  Because this is a combination of marketing and technical expertise you may wish to get someone to help you with this item. Hyperlocal Websites that are hyperlocal give a local business the opportunity of highlight targeted advertising and marketing to geography and demographic.  While these websites are not as prominent for this purpose yet, this will change and needs to be planned for in 2011 and beyond. Having had Internet business experience for the past 16 years, I can tell you that that geographic marketing is the direction of our immediate future.  Hopefully I was able to portray to you some of the known components of local business marketing and how this local business marketing tool can be used to reach the local consumers. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Local Business Marketing – The Known

I have had many opportunities to chat all things local with my good friend Will Scott, and just the other day we were at it again.  We were talking about some of the most common questions we are always asked by small business owners in regards to local marketing online.  I wanted to take the time and put them down on paper for everyone.  I felt this would be a good venue to get the answers out there.  Here goes my interview with Will Scott of Search Influence . 1. What are the best ways that new to Internet businesses can go about increasing the number (or gaining any at all) citations when it comes to local listings? My number 1 recommendation would be that they make their way over to http://getlisted.org . Get Listed is a really simple tool that checks the major local search engines and tells you if you’re there. If you’re not there you can go submit yourself right from the dashboard. Once you’ve done that, go submit yourself to the major data providers. There’s a shortcut here you can get into those providers data with just 3 sources: UniversalBusinessListing.org (submits to multiple data providers) Localeze.com (submits to multiple data providers and powers many online directories. InfoUSA.com/Landing/UpdateListing.aspx (the only major not represented by the 2 above) One caveat: it’s not immediate. You must submit early in the month and then it may take 45 90 days to see full distribution. In the meantime there’s nothing wrong with hand submitting to some of the biggies like MerchantCircle, Yellowpages.com, Superpages and InsiderPages. Just be advised, your phone will ring with follow-up telemarketing. Politely decline and stick with the free listing. 2. What would you say to those who worry about receiving negative reviews? Negative reviews are bound to happen. Lots of businesses think they can play Ostrich and solve all their problems. The issue is that even if the business owner isn’t active online their customers are. As with many things the best defense is a good offense. If a business owner is proactively working to get positive reviews it’s a great defense when they find themselves with the inevitable negative. And, I think everyone understands that we can’t please all customers. No matter how hard a business owner tries there will always be that one. Just like in real life, you can’t sweat them all and the most valuable tactic is to offer good customer service so you don’t have to worry about reputation management . 3. What would you say to those who are worried their competitiors are giving them bad reviews? Forget about it see above. Seriously though, you can’t defend against it. Just monitor your reviews and other online mentions and if one crops up which looks suspect, address it head on and report it to whichever service is hosting it. It does no good to share your agitation with the site where a review is posted. Keep it factual and professional and they’ll be much more likely to take it down. We have seen Yelp reviews pulled, but it’s not very common. In the case of Yelp, reviews which don’t pass the sniff-test often face the Yelp Review Filter . 4. What are some of the best places/resources someone who has ran a business for years offline, but never online use to get started? Wow, the list is endless but just for a few: GetListed.org already mentioned above. In addition to the service, there’s a blog and links to lots of great resources. OutspokenMedia.com/blog/ Lisa and her cohorts blog almost daily. They take a very user-friendly approach to online marketing. It’s entertaining for pros and approachable for those just getting started. SmallBusinessSEM.com Matt McGee’s blog. Occasionally insidebaseball but filled with great stuff written with the business owner in mind. DuctTapeMarketing.com John Jantsch’s site. Very nitty gritty marketing ideas and execution. SmallBizTrends.com Anita Campbell and a stable of writers tracking, reporting and advising on news and info of interest. SmallBusinessBrief.com Forum from the folks at SearchEngineGuide.com. Search Engine Guide is a little technical for newbies, but there are a lot of helpful people in the forum. In all seriousness I recommend our blog: http://www.searchinfluence.com/blog/ . It’s written by my team for and from the perspective of the small business clients with whom we work. And, though it’s often a little insidebaseball for newbies too, I think your blog  http://dreamsystemsmedia.com/blog/ has a lot to offer as well. Mat, thanks for asking for my opinions. This is an area where I’m pretty passionate. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Top Local Business Listing Questions Answered – Interview with Will