Non-Line Blogging

What’s your reputation in the second largest search engine?  Since October 1998 Comscore has been telling us that YouTube searches passed those on Yahoo, with Google still dominating the pack.  So is it about time you started pinging your search terms into engines other than The Big G? 

First up, a bit of a brand reputation challenge. Imagine you are the brand police at Farrow and Ball, manufactuers of beautiful, traditional paints.  Everything is rosy (Rectory Red or Ointment Pink?)  in the marketing garden – natural search in Google for brand terms looks fine, as it does in Bing and Ask.  But have they tip-tied into the scary world of YouTube and looked at their brand reputation?  If they had they will see a dark grey cloud (Off-black, or perhaps Studio Green?) hanging over them.  For the rest of us we can sit back and chortle with delight as some young digital consumer shatters their reputation in front of over 400,000 brand searchers.

So, how about generic searches?  What happens when your next customer decides that YouTube might hold some handy hints and tips on buying things...like car insurance?  Could you have a group of consumers talking about your products, your competitors’ and market aggregators?  How about a few client testimonials, and how about re-purposing favourable reviews from other videos or TV shows?  Add some of the increasingly-easy video optimisation techniques and maybe you can steal a march on the competition.  Hats off to CompareCarInsurance for getting up and running with this strategy, but have a watch of the "Auto Insurance" clip if you've ever had to insure a young male driver...it's very, very funny!

So we now know that search and reputation management is much more than just checking your ranking in Google.  Now we have the challenges of real-time search tools and the sheer pace and volume of brand monitoring on sites like Twitter and Facebook.  But what about all the other search engines out there?  On my digital marketing courses I encourage people to check their brand on Delicious, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Digg and all the other social networking/bookmarking sites.  Aggregate together all the generic and brand searches not being done on Google and Bing and there should be plenty of traffic there to keep you going into 2010. 

And finally, two things to consider with on-site search.  Firstly, how do you use on-site search data?  It could give you some clues about navigation...if lots of people have to search for something maybe it needs to better signposted, or maybe you’re not using the same words as your customers to describe a product/service.  Secondly, what are your in-site search results like?  Try typing a competitor’s brand and see what you get back...could you offer them your alternative product rather than return a “no results found” page?  Or pretend you are Larry and Sergei and build your own search rules to make sure the best results (most profitable, most in warehouse?) come to the top of  your in-house results page.

And what about that apology of a search box on your site?  (Yes, mine’s a weeny one too). A year ago Amazon made its search box HUGE because they noticed that Google had a big one, and people liked that.  Go to some of the younger, fresher sites and the top of the page is dominated by the search box.  It’s just another one of the web design trends that you may be wise follow.

So, search is much, much more than a bit of Googling for many of your consumers, and there are big, quick wins waiting to be taken.  Nows the time to improve your reputation and visibility for brand and generic terms on Google, Bing, Yahoo, YouTube, Metacafe, Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg, Delicious, Stumbleupon, Reddit and then you get stuck into the next 100 search engines! Good luck!