Reputation Management

Protect Your Brand

For many companies, their brand is their most valuable asset. It resonates with customers and offers them a reason to choose one company over another. It is hard to think of a world with- out Coca-Cola, Microsoft or Starbucks. But when a brand becomes tainted, the effects can be devastating. The stigma of a bad brand is almost impossible to shake-off, and all other marketing efforts are hurt by the underlying negative brand message. In the social culture of the internet, it is extremely difficult to erase the collective memory of bad branding.

Search

When users search for your brand name, they generally get your website as the first result, and about six other results about your company without having to scroll down (known as “above- the-fold” results). While you control your website‘s content and title, you have little control over these other sites. Often these sites are negative, complaint-oriented or another form of anti- brand sites. Whether or not the user visits these sites, just scanning the titles (e.g. Killer Coke), the website descriptions (e.g. there are undisputed reports that Coca-Cola bottling plant managers in...) and the URLs (e.g. killercoke.org) can adversely affect user perception.

RankAbove will work with you to determine which sites present a positive representation of your brand. Ideally, these are sites that you own or control. If such sites do not exist, RankAbove will work with you to create new sites that meet these criteria. RankAbove will use search engine optimization (SEO) strategies to push these sites up to the first and second pages of search engine results, pushing down the negative sites to the relative obscurity of the third page of results.

RankAbove will also work to remove negative results from the search engine indices, or edit the content of those sites in order to provide a more positive picture of your company. RankAbove will thoroughly investigate the SEO of negative sites, looking for search engine standard or ethi- cal violations. Where removal of the site is impossible, RankAbove will work with webmasters or open site platforms to combat negative information. In such cases, our priority will be to change the blurb for the negative site that the user sees.

Search is where your brand will make its first impression upon potential customers and existing cli- ents. Let the experts at RankAbove make sure that it is a good impression.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia Wikipedia has quickly become the #1 site on the Internet for information gathering, often coming up very high in the search engine results pages (SERPs) for branded or company name searches. Wikipedia’s strength and weakness is that it can be edited by anyone. One disgruntled employee or customer can post negative information for the world to see. While vandalism and patent non- sense are quickly removed from Wikipedia, (loosely) verified claims are harder to combat. Wiki- pedia does not allow company employees to make major edits to their own pages (namespaces) as it violates the Wikipedia principles of No Conflict of Interest and No Self Promotion

RankAbove employs top Wikipedia editors, who have been recognized by the Wikipedia com- munity as major contributors, to combat negative comments, feedback and external links within your branded and company namespaces. RankAbove editors are allowed access to automated Wikipedia software, which is highly exclusive, to actively monitor and protect your namespace from future negative contributions, and can take punitive action against those who constantly submit such contributions.

Wikipedia is one of the most public and accessible faces your company and brands have. Let the experts at RankAbove ensure that your namespaces promote the best possible company and brand messages, while adhering to all Wikipedia standards

Video Sharing Sites

The revolution, it turns out, is being streamed instead of televised. The advent of video sharing sites, like YouTube and MySpace TV, have not only changed the paradigm of who watches videos online, but also who creates or produces those videos. Anyone with a webcam and a grudge against a company can potentially reach millions of viewers.

As users have begun using video sharing sites for product research, brands with negative video search results are at a major disadvantage. RankAbove works to prevent both the video searcher and casual browser from seeing negative videos about your company. Firstly, RankAbove works to promote positive or neutral videos about your brand above the negative results, pushing negative results to the relative obscurity of the second or third page. RankAbove also looks through nega- tive videos for copyright or Terms of Use/Service violations in order to flag the videos and get them removed from the results.

In addition, RankAbove tackles the more difficult job of negating the effects of popular negative videos about your brand. When a negative brand video begins to accumulate popularity, Rank- Above will work to push unrelated popular videos to combat the negative one, and look for ways to remove that video from the most popular platforms.

Video is the new online medium. RankAbove makes sure it works for you and not against you.

Social Monitoring

While most action online still begins with search, more and more users are navigating the web via social platforms such as Facebook, Digg, Twitter, and other social sites. Users who navigate via these sites are not searching for anything in specific; they are only interested in what is popular within their platform or network of friends. Like video, however, what is popular can easily start with a single disgruntled customer. Certain blogs and platforms, like Consumerist, Slashdot and Digg, revel in stories of unfairly treated customers and mistakes made by major corporations. Members of the social networks often use comments and sharing features to side with the per- ceived “underdog”, the lone consumer against a big brand.

RankAbove maintains popular and well-liked profiles within each network, and uses these profiles to squash or deflate upcoming negative stories about your brand before they become popular and visible. RankAbove will also work to push positive stories about your brand or product to push down negative stories within each platform’s search feature, if applicable.

Word-of-mouth reputation has passed from the water cooler to the social landscape, where the audience has bloomed into millions of online consumers. RankAbove monitors and influences these platforms to make sure only good news and reviews are shared about your brand and business.

RankAbove’s Other Services

Reputation Management is one piece of the puzzle. We also offer SEO with quantifiable results within seven to ten days, and Social Media Marketing which places your product or brand in front of the right audiences the right way for the social media sites.

Learn more about our complete package of services at www.rankabove.com

About RankAbove

RankAbove is a technology-enabled service company specializing in Search Engine Optimiza- tion (SEO) and Social Media Marketing (SMM). RankAbove combines innovative search engine technology, advanced research capability, and pro-active marketing across the Social Media and Search landscapes to produce quantifiable results in fields generally associated with vague prom- ises and ambiguity.