We’ve talked quite a lot on this blog about Online Reputation Management. Before the Internet and Social media, if someone had a bad experience with your company then they would have few avenues to pursue.

To start with, they’d probably moan about how awful you were to their friends. This would probably mean that their friends would never buy from you. Unless you run a local business, shop or restaurant, this probably wouldn’t affect you too much.

If you were lucky, they’d call you up and tell you about why they were unhappy. This would at least give you the opportunity to respond to them, and you could change your service to take on board what they said.

Thanks to the Internet, however, a complainer has an array of tools to make their complaints heard.

To start with, they can tell everyone in the social networks about you. The average Facebook user has over 50 friends, so this means their gripes are heard by a lot more people.

Second, they can start giving feedback about you on reviews websites. Anyone going directly to a read a review about your product tend to gravitate towards the negative ones. Even if you’ve got 10 good reviews and just 1 bad one, it’s the latter that will be read the most, and is most likely to stick in the mind.

The third weapon at their disposal is a forum. It’s relatively easy to find a forum relevant to your product and service, and get in there with a few moans. Forums are incredibly popular places for people to hang out online, and posts can be read by thousands. Once again, it’s the negative ones that stand out.

The Power of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP)

Anyone browsing their social network, looking on a review site, or spending time in a forum, will be directly affected by these negative comments. But there is a secondary effect, and a much more important one.

This secondary effect has to do with the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).The big downside of all these avenues of complaints is that they will show up in the search engine results page when people search for your company or website. As we stated recently, thanks to the ‘Real Time’ arms race the search engines are currently engaged in, comments on social networks are getting indexed by Google to an increasing extent. And as we stated in our Google the innovator series, Google is also giving increased prominence to reviews in their index, Lastly, Google announced just recently that they are giving increased prominence to forum postings in the SERPs.

All these factors are combining with the result that a poor review, comment or negative post has a significant chance of showing up in the SERPs when people look for your company.

If someone is searching on Google for your company name or your website, the worst possible thing for them to see is a page full of results that show your company or website in a bad light. People who are searching for your company have already made a positive decision to buy from you – they are the people that you should find it easiest to sell to. It’s almost as though they are at the check out of your shop. And when they see a bad review, its like someone else in the shop tapping them on the shoulder and saying ‘Excuse me, I wouldn’t buy from these people, they’re terrible!’

The ideal scenario when someone searches for your company or business or website, is the information that they find on the SERP is positive, and will encourage them to trust you.

Having let you know about all the downsides of getting negative feedback, comments and reviews in the SERPs, tomorrow we’ll show you how you can take control the Search Engine Results Page to make sure that those negative comments are pushed to the bottom of the page, and don’t stop people visiting your website.

Last week the Millward Brown Optimor’s BrandZ Top 100 list was published. This is a list of the world’s biggest brands, and their associated ‘value’.

This year the list is topped for the third year running by Google, whose brand worth has gone up a whopping 16% over the last 12 months. This means that it is now ‘worth’ $100 billion.

As to how this value is calculated, Millward Brown Optimor (MBO) say that it is the sum of all future earnings that brand is forecast to generate, discounted to what that value is today. Some have suggested that a brand’s ‘value’ is arbitrary; for MBO, it’s all about a brand’s ability to ‘generate demand’.

One reason that Google’s brand may be so much higher than its fellow technology companies is that it always calls its products ‘Google’. This contrasts with Microsoft who run many secondary brands such as Hotmail, Windows, and Bing.

Microsoft attracts the second highest valuation, at $76.2bn (up 8 % on last year).

Others in the top 10 include Coca-Cola, IBM, McDonald’s, Apple, China Mobile, General Electric, Vodafone and Marlboro.

The two fastest growing brands were Amazon (up 85 % to $21bn) and Blackberry (up 100% to $16bn).

Despite the economic downturn, the total value of the most valuable brands rose by 2 % to just less than $2 trillion.

So what does ‘brand’ mean?

The word ‘brand’ means many different things to different people. For me, it’s what thoughts and associations people have when they think of your company. Do they think ‘good service, nice people’; or do they think ‘cheap products, fast delivery’. Do these thoughts and associations mean that people will pre-decide to buy from you before buying from your competitor? Apart from your products, ‘brand’ is what your website visitors and customers take away with them, in their minds, having visited your website or bought your products.

So how do you improve your brand’s value?

There are two ways to do this. The first is to make you customers and website visitors have as positive an experience as possible with you, your website, and your products. That might be by having a rich, well designed site; it might be by giving them easy to find information, great service, and a good feeling from their interaction with your website and your business.

The second way is to expose this ‘experience’ to as many people as you can. When it comes to building a website, that means getting as much traffic as possible to your website.

The first obvious was to do this is to work on your Search Engine Optimisation so that you can boost your website up the Search Engine Results page. Secondly, you need to make use of the Social Networking features available within WebEden to start building a community around your website. It’s this community who will recommend your site to others, and ultimately build a loyal base of frequent visitors.

Do any of you have a brand that you think is of value? What value do you think it has? Have you got any brand building tips you could leave for us here? Leave us a comment below.