Beat a bad rep	July 2008

Med Ad News discussed the ad agency's role in managing online brand reputation issues with Lisa Flaiz VP, group director, and national pharma practice lead, and Joshua Palau, group director of search engine marketing, of the Philadelphia office of Avenue A | Razorfish.

Med Ad News: What strategies does Avenue A|Razorfish use to help clients defend their brands against negative attacks online? What differentiates the company’s offerings from other “online reputation” offerings?

Joshua Palau: The first thing to realize is that search engines are there to provide the answer to a user’s question.

Search engines are not measuring a page for accuracy of information, but instead rank a page by determining if it answers the user’s query. So if I type in “Medication Side Effects,” it will find all of the appropriate pages on that topic based on the information to which it has access. Therefore, the key for a brand is to make sure that it is leveraging all of its assets as well as brand neutral assets in order to provide the search engines with enough positive choices.

Avenue A | Razorfish’s offerings differ in a few areas. We focus a lot of our work on the search engines. Our rationale is that search drives so much user activity that if a negative result does not appear, then the problem may not be that big. We also use our proprietary spider technology that allows us to crawl sites looking for specific phrases, as well as determine why certain sites might be out-ranking yours. This helps us to determine the appropriate course of action.

Lastly, I think that being part of a full-service agency is the real differentiator because we have the ability to build or implement many of the items we recommend. Many monitoring companies will tell you to create a site, edit content, shoot a video, etc. However, at Avenue A | Razorfish, we can do all of that for you while keeping search in mind so that it is well optimized.

Lisa Flaiz: The other thing that Avenue A | Razorfish does is leverage the dynamics of “new rules of PR.” Reputation management is not something new for companies. However, with the proliferation of blogs, RSS, personalization, and sites such as Facebook and YouTube, there are more media outlets than ever before with which a marketer has to be concerned. Marketers need to actively manage how their brand is presented, and traditional methods are no longer the only way. Brands have to leverage technology and online marketing tactics to manage their brand reputation, minimize the number of negative search results, and increase the number of positive or neutral search results for strategic keyword searches.

Up until a few years ago, when they were looking for information, readers went to a trusted source and looked around for it. Today, they are much more likely to start with a search engine. Newspaper readership trends are down. We’ve all seen the numbers. They are unequivocally bad. After peaking in the early 1990s, circulation is down 10% to 15% in absolute terms (and obviously further on a per capita basis). We could quote similar numbers for advertising, classified, TV news viewership, magazine readership, and so on and so on. I doubt that any of these statistics are news. These trends are a symptom of a deeper and more significant set of changes in how people consume information. But it doesn’t stop at readers. Reporters have changed their behavior. Journalists and media professionals go to search and news engines for their information. If your company employs a traditional public relations strategy without press release optimization, then you are leaving coverage on the table. Search marketing and Public Relations must merge. Bottom line: PR works best when it is search-optimized!

Whether it’s an organic listing or a paid listing, a top search engine position can mean thousands of page views for your release – your point of view – and more press coverage. The problem with most press releases is that the content fails to have enough key word density or the release is not coded in a strategic manner – or at all – from a technical programming perspective. The solution of course is to optimize the content and the coding and to properly submit it with the appropriate online newswire services and/or news engines. The goal is to be in the path of your audience every time they search, every place they search.

Med Ad News: Tell us about the creation of Avenue A | Razorfish’s online defense/reputation offering. What inspired the creation of the offering, and how was it developed?

Joshua Palau: I don’t really believe that this is something new – just something that is evolving because of digital. To me, reputation management is online PR. In the past, marketers only had to concern themselves with negative Websites. They now have to worry about their product failures being documented in images and videos. Marketers can no longer just worry about optimizing their Web-based assets, but all of their brand assets – some of which may not even exist in a digital format.

We recognized that this was happening and went to several clients that we saw experiencing some negative listings. Specifically in the healthcare space, several clients had challenges with recalls or complaints where the information was one-sided and not well balanced, or was not being portrayed accurately. Our clients needed to be able to provide their point of view as well as defend incorrect information.

Once we agreed on this, we needed to set up a process that made sense for all clients that included discovery, strategy development, and then implementation and maintenance. Each phase has its own facets that help us identify how bad the situation is and what the correct course of action should be.

Lisa Flaiz: I agree with Josh that while we are approaching this in an innovative way for pharma, it is not so much of a new offering as it is an evolution of our deep search marketing heritage. Many pharma brands have suffered from reputation issues – Vioxx, Crestor, Premarin, Vytorin, Lipitor to name a few. We realized that in order to get balanced, credible, and accurate information to consumers – which is the goal as responsible marketers – we were going to have to find opportunities that either didn’t exist in the past or had been overlooked. And it had to be something that could move quickly through the pharma med/legal/reg channels. The development of a full-response “get the facts” Website is a great option, but in the world of pharma is rarely timely. So, again, we look to search-optimized PR. It’s important to keep in mind that online distribution broadens your audience – it isn’t just media anymore. Physicians, patients, investors, and other relevant customer segments will all have easy access to the content. The implication is to write press releases that everyone can understand because potentially anyone can see it.

Med Ad News: What do you feel are the biggest risks for a pharma marketer trying to defend against online attacks? Have you observed or experienced specific situations where an attempted defense backfired against the marketer? If so, how so, and what could have been done better? Are there any good examples of companies who did a particularly impressive job of defending/improving their brand’s reputation online? How so?

Joshua Palau: I really don’t think there are any risks unless you are trying to refute a claim that is factual. Brands should be more on the offensive to make the public understand what is real and what is not. We too often are swayed by what is in a search engine and do not realize that it could simply be there because the person has a high optimized site of inaccurate content.

We have never seen this strategy backfire – mainly due to the fact that we don’t look for secretive ways to influence the results. We don’t recommend trying to create “anonymous” but instead be open and honest. As long as a brand understands the commitment involved here and is honest about what they are saying, there is little room for it to backfire.

Mattel did a very good job in managing the problems they had by creating a response site and addressing the issue head on. The sad part is that because the story was true, they had little to do outside of addressing it head on. I like the fact that they set up a response site that allowed them to keep that information separate from the main company site.

A good measure of reputation management is when you are dominating “brand” or “brand neutral” queries. These are searches that are completed by people that may not know that there is anything negative going on with your brand. Therefore you want to keep them away from any negative news. I am less concerned about people who search for “Brand sucks” because they seem to already have a predisposition.

Lisa Flaiz: The only thing I have seen truly backfire is when a marketer did not respond to an attack. “No comment” just does not fly with consumers, and I believe this would be the biggest risk to a company’s reputation. I like to think about how J&J would have handled the Tylenol tampering scare of the 80s if that had happened today. I have no doubt they would have aggressively utilized every media channel at their disposal to address the public and take accountability. Marketers should strive for full transparency, accountability, timeliness, and responsiveness when dealing with negative attacks. But we must also keep in mind that since there are no FDA guidelines around digital marketing specifically, every channel must be treated as promotion, and therefore under DDMAC jurisdiction. The normal rules apply – information must be balanced, accurate, reviewed, and even filed with first use. Managing the digital channels of communication takes resources and for now is best left in the hands of the professionals, such as your corporate communications team, PR agency partners, and other trained representatives.

The first step is to get an understanding of how bad the situation is. Technology can be leveraged to manage the mass data and provide recommendations that will have true impact. Technology also allows for tracking and managing conversations before they become larger issues, by evaluating the words that are triggering negative results and the number of searches associated with those words, and uncovering conversations and sites that are tied to brand-specific terms..

Med Ad News: We’ve heard a number of folks talk about “snake oil” offerings in the online reputation space. Has this been your experience as well? What are some ways that potential clients can measure the credibility/viability of an online reputation offering?

Joshua Palau: The key with any offering is staying away from people who talk about guarantees or that they can remove negative listings. We have not had that experience because we are extremely open with our clients that there is no way to guarantee that we can dominate the listings or remove the negative ones. We actually tell clients that we can never remove negative listings, but if you optimize your other assets, you will likely give the search engines better options then the negative listings – which should replace your negative listings.

One of the ways we talk about measurement is by looking at how much of the search page you own.  We break down a page and review how many of the top 10 listings are positive, neutral, and negative. From there you can measure how bad the situation is and then see the changes over time.

Lisa Flaiz: The only thing I would add to this is in terms of measuring. I would also consider consumer sentiment studies – also known as word-of-mouth studies or buzz monitoring studies. These are beginning to take hold in pharma. Most of our clients have done these at least as one-offs. The challenge – and the need – will be to institutionalize the practice so that it becomes a regular part of the market intelligence gathering process. Of course, pharma’s biggest question around these studies is, once we know what people are thinking and saying, how do we influence that conversation – or even participate?