Introducing

The online reputation management solution from Newscounter

Context

Reputation management has changed

The mass media has been joined by the Internet as a key influencer of the perception of your reputation.  

• The Internet is the primary source of research and information for decision makingThe Internet is synonymous with searching for information. When anyone wants to find out about your company, the web will be their first port of call.

• Mass and specialised audiences are accessing the InternetWhether a customer, an investor, a member of staff or someone with no link to your organisation, mass and specialised audiences are accessing the Internet and learning about your reputation. They are also able to influence the perception themselves through user generated content.

• Bad news is permanent onlineInformation on the Internet can be stored permanently. Media coverage of your reputation is no longer used to wrap tomorrow’s fish and chips – information about you gathers on the Internet and is accessible for years to come.

It is vital to be aware and react fast to manage your reputation.

Your reputation under threat

The speed of the threat

The hidden threat

The size of the threat

The speed of the threat

From blog to front page• Reputational threats can move at

lightning speed across the web creating a negative tipping point against you before you can react. – Be blindsided by negative press – Appear slow to react – Appear vulnerable

The hidden threat

• Bloggers can have a silent but deadly impact on your reputation. The identity of key influencers may remain hidden until it’s too late.– Become aware of danger too late – Damage sustained to reputation – Negative impact on sales

The size of the threat

• The rise of blogs and social media have given millions of people disproportionate influence compared to just a few years ago.

• This new world operates very differently to the world of traditional media.– 1.6 million Web posts each second – 540 hours of footage uploaded

to Youtube everyday – Online news stories can attract

over 1000 articles

The reputation management challenge

• Not just a few newspapers but millions of posts each hour. The risk of silently losing your reputation within days.

• Even with a team of full-time researchers it would be impossible to track and evaluate everything by hand.

Time is needed to avoid being swamped or ignorant

The Counterpoint solution

• After years of studying the threats and the tools available, we have created the Counterpoint to automatically track and monitor your reputation.

• The Counterpoint system is:– Automated – Immediate – Manageable

How it works

1. Monitor 2. Evaluate

3. React

1. MonitorThe system scans the Internet for possible threats - to find the conversations about you.

Comprehensive• It pulls together content from blogs, from social sites, from

across the Internet

Constant • These sources are rechecked several times each day

Tailored • You can measure the bias in content and measure your

promoters and detractors accordingly

Comprehensive

• The system scans blogs, websites and search engines

• All material that is found is accessible to the user through the system, including YouTube and social networking sites

Constant

• The system checks all available sources every couple of minutes

• The system then re-checks all identified content to identify if and when a piece of content is attracting a large audience

Tailored

• You can change keywords whenever you want

• Any material related to your search is filtered for relevance

• You can assess the bias of each piece of content to evaluate your online coverage.

2. EvaluateWe evaluate those threats to determine how seriously they affect your reputation. There are three main ways that people access information online:

Search engines • The system measures how visible a threat is on the search

engines

Websites • It measures the importance of a site by understanding the

number of incoming links

Social networks • Where possible we measure the audience size of content on

social networking sites

Search engines

The majority of internet use begins on a search engine so you need to know:

• Which keywords people are using most frequently

• When your websites appear prominently in the results – and when they don’t

• Any changes in the rankings which may give prominence to criticism of your brand or products

Our methodolog

y

Websites

People also find information by clicking on hyperlinks between websites. Counterpoint counts:

• The number of links that are coming in to a website

• How many links each of these sites have, on average

Our methodolog

y

Social networks

• Social networking platforms such as YouTube or Facebook are increasingly important

• More than 12 million Britons use a social network each month

• Counterpoint measures:– The current audience; how many people are

seeing a piece of content– How many friends they have each, to indicate

its potential audience

Our methodolog

y

3. React

We alert you immediately so you can decide how best to deal with the threat.

React Fast • When necessary you can react directly

before a small problem escalates

Get Help• Working with specialists, we can help you

decide on the best response

React fast

• Set how you are alerted about any material the system monitors

• What you need to know, when you need to know it

Get help

• Newscounter can help you engage with blogs, promote your content or put you in touch with specialists to reduce your risk exposure.

• The company can provide consultancy services as and when needed

Who needs it?

The speed of the threat: HSBC

• The National Union of Students claimed a campaign victory over banking giant HSBC after protests on Facebook.

• Thousands of graduates found the bank had suddenly started charging them for overdrafts. They made their anger known by joining a Stop the Great HSBC Graduate Rip-Off! group on the website, started by NUS vice-president Wes Streeting. It attracted more than 4,000 members.

• The bank took a u-turn and froze overdraft charges to recent graduates and pledged to repay charges deducted in August.

• A spokesman for HSBC acknowledged the role of this new-style cyber campaign on Facebook.“We are a service-oriented organisation and we have to listen to our customers - that is a priority for us. It's a good example of where a medium like Facebook has enabled customers to tell us something they feel strongly about.”

The hidden threat: Kryptonite

• A blogger posted instructions on how to pick a Kryptonite lock using a Bic pen.

• However, the company had no knowledge of this and was unaware of the defective lock.

• Of course, monitoring blogs wouldn’t have prevented the problem with the locks.

• But had public relations and marketing people at the company known about the issue earlier, they could have proactively addressed the situation.

The size of the threat: Verizon

• In early 2005, a customer of Verizon Wireless wrote of his dissatisfaction on a blog regarding the company’s mobile phone service.

• The blog claimed that Verizon had advertised a particular phone as being Bluetooth-enabled but that the company had disabled a function that enabled wireless connection.

• As a result, customers were charged extra to use the Verizon network to transfer files.

• The blog sparked a response, with other dissatisfied customers posting to blogs to discuss the problems they had had with the service.

• Online blogs gave an outlet for customers to share stories about phone failures and complain about the company’s service.

• A California man initiated a class action lawsuit against the company.

Our methodology

Search engines• To understand when the society wants to be found on

search engines, we take the keyword tags from the source code in the client’s homepage.

• We then found out how often each of these search terms is used and ranked them from accordingly.

• Counterpoint then put these terms into search engines. The system analysed the search results and scored each according to its rank from first to twentieth.

• The system then gives each result a score from 100 for the top result to 10 for the 20th result and adds up the score for each search result that links to a client website.

• If all 20 search results linked to the websites of the client, it would score 675.

Websites• Counterpoint understands the reputation of websites by measuring

their authority, in a similar way to the citation of academic research.

• Firstly, Counterpoint counts up all the websites that link in to your website, which gives the ‘direct authority’ of your website. However, some links are worth more than others. One link from a website with a lot of authority is worth more than ten links from a website with little authority.

• So Counterpoint then it finds out the authority of the top 100 websites that link in to your site. It calculates whether on average those sites have more or less authority than your website. A score in excess of 100 shows that the sites that link to your site have, on average, a greater than your own site. This gives the ‘indirect authority’ score.

• Finally, Counterpoint assigns each website a risk level from critical to low according to its authority in comparison to other UK-based websites. So a website with a similar authority to the BBC website will be labelled ‘critical risk’ whilst a small blog will be labelled ‘low risk’.

Social networks

• Counterpoint scans the major social networks, Facebook, Myspace and YouTube.

• Where it finds relevant content, it identifies how many people have expressed an interest in it – by viewing it or joining its network. That gives the direct reach value.

• Counterpoint then searches each of those people (or the subscribers to videos) to find out the size of their online networks. This reveals the total potential reach of the content, within two or three clicks.

For more information

counterpoint@newscounter.com

07809 882844