Search and Reputation: Your Brand Standing Is Your Shelf Landing

My most recent ClickZ article, entitled Search & Reputation: Your Brand Standing is Your Shelf Landing, insists that "search and brand reputation share an inseparable, symbiotic relationship, and CGM is the dominant, if not final, arbiter of that marriage. That puts the exercise of managing brand equity on the thin, precarious line between control and capitulation." Further:

"In both pleasant and unsettling ways, companies are quickly learning their brand equity and credibility is the sum total, and composition of their search results. They're also beginning to internalize (usually the hard way) that CGM is now the fastest-growing source of indexed content in search results....That means, in essence, we're all hostage to the conversation."

This issue is a key theme in my upcoming book, and it powers one of my "six drivers of brand credibility" -- affirmation.  Brand credibility and reputation heavily rests on how well search results "affirm" brand attributes.  For example, after hearing a "we solve all your problems" ad pitch from a particular brand, a consumer might conduct a bit of extra due diligence on a search engine, or even Wikipedia. In some categories such as wireless, search results often "affirm" negative -- not positive -- experiences with the brand, hence eroding credibility. Every brand stakeholder needs to be attentive to these dynamics.   Again, here's the article.  If you want to dig deeper, John Battelle, not surprisingly, has written a fair amount about this topic.

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