Alert Blog Reviews

I trust you had a great Christmas! As our minds dream of how fantastic 2010 will be, it’s time to look back at the hot topics of 2009. Here are Marketing Pilgrim’s top ten most read posts in 2009. Bing.com; Is it Worth Switching from Google? – A home run for Microsoft? While Bing certainly deserves credit for being the first serious challenger to Google, it didn’t hurt that 2009 was the year that Microsoft stepped-up its media outreach to us. Social Media Monitoring Tools: 26 Free Online Reputation Tools – This post was written in 2007 and has been in our top five for the past 3 years! Social Media Marketing Beginner’s Guide – A great guest article by Jon Rognerud and it still stands-up as a great primer for social media marketing. 8 Essential Free Social Media Monitoring Tools – A smart blogger knows not to simply update a popular post. Instead, you think of ways to expand on it–with a new post! This post from December 2008, added 8 more great monitoring tools for reputation monitoring. 200+ Internet Marketing Gurus on Twitter – Back before there Twitter Lists were just a twinkle in the eye of Twitter’s founders, Brian Chappell authored the definitive list of marketers on Twitter. If we hadn’t introduced a policy to close comments on older posts, I believe this one would have easily broken 1,000 comments by now! 21 of the Best WordPress Plugins for New Blogs – Just a little over a year ago, I spilled the beans on the plugins that power Marketing Pilgrim. Look for a new, updated list, in the New Year! Google Offers Cheap Online File Storage With a Catch – How in the world did this benign looking post from 2007 make it into our top ten list of 2009? Good keywords! The Five Pillars of Social Media Marketing – My good friend Ben Wills authored this post in 2006–which at the time was groundbreaking. In fact, I blatantly–with his permission–used it to frame an entire chapter of Radically Transparent! Google Reputation Management: Fix Your Google Reputation & Remove Negative Results – Do you get the feeling that we have a good grasp of reputation management issues? This post is over 2 years old, but, aside from the Google Pages reference, is still remarkably relevant. Facebook Really Does Make Mone y – When it comes to Facebook, I tend to defer to Jordan’s critical eye. She never fails to deliver! Some observations: As of today, Marketing Pilgrim consists of 6,792 (make that 6,793 with this one) posts and more than 45,000 comments! That’s a lot of words! Traffic was up 17.54% in 2009 compared to 2008. Not a bad growth rate! Referrals from Twitter were up 120%!!! Referrals from Yahoo were down 13%. Our own URL shortener– Gri.ms –let us track the origination of around 10,000 visitors! We know where you live! Want to see previous years’ top posts? Check out 2006 , 2007 and 2008 .

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The 10 Most Popular Marketing Pilgrim Posts of 2009

There are few email newsletters that I can recommend marketers subscribe to–we live in an RSS world these days–but Dr. Ralph Wilson’s Web Marketing Today is on the list! If you’re not familiar with Dr. Wilson, then I suspect you’ve entered your marketing career in just past the few years– Dr. Wilson is the grandfather of internet marketing advice. Hopefully, he’ll take that as a compliment Anyway, when Dr. Wilson asked me to jump on a video interview with him at SES Chicago, I made time for him in my busy schedule. The result? The video below will take less than 7 minutes of your time and hopefully give you a few tips for your own online reputation management efforts .

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Talking Online Reputation Management with Dr. Ralph Wilson

When we first launched Trackur , my target audience was the person that had outgrown Google Alerts, but didn’t have the budget for the existing–expensive–online reputation monitoring tools. Well, fast forward 18 months–and almost 13,000 registered accounts–and it turns out that Trackur is extremely popular among PR and marketing firms. You see, if they want to manage dozens of client accounts, they don’t want to have to blow their budget in the process. That’s why we built the Trackur Agency plan . We’ve been quietly adding all kinds of great features: Unlimited client profiles Unlimited saved searches Direct client logins No contracts White-labeling The white-labeling is the one that we’ve worked hard on and now we make it even easier to put your brand in front of Trackur–instead of ours. When you sign-up for an Agency plan , we’ll register a domain name on your behalf, upload your logo, and give you your very own social media monitoring solution! You can keep close control over your client’s monitoring, or give each client their own unique monitoring dashboard. All for around $300 a month! Actually, $297 a month is the pricing we’re offering until the end of the year. So, if you want to offer monitoring of any kind of news media to your clients, now’s the time to get your Trackur Agency plan.

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Hey Agencies! Want Your Own Online Reputation Monitoring Service?

One of the things that’s been consistent about Trackur’s social media monitoring since launch, is that it tracks around 90%+ of online media. You know, news, blogs, tweets, images, videos, etc. But, what about that other 10%? Well, we think we’ve shored that up, with the new option to submit your own RSS feed to Trackur. The new Custom Feeds option lets you upload any valid RSS feed and have Trackur keep a watchful eye on it, for mention of any of the keywords you are tracking. Here are some example uses: You want to monitor a message board for any mention of your brand? Simply submit its RSS feed to Trackur. Want to keep track of any known issues at TripAdvisor? Monitor the keyword "bedbugs" or "mold" and Trackur will alert you if someone posts a review to your profile using those words. Are there particular language specific sites you’d like Trackur to monitor? Upload the RSS feed, et voila! We believe this new feature is going to make Trackur even more awesomer! Right now, the new feature is limited to Enterprise and Agency plans , will max out at 100 custom feeds per plan, and only supports RSS (we’re working on Atom support). As we test it, we may add the option to other plans in the future and remove the cap. Whether you use the new feature alongside your existing Trackur monitoring, or set-up Custom Feeds as some kind of RSS reader on steroids, we think this new feature gets us closer to 100% monitoring of the things that are important to you! Disc: Andy Beal is the founder & CEO of Trackur. But, if you didn’t already know that, he’d be surprised.

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Trackur Now Monitors Virtually Everything Important to Your Brand

What is it with airlines? If they’re not breaking guitars , their pilots are missing airports , or they’re berating people that are trying to help them. Well, we have one more reputation disaster to add to the list, courtesy of American Airlines. You may recall the open letter web designer Dusting Curtis wrote to the airline. In it, Curtis suggested that AA was losing millions because of its poorly designed web site. He even went as far as suggesting a new design for the site. Shortly after, one of AA’s designers took it upon himself to reply and explain the complexities of AA web site design decisions. His reply was open, honest…radically transparent. American Airlines has allegedly fired him for it! This may have happened back in May, but it’s only just come to light that the AA designer was apparently fired an hour after he wrote his reply. AA searched their exchange database for the text I posted, found the guy, and fired Mr. X on the spot. From what I have learned, they also threatened him with legal action if he spoke to me again. Apparently he broke his non-disclosure agreement by discussing the design process at AA. OK, so maybe he shouldn’t have broken his NDA with the airline. But, maybe AA shouldn’t have been so near-sighted and pedantic about its employee policies. Surely the airline is aware that it’s industry hardly has the best reputation for caring about its customers. Heck, even Jet Blue–the poster child of airline awesomeness–has screwed-up royally in the past. In some ways, you can’t blame American Airlines. It is completely ignorant of how customers want to interact with the airline. We don’t want to hand flight attendants slips of paper that say “well done”–something AA encourages me to do as a frequent flier–we want to engage with the airline. We want it to do better, and we have ideas. Ideas about clean blankets, baggage fees, and yes, web site design. How does AA marry its apparent openness on Twitter , with this crackdown on a real employee that wants to help? Yes, you should have guidelines in place, but those guidelines should be designed to encourage thoughtful customer interaction, not prevent it! If we hear that you’re firing employees because of their transparency, how are we supposed to take your official social networking efforts seriously? What, do we now assume that everything that is shared on Twitter or Facebook is nothing more than sterile, PR sanctioned, sound bites? The airline industry may well be the very last to “get” the concept of Radically Transparent . When they do finally have that “aha!” moment, we’ll know that we’ve finally entered the age of open, honest, dialogs. Andy Beal – AA Platinum Card Holder; Million Mile Flier. ( via )

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American Airlines Fires Employee for Being Transparent

The NFL is an interesting study in how social media can be your best friend or your worst enemy. The NFL is a media savvy, marketing powerhouse and is now the center of the sports world with baseball gone and other leagues just getting under way. Thursdays and Sundays belong to the NFL and there is a lot of talk in between as well. So what’s different this year? Social media. There is a lot of talk about how players can or cannot use Twitter. Well known teams like the San Francisco 49ers have just started their official Facebook page. Everyone is talking about the NFL. That can be good and that can be bad. What happened yesterday, however, with the owner of the pitiful Tennessee Titans might have been just an urban legend a 10 or so years ago. A few drunken fans could reminisce that they were there when the owner, Bud Adams, lost it a bit. Evidence would have been their blurry memory. Now the blessing of ubiquitous video is a curse. Here’s why. Cover the kids eyes, please. Apparently Mr Adams, who is 86, was directing this show to the Buffalo Bills sideline. Call it the heat of the battle I suppose . Wow! I think we know how he feels! What does the NFL do about this one?

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NFL Video Giveth and Taketh Away

There’s a growing interest in online reputation management. Over at Wildfire Marketing, I answered some reputation management questions for their Thought Leader Thursday series. Here’s a taster… What are some of the biggest mistakes you’ve seen people make when it comes to responding to a reputation management crisis, and how someone salvage the situation if they’ve already made one of these mistakes? The biggest mistake is simply not having official channels in place to allow your customers to complain. Most disgruntled customers post to blogs and Twitter because they feel like they are not being heard by your company. They get frustrated with your lack of customer service and they think to themselves, “I’ll show them, I’ll post a negative review on Yelp/Twitter/Blog.” If companies would simply look at how they’re listening to their customers, and how they escalate and resolve customer service complaints, many of the reputation problems you see would never make it to the web. Perhaps the second biggest mistake is not apologizing soon enough. We tend to get too defensive, when we screw-up. We want to try and resolve the problem without accepting blame and without putting our hands in our pockets. When your business faces a legitimate complaint, move quickly to resolve it. Don’t think about the few dollars in refund demanded by the customer, instead think about the thousands of dollars in lost revenue, if the customer creates a reputation headache for your business! Head on over there for the full interview .

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You’re Facing a Reputation Crisis, Now What?