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What’s your Google Sucks Index?
I just read an interesting article in Business week by Jeff Jarvis (the Dell hell blogger). You should read it, especially if you’re concerned about your brand and what people are saying about you online. Yes online (as I really have to point this out).
With the rise of the ’social web’ there are endless places where people are discussing anything and everything online, including your brand. These conversations can be both good and bad, hence responding, leveraging and monitoring (or whatever else you should do) are now a priority. In fact, this probably explains why we always have a waiting list for our digital marketing seminar (just helping our marketing team - this one is for you Fiona
So what are people saying about you online? Or to be blunt - how much does your brand suck? Obviously our digital marketing team are the best people to answer this question (sorry, yes, I will stop this self promotion now.
Adam winks at Dean and they high five each other). However if you’re on a shoestring budget, you can still measure some aspects of this by following Jeff’s simple advice in Business Week. The magazine should be at your local newsagent. (OK, it is official I’m now worse than a used car salesman - I’m even promoting Business week!).Anyway, if you really are on a shoestring budget (
you are screwed) or for any other reason can’t get a hold of the magazine. Here’s the advice in a nutshell:- go to Google
- enter your company’s brand followed by the word ’suck’
- the number of results is your Google Sucks Index (GSI)
- compare your index with your competitors’ (and laugh out loud)
The moment of truth - Do you suck?
this post has also been submitted to newsvine through the ’social bookmark’ icon (above). You can read their comments by following this link: http://adamprec.newsvine.com/_news/2008/03/05/1345022-whats-your-google-sucks-index
Hmmm and Precedent’s rank is? And how I wonder does ’suck’ fit into your quality audit process?!
Our Google ’suck’ rank is 9,880 & UK pages only 3,580. Although I have to say that our ranking is being warped by what appears to be an unholy alliance of Formula 1 car aerodynamics, XML specifications and robots climbing nuclear reactors; the joys of leading the way in open source research paper archiving. Oh, and the fact that we run a bus service for the city.
On a serious point I think the problem with the crude ’suck’ ranking is its exclusion of any metrics based on value and influence of the people creating the noise and therefore the related impact on business objectives and/or brand perception.
A mass of people blogging on a topic or joining groups or causes on myspace, Bebo or Facebook for example are an irrelevance if they lack the influence to effect change. The reason why Dell was forced to respond, and then turn a negative into a critical aspect of their business, was because it was their consumers who were complaining, the same is true of HSBC and their attack on student overdrafts.
It’s not immediately apparent to me how, in terms of campaigning, advocacy or knowledge transfer organisations, the concept behind the ’suck’ ranking would be of benefit. I would agree however, that monitoring and evaluation is no longer an option but should be the cornerstone of any communications strategy and brand perception analysis.
If you’ve got a waiting list for your digital marketing seminars and people are particularly interested in the monitoring and leveraging of ’social web’ feel free to send them our way. We’ll be only too happy to help you out by talking them through a real-world applied solution that monitors ’social web’ in terms of individual digital and integrated campaigns, performance of individual web2.0 tools as well as being against brand.