As the reach and immediacy of the Web make it tougher to safeguard brand image, new services are helping marketers play better defense

By: Linda Formichelli

As marketing tools go, the Internet is easily the keenest of double-edged swords in any company’s arsenal. The same scope and timeliness that lure so many brands to the digital world are just as often turned against big companies, as competitors, consumers, bloggers and others use the Web to rip a company’s name to shreds.

“The Internet amplifies everything,” says Steven Silvers, principal at strategic consultancy GBSM Inc. and publisher of the blog Scatterbox at stevensilvers.com. And it’s not just that people are talking online about your dirty restrooms or poor customer service. These days, media members are often looking to blogs to dig up news. “Compared to 10 years ago,” says Silvers, “problems escalate even to a national level much more quickly.”

As the problems increase, so do the companies designed to solve them. As a result, online reputation management is becoming brisk business. Take BuzzLogic, for instance. The San Francisco based company helps its clients track and engage with popular blogs and the influencers who post on them. “We enable them to pinpoint which specific topics influential people are talking about at which specific times,” says Valerie Combs, BuzzLogic’s director of PR.

Commercial reputation-tracking services are only one option. Other tracking methods include Google Alerts (google.com/alerts) and Yahoo! Alerts (alerts.yahoo.com), free services that send e-mails when certain terms say, the name of your company or executives appear in the news.

Of course, keeping watch over your reputation can also yield other advantages, says Combs: “This lets you see what’s being said from a negative perspective, but also what opportunities you may not be capitalizing on.”

For example, Steve Broback, president of the Parnassus Group, host of the Blog Business Summit, uses the BuzzLogic service to help target his direct mail campaigns. “We’ve been mailing out free copies of our books to a number of bloggers whose posts have been relevant to our efforts,” he says. “We see their posts, [then post a] comment asking for a postal address, and off it goes. These addresses then become a part of our house list for various promotions.”

Primarily, though, these services are used to help marketers play defense. So once you’ve found out that someone’s dissing your brand online, what can you really do about it? Silvers recommends that companies start by keeping perspective.