When we began working with Reputation Management clients, most firms treated ORM (Online Reputation Management) as just another type of SEO. With extensive experience behind us, we now believe that, while an understanding of SEO is important to be effective in Reputation Management, it is not enough.
For Five Blocks, Reputation Management is about helping our clients be heard and making sure that the positive voices are strong enough to outshine any of the negative ones.
The Learning Engine
At the core of our technology is a learning engine that constantly builds and refines the Five Blocks Knowledge Base. This Knowledge Base takes relatively few inputs and then accurately predicts which actions will be necessary to meet the client’s needs.
For example, a finance client will come to Five Blocks with the goal of taking better control of their online image. They notice that a search for their firm’s name returns 3 negative results: a blog post at #3; a news story at #5; and a forum comment at #9; all on the first page in Google. Our system takes this input and analyzes each of the websites (as well as the positive websites on the same results page). We note various characteristics such as their current position in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page), their overall authority and their relevance vis-à-vis the keyword. The system then queries the Five Blocks Knowledge Base (KB), the center of our learning engine. The KB is an encapsulation of everything we have learned from client programs over the past 4 years. The KB returns recommendations that guide our professional services team in taking control of the client’s online reputation. Ultimately, as a result of our work, the negative comments are likely to be supplanted by positive results.
The Five Blocks Management System enables us to:
- Manage client keywords (names, brands, company names)
- Deploy web content to our various web assets
- Get rankings feedback based on our actions
- Receive feedback from the learning engine based on the knowledge base
- Implement changes as necessary
- Create and disseminate internal and client reports
Coming Soon….
Intellectual Property: We plan to apply for patents to cover the learning engine as well as our analytics system.
iPhone App: A few months ago we released our iPhone Application called ‘Reputation’ that helps track online reputations in Google, Yahoo, Bing, News, Blogs, Twitter and Video.
Firefox Plugin: We are also Beta Testing a Firefox add-on that allows clients to mark results red (negative) or green (positive) and then track changes in their Google results over time.