I was reading Garret French's post about Chris Anderson's talk at MPlanet tonight - most of it is a rehash of the Long Tail book.  However, I found one statement fascinating and I wanted to more about ….

Your brand is what Google says your brand is.

As soon as I searched on this phrase I came up with Jim Kukral's post in Marketing Profs that said "Your Brand Is NOT What Google Says It Is".  Boy..that was quick!

Jim Kukral thinks we give Google too much credit, one way or the other, on determining brand:

"…Yes, Google can help determine perception by dissemination of negative reviews and commentary about your brand. But you know what? If your product was as good as it could be, the risk for extreme exposure to negative reviews is limited, and you can hardly blame the messenger (Google) eh?"

And as soon as I read Jim Kurkal, I found another blog post from Steve Field that corrected both Chris Anderson and Jim Kurkal.

"…..For those who haven’t been involved in this discussion, let me start with a few things that your brand is not (but can be found via Google).

1. Your organization’s logo
2. Your organization’s slogan
3. Your organization’s theme
4. What you tell others your brand is

The common thread? All of these things are delivered from the company to the customer.

The problem here is that just because you say you are something doesn’t mean that you actually are. McDonald's can try and define themselves as a healthy option by pushing their salads and white-meat chicken, but the public will still perceive them primarily as a greasy fast food joint."

Finally, I came across a white paper called "Search is Brand" by Weboptimiser that lists several top brands that had detractors in the first page of Google Search Results - some of these pages were generated by bloggers.

"…Recently the research firm Delahaye produced some work looking at the proportion of negative commentary on the net. They found that in message boards 11% of comments are negative,in news coverage 13%, but in blogs 23% of all comments are negative."

And because blogs get a lot of links and get updated often, they do very well in Google - meaning a Blogger can, in theory, take down a brand.  The rules of marketing, engagement and branding have forever changed.

That's it for November 2006 posts.