When Thomas Friedman coined the term, “the world is flat”, he meant that businesses and consumers around the world can share equally in the benefits of the Internet. A side effect of this flatness is that overlap between businesses can easily occur based on company names and catchphrases. Take the case of the Hello Cupcake bakery at Dupont Circle in Washington, DC. From the site’s about page this business is run by Penny Karas. There is also a Hello, Cupcake book written by Alan Richardson and Karen Tack, who have a blog called Hello, Cupcake! So we have a collection of websites, people and products that are all related by the phrase “hello cupcake”.
Just to make matters more confusing, there are blogs that write about cupcakes that include mentions of many of these identities. And now this blog has contributed to the mess by putting them all in the same post. People doing a search for hello cupcake can easily get all these cross-referenced identities mixed up, so an effective reputation monitoring campaign has to include them all. A negative comment about the book, or the book’s author, or even a person with the same name as the book’s author, could reflect badly on the bakery.
Reputation monitoring is more than just creating Google Alerts for your company’s name and your name. You have to do continual research on related names, and track them as well. This means that Penny Karas should run an alert about both Alan Richardson and Karen tack, and they should have an alert about Penny. It isn’t easy, but you never know which mention of your brand’s name will be found when someone does a Google search. It makes sense to keep track of all the possibilities.
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