John Howard vs Kevin Rudd’s online reputations revealed

Mirror Mirror on the Wall

News travels fast on the internet, and opinions flow freely. Monitoring and managing your online reputation is important – there is a lot happening in this publicly accessible space. To demonstrate this, we have prepared a case study of the most current public battle in Australia: the lead up to the federal election.

Who has the fairest online reputation overall?

We tracked online opinions of John Howard and Kevin Rudd over the last three weeks. The data collected and analysed was astounding. There are no surprises that Australians have a lot to say about our PM and Opposition Leader in this pre election stage. John Howard registered 2067 references on the internet in that time, while Kevin Rudd had 1802 mentions.

We analysed the references from the last week to see how the competitors measure up in the opinions of online posters. While the majority of mentions of the two were what we deem neutral (mostly from news sites), the clear positive and negative opinions, mainly from bloggers and social media, were not in balance with each other.

Kevin Rudd had 6% positive posts and 4% negative posts, while John Howard lagged in the minds of many posters with 3% positive and 13% negative posts. Many people had negative things to say about both politicians, but some of the things said about the PM were particularly malicious.

When an issue really upset some bloggers (such as Howard’s opinions on HIV positive immigrants or Rudd’s capability as a leader), others commented on those posts and linked back to them, escalating the discussion. This is the way social media works: it is fast, interactive and opinion driven.

What are people saying about you on the web?

Conversations are spreading online as people share their views, opinions and experiences with the public and engage in a dialogue about anything and everything from the news, politics, their pets, or perhaps your brand.

Can you trust your ex-employees? What about your competitors? It is vitally important to listen to what is being said about you online, especially if it is negative. Sites containing this sort of information are indexed by search engines and will appear in search results. For example, a satirical mock blog ‘allegedly written by John Howard’ appears third, clearly visible in the Google search results.

Online reputation management combines the elements of marketing, public relations and search engine marketing.

There are three steps to managing your reputation online:
1. Monitor
2. Analyse
3. Influence

We have completed the first two for Howard and Rudd. To manage what is being said, they could influence the online conversation by joining in, answering legitimate questions and adding their own opinions to the discussion. They could also influence their online reputation by keeping the negative results out of the first search engines results page.

Proactively managed through effective SEO.

Reputation management is more than just monitoring what is being said responsive action needs to be taken. This is where SEO comes in. Knowing how search engines work is imperative when protecting your reputation online. Your website should appear at the top of a search, with negative results not even visible on the first page. Search Engine Optimisation can make this happen.

1 Response So Far

1. 1

   By Jacob Skir on 25 June, 2007 at 6:07 am

   This issue of online reputation management (= online posters, positive and negative opinions measuring) is great.