The topic on everyone’s lips this morning is the passing of Michael Jackson. One of the most well known musical artists of our time, Jackson’s death has led to a media frenzy of rumoured and unconfirmed reports.

As previously discussed on this blog, traditional media is increasingly turning to websites and blogs as official sources of information when a large news story breaks, as these websites are often able to process news stories a lot quicker.

TechCrunch.com has this morning reported that several websites such as celebrity gossip website TMZ.com, which was the first source to break the story, the LA Times Website, Perez Hilton’s gossip blog and Twitter have all crashed or experienced delays in the first few hours after the story broke, due to extremely high traffic volumes. No doubt the capacity of these websites will continue to be tested throughout the day as more news becomes available.

TechCrunch.com claims that this story is currently ‘dominating’ the web.

“And just in case you didn’t believe this story is dominating the web right now, 9 of the 10 trending topics on Twitter are MJ-related. The lone exception is Ed McMahon, who also passed away two days ago.”

As an aside, hat tip to TechCrunch.com for its quick response taking the “hot topic” and creating newsworthy content, relevant to their own subject matter of reviewing new Internet products and companies. Way to leverage an issue!

News.com.au has also today experienced the impact of increased traffic when “big news breaks” with 900, 000 visitors to its website by 2pm today – a typical full day is 400,000 – and its internal system is predicting there will be 1.3 million visitors by the end of the day! This is proof that we now go to the web to validate word-of-mouth reports or radio “snippets”.

Last week’s post explored online reputation management. This week, another issue relevant to the topic has emerged.

In case you haven’t heard, users of the social networking site Facebook are now able to register names for their profile pages. These names also act as a URL address extension so that users can to access their profiles directly.

The ability to register became available last Saturday June 13. Three million users have already registered individual profile names – 500, 000 of whom did so in the first 15 minutes of this feature becoming available.  Source.

Connecting Images recommended to its clients with existing Facebook pages to register their business name/s as their individual profile names, so that their profiles became easier for existing and potential customers to locate.  In addition, getting in early could prevent others from inappropriately registering their business name.

The process of poaching a competitor’s name online is not new – think back to the early adopters who registered well known web addresses long before the legitimate brand owner set up a website!

Poaching business names online is quite common and referred to as ‘cyber squatting’. Businesses must be able to establish their genuine presence on such sites, to avoid reputation management issues.

So what can you do to avoid cyber squatting?

Quick tips

- Regardless of whether you are currently engaged with new communication technology, stake your claim anyway, and register your business name on emerging web services.

- Don’t try to get creative! Register your most commonly used business name (the one that is on your website, in your marketing collateral and in your advertising).

- If you find that someone else has already registered your business name as their individual profile name, check it out and if you suspect it is a case of ‘cyber squatting’ take action. Some services (i.e. Facebook) offer the right of appeal.

Want to know more about how your business can best utilise emerging web services? Give Merilyn or Cal a call on (03) 9819 2566 and arrange to come in for a coffee and a chat.

Google has recently updated its searching function to include features of ‘real time search’, according to Smart Company.

So what does this mean?

A greater emphasis has now been placed on the importance of regular and fresh content being added to websites, which allow users of the search engine to categorise search results into time relevancy (E.g. past 24 hours, past week etc).

Although most Search Engine Marketers (SME’s) are concerned about what ramifications this may have on the SEO of websites, as it has so significantly increased the need for frequently updated, fresh content; this feature also allows your business to effectively monitor your reputation over the internet.

Online reputation management is becoming increasingly important when recent communications crises such as that of the Dominos video are considered.

One of the most conflicting aspects of the internet is the power of the user to contribute to a social forum on a range of topics. In one way this empowers those that may not necessarily have had their voice heard in traditional media. However, it also opens a Pandora’s box in terms of protecting the image of an organisation or business.

Furthermore, traditional media now refers to blogs and social media websites as reliable information sources when reporting on breaking news stories.  Due to the immediacy of the internet, blogs etc. can often be the first sources for breaking new stories as they can publish information before traditional mediums have had a chance to respond.  This has increased the power of the internet, as a reliable source of information, which means online attacks can be particularly damaging to your company’s reputation – particularly if the story is later picked up by traditional media.

Read more on online reputation management here.