v-Fluence Blog

Online Environment Optimization: The Key to Being Heard in Your Online World

In today's world of online rumors becoming "fact", e-mail protest campaigns, and customers making purchasing decisions on a mouse-click, a strong, effective and strategic Web presence isn't luxury, it's a necesity.

While a visually appealing and distinctive Web site is important, it's not enough to affect the way the Internet-using public - and that's most of us - perceives companies, their industries and related issues. To use an analogy, a single, expensive and nicely built home in a bad neighborhood is still going to lose value until the neighbors work together to clean up the street and improve everyone's property. To significantly alter your online context you have to optimize not just your own Web site, but the entire online environment relevant to your company, industry, products and issues.

Advocacy Advantage

This broad-based community-building strategy is something that advocacy groups, including those opposing lead extraction and lead product industries, have understood and successfully exploited for some time. These groups' efforts are supplemented online by such opportunistic feeders as class-action law firms seeking victims of lead for litigation, lead remediation firms and holistic and alternative health providers offering cures and treatments.

In the lead industry, themes of lead only as a pollutant and danger to small children (and not a responsibly used mineral). These themes are repeated constantly online until they are perceived as the truth. This is of particular concern given the growing body of research underscoring the importance Americans, including journalists, give to what they see online. For industries with complex and critical issues, this demands moving beyond traditional public relations and simplistic individual-site search engine optimization.

The Response: Online Environment Optimization (OEO)

How can companies and trade groups respond? There's a lot of time and money being spent on Web site development, search engine optimization, keyword purchases and the like. While all of these work well up to a point, they're often not enough to ensure that when news breaks or a product launches Web users will see the information you want them to see and in a favorable or at least balanced context.

Enter online environment optimization (OEO), an innovative, holistic strategy for balancing your online environment. OEO tactics include working within an industry on shared search engine optimization, coordinated pay-per-click campaigns, issues-oriented network-building linking campaigns, and content-development and sharing campaigns. All of these can complement offline public relations and, when used strategically, yield dramatic results.

The Internet continues to expand and is one of the most influential sources of information available. Making sure you and your industry allies are in a position to be a factor in the medium can be critical to any company or industry. It starts online, do you?

Applying OEO to the Battery Industry

Currently, lead-acid battery issues are wrapped up in broader discussions of batteries and of flead as toxic and a contaminant. Continued emphasis on child-related issues; ongoing issues with lead in water and Mexican candy; and closer to home the "Get the Lead Out" campaign are likely keep both the heat and the negativity up on lead issues.

Here are some steps that companies in the lead-acid battery industry can take to better balance the online environment:

Compare the current consumer-oriented language on lead-acid battery issues with industry's favored terms. The industry clearly isn't speaking the same language as the majority of the consuming public. See example below.

Review company-owned and related Web pages and sites to ensure they contain the popular words and phrases. Negative terms can be addressed with phrases such as "Lead and toxic concerns answered here!"

Ensure that company and industry partners, as well as other supportive stakeholders, have optimized their sites for searches on terms used by consumers -- not just industry-tested phrases or brand names.

Build a hyperlinked network of supportive companies, customers, industry groups and others. Supportive content and allies are only valuable online if they can be easily found.

Set up a content-sharing system for supportive articles, so that the network can quickly and effectively post balancing content in multiple spaces when needed, thereby leveraging opportunities and minimizing risks presented online.