RECENT NEWS RELEASES FROM VELVET TALK MANAGEMENT
Velvet Talk Management unveils plans for a reputation-based search engine.
New search engine to incorporate sentiment-based re-ranking as a measure of results quality via reputation scoring.
Toronto, Canada, March 26, 2010 – (Velvet Talk Management) – Following a recent security breach and facing the risk of uncontrolled statements being the first to come out about the company’s search engine plans, management at Velvet Talk Management has decided it would be best to announce its plans immediately. Below, then, is what the company is currently willing and not willing to reveal about the search engine, which it hopes will become a serious challenger to the hegemony of Google and Facebook.
Features Revealed:
- Optional co-registration with your best friend to make search results more relevant (patent pending).
- Sentiment-based re-ranking of initial search results may also be selected as a way to gauge results quality via reputation scoring). Users will be able to shuffle SERPs from neutral to more negative or more positive.
- Awarding/nomination of pro-searcher status to identify higher quality results .
- Optional subscription-based version of the search engine for professional users.
- Optional eCommerce suggestions box for each search (Making VTM’s search engine the ultimate affiliate marketer and thereby adding a third revenue stream for it beyond mere advertising).
Stated Aims:
- To make search results less biased toward big business (and therefore more accurate).
- To increase rank transparency.
- To improve customer service for users, customers and partners.
- To introduce monetary and reputational penalties for practitioners of ‘Black Hat SEO’ and also to reduce their ability to game the system in the first place.
- To reduce the occurrence and impact of inordinate reputational harm on undeserving people and organizations.
Regarding details it currently wishes not to reveal publicly, the company:
- Will not reveal the names of employees or partners who are or were working on it or who may have leaked details to Google.
- Will not reveal details of its current investors in Velvet Talk Management, but will confirm that it is seeking further investment to help with the development and roll out of its search engine.
- Will not reveal further details beyond those listed above to non-qualified persons. Requests for further information must come from email addresses with corporate domain names (e.g., no Hotmail addresses) and the company may require non-disclosure agreements be signed before revealing further information.
For more information about Velvet Talk Management visit their website at http://www.VelvetTalkManagement.com or email the appropriate address below.
General Inquiries:
This_is_important@velvettalkmanagement.com
Media Inquiries:
Corduroy_pillows_make_headlines@velvettalkmanagement.com
Sales:
Whats_it_gonna_cost_me@velvettalkmanagement.com
Careers:
I_sometimes_buy_the_donuts@velvettalkmanagement.com
###
Bankers targeted amid rising threat to their online reputations.
Innovative ads by online PR firm Velvet Talk Management highlight threat of online brand sabotage for banks and financial professionals.
Toronto, Canada, February 24, 2010 – (Velvet Talk Management) – As economic linchpins that operate essentially on trust, banks (perhaps more than any other type of business) must protect their reputations against attacks by competitors and disgruntled customers that can sometimes spread online like a prairie fire. Mindful of this, online PR firm Velvet Talk Management has set out to target more financial institutions and their employees as clients.
Mick McMullan, VTM’s General Manager and head of marketing, explains how the firm is aiming to attract the attention of key bank staff by running its ads against keywords like “hate XYZ bank”, which he expects are being monitored by some banks and their competitors. “To some degree banks are already managing how people are talking about their brands online,” says McMullan, “but for some their strategies and resources don’t seem to be well developed yet.”
That may be understandable given the exponential speed at which the Internet has grown in recent years, but McMullan asserts there are huge threats to and opportunities for banks that wouldn’t take much to address. “I was quite surprised recently”, he explains, “when I did a little research on Google Adwords and rather quickly discovered how intuitive keywords like “hate XYZ bank” and “XYZ bank sucks” turned up multiple, inexpensive opportunities for a bank to advertise against its unlucky competitor when an attack against it shows up on a page within Google’s publisher network”.
McMullan continues, “they might not know about it or they might think the threat is low. Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if, in some cases, their advertising agencies are still telling them to spend most of their budget and time on TV since that’s an easier medium to understand and typically it’s where an agency’s margins are highest. And, though it’s either cynical or prudent to posit, some agencies may be very aware of the threat posed to their financial clients, but it’s not in their own financial interest to sound the full alarm yet about the online threat to their clients’ brands. Instead, by waiting till a crisis actually breaks out, the advertising and PR agencies will be called into action when the problem is so huge and expensive to fix that they’ll be in a position to make a lot more money. Till then, they might continue to oversell the benefits of TV advertising to their financial services clients who are among the biggest advertisers.”
The risk that confidence in a bank could quickly deteriorate due to one negative comment online is substantial, McMullan contends. “What’s to stop a clever competitor of a bank”, he says, for example, “from building a bunch of primary or secondary links to an article of criticism, boosting its visibility in search engines, and then stoking conversations about it on social media to attract further negative commentary from that bank’s current or former dissatisfied customers?”
“And”, adds McMullan, “the recent financial crisis has embittered a lot of bank customers, and the economic recovery remains fragile; so, there are probably lots of people out there who just need to see one prominent bad comment to spark them all into leaving their own comments. That kind of bad publicity could have a pretty long term effect on a bank’s reputation and competitiveness.”
However, smart banks will figure this out soon, he says, and hire, train and equip plenty of staff to be on guard and hopefully prevent any disastrous hits to their reputations online.
For more information about Velvet Talk Management visit their website at http://www.VelvetTalkManagement.com or email the appropriate address below.
Media Inquiries:
Corduroy_pillows_make_headlines@velvettalkmanagement.com
Sales:
Whats_it_gonna_cost_me@velvettalkmanagement.com
General Inquiries:
This_is_important@velvettalkmanagement.com
Careers:
I_sometimes_buy_the_donuts@velvettalkmanagement.com
###
With the speed of bad word of mouth accelerating online, Velvet Talk Management predicts the next trend in business will be improving employee friendliness
Toronto, Canada, August 12, 2010 –(Velvet Talk Management)–Unfriendly employee behavior is becoming an urgent crisis for many companies and co-workers, says Mick McMullan, General Manager of Velvet Talk Management, a reputation management and training firm. “We pioneered the idea of performing ‘Friendliness Audits’ to help companies identify and then reduce employee communications that are unfriendly to customers and co-workers. The need’s always been there, but now, with the rise of social media where bad word of mouth can spread like wildfire, the need to address the threat of unfriendliness has become almost urgently important. The risk of alienating customers, talent and valuable partners is really intensifying now ”, he says.
Accordingly, McMullan predicts that actively managing the friendliness of staff will soon become a major strategic objective of many companies. He says that some companies will figure this out ahead of time, but believes that many others will need to have something really bad happen first. “Like one comment about unfriendly service”, he says, “that triggers comments from many other people who’ve had similar, but perhaps less extreme, experiences of unfriendly treatment with a company.” “And actually”, adds McMullan, “it’s this more pervasive moderate level of staff unfriendliness that is the bigger problem for companies as it may not always directly generate any bad comments, so it’s harder to detect, but it still manages to significantly undermine customer, employee and partner loyalty.”
Part of why McMullan thinks most companies don’t yet see the enormity of the situation is that these bad comments are online but many take place within closed, private communities that aren’t viewable by non-members. “The Google-searchable stuff on the public forums is only a fraction of the bad word of mouth that’s out there”, he asserts, “and it’s not just about companies’ products; it’s also about soft factors like the friendliness of service that’s being talked about”.
“Right now” explains McMullan, “a lot of companies are being reactive by hiring consultants to do online reputation management, a service that we also offer, and one that’s growing.” “The clients,” he continues, “are basically trying to cover up the bad things that have been said about them, but they also need to invest in proactively developing the friendliness of their staff to avoid negative comments that are difficult, and sometimes impossible, to cover up online.”
Nevertheless, McMullan says Velvet Talk Management is seeing increased interest in its Friendliness Audits. “We determine friendliness scores for employees,” he says, “and this gives our clients a metric that can be positively improved over time”, adding that “you can’t manage what you don’t measure”.
Essentially the process is to take random samples of external and/or internal communications from employees, like email and voice mail, as appropriate, and then run them through a sophisticated piece of software that uses proprietary algorithms and statistical analyses to detect patterns of friendliness or unfriendliness in the language. The preliminary scores generated by the software are then also qualitatively assessed by a person for added accuracy.
McMullan emphasizes that their Friendliness Audits provide more accurate measures of friendliness than what is achievable by conducting customer and employee surveys. “For one thing,” he says, “Friendliness Audits avoid the biases of these other more common methods by relying instead on objective language data that is factually recorded, without any amateur pre-interpretation by mystery shoppers or rival co-workers, and then analyzed by experts at Velvet Talk Management.
“Companies spend a lot of money on fancy loyalty card programs and touchy feely advertising,” McMullan says, “but customers forget about that as soon as they run into rude or aloof staff.” These companies would be better off spending some more of their marketing budgets on the identification and training of unfriendly employees.”
When asked why he is so passionate about improving employee friendliness, McMullan mentions how five years living in super-polite Japan made him realize the importance of language in forming strong business and personal bonds. Being impressed with how Japanese business people communicate with each other was an important factor in why he went back to school to focus on East Asia and business studies at Harvard. Velvet Talk Management’s friendliness audit services would never fly in Japan, but sadly the West is full of unfriendly employees and we need this, as some companies are starting to discover as their reputations get slammed on the Internet for unfriendly behaviour by some of their staff.
For more information about Velvet Talk Management visit their website at www.VelvetTalkManagement.com or email the appropriate address below.
Media Inquiries:
Corduroy_pillows_make_headlines@velvettalkmanagement.com
Sales:
Whats_it_gonna_cost_me@velvettalkmanagement.com
General Inquiries:
This_is_important@velvettalkmanagement.com
Careers:
I_sometimes_buy_the_donuts@velvettalkmanagement.com
###