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Chapter 4 E-environment 223

Comparison of number of blog postings for three consumer brands.
Figure 4.9
Source: Blogpulse (www.blogpulse.com), reprinted by permission of Nielsen Buzzmetrics

A related issue is brand and trademark protection. Online brand reputation manage-
ment and alerting software tools offer real-time alerts when comments or mentions about
a brand are posted online in different locations including blogs and social networks. Some
basic tools are available including:
Googlealert (www.googlealert.com) and Google Alerts (www.google.com/alerts)
which will alert companies when any new pages appear that contain a search phrase
such as your company or brand names.
Blog Pulse (www.blogpulse.com) gives trends and listings of any phrase (see example
in Figure 4.9) and individual postings can be viewed
Paid tools (see listing at www.davechaffey.com/online-reputation-management-tools)
B Using competitor names and trademarks in meta-tags (for search engine optimization)

Meta-tags, which are part of the HTML code of a site, are used to market web sites by
enabling them to appear more prominently in search engines as part of search engine opti-
mization (SEO) (see Chapter 9). Some companies have tried putting the name of a
competitor company name within the meta-tags. This is not legal since case law has found
Pay-per-click (PPC)
search marketing against companies that have used this approach. A further issue of marketing-related law
A company pays for text is privacy law for e-mail marketing which was considered in the previous section.
adverts to be displayed
on the search engine C Using competitor names and trademarks in pay-per-click advertising
results pages when a A similar approach can potentially be used in pay-per-click marketing (see Chapter 9) to
specific key phrase is advertise on competitors’ names and trademarks. For example, if a search user types ‘Dell
entered by the search
users. It is so called laptop’ can an advertiser bid to place an ad offering an ‘HP laptop’? There is less case law
because the marketer in this area and differing findings have occurred in the US and France (such advertising is
pays for each time the
hypertext link in the ad is not permitted in France). One example of the types of issues that can arise is highlighted
clicked on. in Box 4.5.