Marketing to the Social Web: How Digital Customer Communities Build Your Business

Chapter 12. The Reputation Aggregator Strategy (We’re Number One!)

What, you ask, is a reputation aggregator? A site that provides rankings of content/sites. (I discussed reputation aggregators briefly in Chapter 7, in the context of online conduit strategies.) Reputation aggregators are a key—perhaps the key—gateway for most users to reach online content. People use these sites to decide what content they want or need when they’re getting ready to buy, researching schools, looking up statistics, and so forth. Some popular reputation aggregators, ranked in order of total searches by a Nielsen/NetRatings report,^[1] are: Google, Yahoo, MSN/Windows Live, Ask.com, My Way, EarthLink, Comcast, Bell-South, and iWon.

I call these sites reputation aggregators because, if you’re going to search for anything, search engines like these aggregate the findings. They put sites or results or products in some kind of order—the most recommended or most linked or most used or bestselling or most visited, for instance. Because people can’t buy your products or digest your ideas if they can’t find you, you have to understand how search works and how it seems to be evolving.

Everybody Loves Search

According to a Pew Internet & American Life Project study, search engines are decidedly popular among Internet users. As the study’s author, Deborah Fallows, wrote: “Searching the Internet is one of the earliest activities people try when they first start using the Internet, and most users quickly feel comfortable ...