Kurkure Plastic Rumors

Everyone knows about the plastic in Kurkure rumors that hounded the popular snack food in India. Popular brands find themselves at the receiving end of criticism and whiplash, due to seeds of suspicions planted in the consumer mind by rival companies, frustrated employees or miscreants who simply love to play spoilsport. At times, consumers who have had problems with a certain brand may use the same yardstick to assess all brands dealing in similar products.

Coming to Kurkure, the rumors of plastic were baseless allegations. The popular snack food brand is a product of Pepsi, one of the reputed brands in the world. The ingredients present in Kurkure are the ones used for making home-made food: rice meal, corn meal, gram meal, edible oil, salt, spices, condiments and flavors. Also, the edible oil used in Kurkure is the rice bran oil, one of the healthier oils naturally rich in fats (MUFA and PUFA) and low in saturated fats (reduced by up to 40 percent).

It is not just the Kurkure plastic thing that has stirred up a controversy. There had been occasion when other companies like ICICI Bank in India and Cadburys-worm controversy that hogged the headlines in the recent past. These companies had to use personalities like Shahrukh Khan and Amitabh Bachchan respectively in their ad campaigns to reinforce trust in their brands. Fair enough, but the consumer should not be swayed in by such rumors and act on his judgment and basic, common sense. Yes, brands can also be at fault, there can be things that could go wrong from their side too, which can translate into consumer dissatisfaction. However, such ‘controversies’ can also be handiwork of miscreants to spread negative publicity about brands. Consumer is King and the king should act wisely.

Online reputation management-Changing the consumer mindset

Online reputation management entails a transitional shift from the bad to the good. Let us understand from the perspective of the consumer how online reputation management (ORM) can affect his decision making process. A consumer who is searching for buying something online or wants to read a review before making a purchase at a nearby store will log on to the net and check for some information.

Quite reflexively, I must say, many latch onto Google or Yahoo to type in a few key terms or key phrases that give information about a product. A website gives only limited amount of reviews. So in order to make the most of information intake, the consumer goes to a search engine and puts the name of a particular brand, product or service to find relevant information in the form of reviews, blogs or forum sites. The consumer is most likely (84 percent to be on the safe side of percentages) to look at the first two pages of a search engine. Can you imagine, if the search engine results on the very first page gives not so flattering views and reviews about a product or service. The very first page of Google or such other search engine will have done the damage and the consumer will change his mind and go to some other product or service, mostly the one belonging to the competitor.

Online reputation management is an exercise to make sure such negative things about your product or service does not crop up in the first two search results pages of Google or any other search engine. While doing so, the online reputation management team uses the best optimization skills at their disposal to make sure that only good and positive information about your product or service appears in the first two pages of a search engine. Imagine if the same customer who uses the same key terms for a product or service finds relevant, useful, positive information about your product or service, what will his line of thought be? Will he go ahead and buy the product/service? Of course he will. Will he recommend about your product or service to others? Of course, he will. This proves that online reputation management is quite crucial for your business to grow exponentially and also to make sure that your business enjoys a substantial amount of goodwill in the market.

Using online reputation management to market your business online

The post mentioned below talks about the power of online reputation management and writing effective content to make good amount of information and positive news about your company feature on the first two pages of Google or any other search engine.

Apart from writing good content and providing back links, there are many other steps that can help in online reputation management. Discussed below are some of the ideal methods to increase the presence of your business online:

• Social networking sites: You can make the most use of social networking sites for spreading awareness and a virtual 'fan club' for your product or service. Setting up online communities and making them interactive is a good idea. You can also make the most of social bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us and Technorati and tagging them to certain associating tags. In fact, these social book marking sites have a huge number of visitors who will tag your content to their website or online business if they find something interesting. Social bookmarking sites and video uploading sites like YouTube etc give a chance to make your online businss come 'alive' Make sure you use effective tags while bookmarking for your social bookmarking site. For instance if your company's name is Horseshoe, then make sure you tag terms like: shoes, footwear, horse, etc.

• If it a new concept you are promoting or if you want to build content for a company that is famous, you can write in wikipedia or even use the ‘edit’ option of Wikipedia.
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• A lot of positive reviews or feeback can be written on specialized siters like www.consumerrview.com. If you are marketing a product, you can use shopping search sites like shopping.com.

• · You can set up a tracking system like Google alerts for free which monitor any of the search results that comes up with the terms that are related to your product or service.

These are some of the common ways that can be used to boost your search engine rankings apart from writing effective search engine friendly content.