Praises or Blame: What’s the Word on Your Company?

You don’t have to belong to the Multinational Monitor’s list of the Top Ten Worst Corporations, or have your very own ’spoof’ site (WhirledBank, Microsuck, McSpotlight, Monsantosucks, Compaqsucks, etc.) to be concerned with negative coverage of your organization on the Web. However, sorting through the thousands of results that a name search will produce on the average multinational corporation is hardly an effective way to spot the ‘disgruntled’ view. One search method involves creating your own list . . . of anti-corporate/anti-globalization sites (i.e. Adbusters, CorpWatch, Indymedia, POCLAD, etc.) and routinely review them or automatically monitor the list with a website monitoring application (* we plan to cover this subject in a future post.) The blogosphere is today’s prime opinion-voicing platform and any search will have to include mandatory stops at blog search sites like Technorati, Google BlogSearch, IceRocket, etc., as well as social bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us or Keotag. Alternatively, Google Directory includes an Anti-Corporation site list with the added value of being able to search for terms only within the list itself. A new source in this space is dotherightthing which, although still a bit weak on content, has a Web 2.0 flavor to its ’social ranking’ system and could build some momentum.