I love it when a few articles come together for me into something that makes me go wow! I'm going to start with the recent article that started the tumble into the connection.
Steve commented on a SearchEngineWatch article about companies needing to include search engine monitoring in their PR programs (especially watching blogs). Steve cited the statistic that 39% of the top 20 results on the top 100 brands were from "consumer generated media". Okay, cool. The SEW article goes a little deeper, talking about how blogs can, and will, steer the commentary on your brand. They cited WalMart and unions as an example. Me? I look to my friend Toby.
Toby and her clients at GourmetStation were recently profiled in Inc. Magazine (here's the link to Toby's post, the blog Delicious Destinations and a PDF of the article: Download: inc_magazine_november_2005_blog_gs_article.pdf) on the whole T. 
Alexander character blog saga. What Toby didn't mention was that she (and I helped a little) used PubSub, Feedster, and other search tools to track the conversation and ride it out. This, I think, is better than the cited WalMart approach of building a site to push other sites down. Work with those who are already talking about you, leave comments, start a blog and link to them. Become part of the discussion and conversation, not a giant trying to squash it.
See, this is how you monitor search for your brand and how effective it can be at working with (let's not try to say "change") public opinion. So hats off to Toby and Donna. And thanks Steve for putting the ideas together ... even if you didn't mean to!
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