Online Social Optimization
November 27th, 2009

Greater Manchester Chamber Blog: Top 10 Tips: For Online Reputation Management

1. Compile a list of your brand keywords – including common misspellings and abbreviations. It’s worth bearing in mind that people do often shorten brand names when communicating via the social web, especially as sites like Twitter only allow a specific number of characters in each update.

2. Set-up a Google alert for your keywords – this service doesn’t capture everything but it’s a good start. Basically, whenever your chosen term is mentioned on a webpage, Google will send you a quick email to let you know.

3. Search Boardreader.com every day for your keywords – this website will search every forum out there for mentions of you and will provide a direct link to the thread where you are mentioned.

4. Use Google Blog Search – this is similar to the above but searches across blogs as opposed to forums.

5. Make the most of Twitter Search – as well as using Twitter to update your followers, there is a powerful live search engine there too, so search via the website at http://www.twitter.com/ or download Tweetdeck for free and add a search for each keyword – as long as you have the Tweetdeck application open you’ll receive an on-screen notification and a beep every time there is a new mention of one of your search terms.Remember, this search feature is in real-time – so you can resolve any issues almost instantaneously. How’s that for quick customer service?!

6. Get involved! When something is said about your brand, don’t be shy – leave a reply! If it’s a compliment, a simple ‘thanks for your comments!’ will suffice – if it’s something that needs looking into then it’s best to post a quick reply to confirm that you’re looking into, to make it clear to anybody who visits the page in the meantime that you’re aware of the situation.You don’t need to reply to every single positive or neutral remark though – after all, you don’t want to seem too big-brotherish to your customers!

7. Never Astroturf! This means that you should never respond to a forum thread, blog post or webpage with a comment that suggests that you’re not connected with the business that you’re talking about. When you do respond to something, always be open about who you are and which company you are from.

8. Be professional! It’s easy to slip into being more casual if you’re commenting on something on a social networking site for example, you’re probably not used to being in ‘work-mode’ on Facebook however you must remember that anything that you post will usually be visible to everybody – and furthermore will probably remain on the site for a long time.

9. Listen and learn – by engaging with your customers online you may be able to get feedback on things that otherwise would be unknown to you. That way, as well as resolving problems through social media channels you can also use them as a method of collecting free, live market research.It’s also worth keeping a track of who you to talk to and what you say – for example, perhaps you have a customer database that allows you to enter notes against a customer’s record.

10. And finally, please remember that you’ve got to do these things at regular intervals! Depending on the volume of conversations surrounding your brand, you may only need to set aside fifteen minutes each day to perform the above tasks – a small price to pay for digital peace of mind.

via Greater Manchester Chamber Blog: Top 10 Tips: For Online Reputation Management.

April 21st, 2009

Online Reputation Management

Reputation Management is one of those terms that comes wrapped in association with Image Branding and Strategic Brand Management – a business to business buzzword lumped in with all the rest, hollow, and without substance for the individual.  However, the internet is, in many ways, a permanent public searchable record that takes in everyone, shadows each of us with a sort of echo – an immanent library.  Depending on your involvement, the internet will invariably have different layers of information attached to your name, some of which might reflect poorly on you in those first impressions when someone you meet searches you out online.  ‘Googling one’self’ is something of an ongoing joke in today’s culture, the insinuation being that it’s a narcissistic behavior, a kind of preening before a digital mirror–I say do it, look yourself up, and if you don’t like what you see, online reputation management techniques can help you revitalize your online presence.

This is a by-product of the changes in the overall functioning space that makes up the internet–if you engage online, you engage in the same vectors and modalities that the rest of the entities out there engage in–and there’s only several maps available to the bulk of the online community.  The more common one’s name, the more diffuse one’s presence online.  A vast number of people are totally disconnected from the internet, yet traces of their presence still exist in different ways.  Becoming aware of one’s online footprint, one’s digital shadow, is the first step in managing that shadow.

There is no way I can change the search engine to radically restructure the results it provides – I can only tweak bits here and there, and each case is different.  Why Most SEO’s Can’t Do Reputation Management breaks it down like so:

There are a number of very distinct differences between this and the skills needed for ORM Triage. Here are some of the most basic:

However, that said, a reputation online is usually not something under fire, experiencing a crisis event…  usually some people are googling themselves and discovering some spam-trap has siphoned off personal details from some social networking site they’d signed up for ten years ago, filled with irrelevant and irritating details they’d rather a prospective employer discover down the line.  A surprising number of college students awake from a drunken haze to wonder what dating site they signed up for over the weekend, years later to be faced with intimate details of their sex lives ranking above their .edu homepage.  To you, (and I know by my statpress reloaded plugin that you’re out there) I say Get a Blog. In a week or less, using just a simple wordpress set-up and your real name, you’ll do yourself plenty of good blanketing out old search engine results, bumping them down the page.

Related External Links

November 17th, 2008

Post-Commerce Marketing

If marketing is simply the most effective and persuasive possible communication, and can be though of beyond the mere selling of product–in other words take a structural approach to marketing and systematize it then use it as a rubric against which to measure any communication, product-related or not, then all forms of communication will become clearer and spread with greater fidelity. Studying marketing divorced from ‘sales’ and tied instead to direct action, direct response, provides an interesting model, as does the proselytizer of an evangelical faith.

The importance of the new marketing revolution cannot be ignored – direct and open contact with a user base will always trump top-down indiscriminate messages, no matter how ubiquitous. Ultimately, the success of this method is tied to channel reputation and is an aspect of ORM, or online reputation management.

Post-Commerce Marketing is not the ideal title for this section, but other monikers seem equally unfitting – this management of signal-to-noise and the hypercognition needed to apprehend massive flows of data, weighed against an expert cultural base of knowledge, is essential for such an information manager engaged in channel reputation for a major named entity, and the purest form of this would be an agent maximizing profit potential on stocks directly by affecting online presence in reaction to market pressures throughout the day.














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