5 Reputation Management Things To Do Right Now
Online Reputation management is becoming more and more important every day. Anyone can easily go online and write all sorts of things about you and your company and you have virtually little recourse. The amount of money it would take to search and find an anonymous blogger would alone be a huge obstacle.
But you can do tremendous wonders for your online search engine reputation just by doing these 5 things today:
- Subscribe to Google Alerts – It’s free. Subscribe to Google Alerts for your name, company name, and important keywords, especially branding words. This will allow you to monitor what people are saying about you online.
- Start a blog – A blog is the No. 1 reputation management tool. Every single blog post is potentially able to boost your positive reputation points and decrease the negative.
- Start Twittering – Twitter is fast overtaking Facebook as the most popular social network online. Soon, Twitter will be the primary mass communication tool for serious Internet marketers.
- Go Social Media Crazy – Beyond a blog and Twitter, set up as many social media profiles as possible. Go to bookmarking sites, networking sites, and as many social media sites as you can find and set up a profile. Even if you don’t use them, open an account and write your bio. Many times, that alone will help boost your rankings in the search engines for key branding terms.
- Be a Good Net Citizen – An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Treat people the way you’d like to be treated. Don’t steal or injure others, employees, customers, or business partners. While you can do this perfectly and still fall victim to reputation damaging attacks, the more you focus on being a good customer, employee, employer, and relationship builder online the less likely you are to encounter search engine online reputation killers. And when you do occasionally meet with reputation damaging information online, if you do the other 4 things above, you’ll be better equipped to combat it.
3 Responses to “5 Reputation Management Things To Do Right Now”
The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Journal is Written by SEO Expert:
Nick Stamoulis
Tel - 781-999-1222
nick@brickmarketing.com
Brick Marketing - SEO Company
Hi Nick,
It’s true that ORM and SMM are the things a lot of companies are talking about now, and adopting to varying degrees, but I want to argue with your point number 4 “Go Social Media Crazy”. It really is not worth it to just set up accounts all over the place just to show that you understand social media. It is much better to focus just on a few sites, but the focus will be personal and much more pronounced in terms of results. It will certainly take a lot of time to build up a network that is relevant to your online reputation, and you have more chances of doing this if you don’t spread yourself thin in the process. Social media marketing is a process that takes a lot of hours every week (or every day if you take it seriously).
Nik
Yes, Nik, I agree that you should focus on actively being engaged on just a few sites, but I’d encourage everyone to set up profiles at every site they can find. With social media, the profiles are most likely to give link juice and it prevents anyone else from registering under your brand and ruining your reputation.
These are good tips. I have all of my clients do this. One in particular had a legitimate reputation management challenge and While we implemented the above tips, I also strongly suggested and persuaded them on the importance of actually delivering better service, so people aren’t complaining to begin with. It goes back to the Purple Cow. As far as setting up online profiles, an important one to set up is on zoominfo.com. So bottom line – Content is King, but words need to be backed up by superior service and superior product. People can see through a phony effort and it will only make matters worse for you.