Reputation Management Is A Multiple Channel Proposition

The best reputation management is a multiple channel distribution of your content. The more often you appear online, and in as many places as you can appear, the better off you are. And it’s not just to combat negative reviews of you and your business.

Google will only index two pages on any one website for a particular key term. That means if you want your brand or name to have search traction then you’ve got to hit it on several channels – your website, your blog, the Internet Yellow Pages, a local review site, a couple of different social networks, a video website, etc. The more channels you grab onto the better off your reputation will be, especially if someone does begin to attack your reputation online. By taking hold of several channels at once you’ll make it more difficult for negative reviews to appear.

Unfortunately, most people take a reactive view of online reputation management. You need to be proactive. The best defense is a good offense, even with reputation management online.

Social Media Marketing IS Reputation Management

There is a real need in today’s online marketing culture to understand and comprehend  reputation management. Just as well, business owners need to comprehend the power of social media and how it fits into your overall reputation management plan. The two are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they are almost synonymous.

Social media marketing is the wave of the future. You can no longer ignore the power of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube and the hundreds of other social media websites online.

While social media is the future of online marketing, it should also be viewed as more than just another online marketing tool or strategy. It is a reputation management strategy. The key to utilizing social media for reputation management is to know yourself and to know your product and how it can solve problems. By knowing where you fit into the marketplace and the problems your product solves you are offering yourself as an expert with a specialized niche to fill. How you present yourself is how others will see you. And, yes, your reputation is always on the line.

The Best Reputation Management Tool On The Planet

There are reputation management tools and then there are reputation management tools. The best tools for managing your reputation online are more than just reputation management tools. They are tools that can also – and should also – be used for other things.

For instance, a good reputation management tool will also optimize your website for search engines for the key terms that are important to your website as well as the key reputation term that you are managing. It is a branding tool, and SEO tool and a reputation tool all rolled into one.

So what tool is that?

Your blog. And this is what your blog does in each of those areas using normal, every day tactics that the search engines approve:

• Adds fresh daily content to your website – This alone takes care of all three of your goals: Branding, Reputation Management and SEO. Your blog is a unique branding tool, but it also can be used to SEO your website around your key terms. Every key term that is important to your marketing efforts can be taken care of through your blog. Then there’s reputation management. If you write your blog yourself and sign your name to every post, that’s a big reputation plus. Even if you hire a ghostwriter, you can have blog posts signed as they are a reflection of you and your values.
• Link building and internal navigation – Yes, this is also a three-time bread winner. Your anchor text not only acts as an SEO element for your website, but it also is great for branding. And links that include your key reputation terms perform an added boost as well.
• Increases your chances of being found – Every blog post is counted as a unique web page so the more often you blog the more often you brand and SEO your website and manage your reputation.
• Gets your website crawled more often – If your website is crawled more often then the search engines will update their indexes more often to rank your important pages for your key terms, key reputation terms and, of course, that makes you more brandable.

So, as you can see, your blog makes your website more brandable, increases your SEO and adds a reputation management element that other SEO and branding tools do not. It’s the perfect reputation management tool.

Positive Rollout is Reputation Management

Google took a hit to its reputation this week when it rolled out Google Buzz with some privacy flaws. This could have been fixed really easily very early on. All Google had to do was make its public profile of Google Buzz users an opt-in feature instead of an opt-out feature. Now they have reputation issues and for a company like Google, this is a big issue.

It’s also a learning point for the rest of us. Your reputation management begins the moment you start planning. It doesn’t begin when you start marketing or when your product hits the market. You’ve got to plan your reputation management right from the beginning.

If you can’t anticipate correctly what the market wants, take a poll. Conduct a survey or find out in some other way. But you can ask your users what they want before you ever do it. That will save you head aches later, believe me.

Just remember, your reputation is at stake the moment you consider an idea. Protect it with everything you have.

Old Content And Reputation Management

There is more than one way to manage your online reputation. When it comes to content promotion, you don’t necessarily have to stick with creating new content. Of course, you should, but you can also promote your old content and continue to boost your reputation.

Old content is like a jewel lodged between the wall and and old piece of furniture. It may be stuck in a bad place, but it’s still a good thing.

Take an old piece of content you’ve created and that had a nice shelf life. Let’s say it received some initial popularity then over time faded away. However, every now and then you get a new link to it and some new traffic based on other people who find it in the search engines or who find it through an old link pointing to it. Can you use it?

Yes, I think so. There are two ways to take this old content and re-promote it for increased reputation.

1. You can write a new blog post and link to the old content so that your current readers discover a gem from the past. This will bring new attention to the old content and might even get it some new links.
2. Share the old content on your social media sites and create a new Twitter link for it. New social media traffic could get some new links for that old content and resurface it if it has lost any search rank.

Online reputation management is not a static game. You can manage your reputation just as well with old content as with new.

How Many Ways Can You Manage A Reputation

Reputation management is often thought of as nothing more than increasing the number of ways you rank in the search engines for your name or brand while reducing the number of negative results for the same. While that is certainly one way to approach the subject of reputation management, it isn’t the only way.

Online reputation management is really about building trust. And it’s your job as a member of your team to help boost the company image and brand recognition through the tools at your disposal. Much of reputation management is simply interacting with your audience and engaging them in conversation on your blog, through social media, and using other online tools to reach your audience. Reputation management should be seen as an extension of your online marketing efforts.

In truth, everything you do (and everything anyone in your organization does) is reputation management. It all affects how your audience views your brand. Whether you are writing a press release and sending it out or engaging through Facebook and Twitter, you are trying to send a positive image. Succeeding at that is the best reputation management tool you have.

Why Facebook Is Good Reputation Management

Online reputation management is really about one thing. Presenting yourself in the best light possible. Also known as “putting your best foot forward.”

It really doesn’t matter what tools you use. The whole point is to make yourself look good. You are running a business.

Reputation management can best be described as a positive and a negative. The positive is you telling the world who you are and what you do. What you’re good at. The negative is combating negative reviews or comments about you or your business. The reality is, most businesses don’t have to worry about that last part. Still, it’s good to be prepared in case you have to.

The best negative defense, of course, is a positive offense. You want to make yourself available in as many places as you can and in as many high profile places that you can. That means Facebook.

Facebook is a good place to meet people. All you really have to do is make friends and interact with them by writing on their wall and responding to what they write on yours. Post photos and videos and links of your favorite places. By simply doing what you do best and sharing who you are with your friends and contacts you are performing the best reputation management that you can in a natural way. It’s really that simple.

How RSS Can Boost Your Reputation

Your RSS feed can be a very valuable tool for your reputation. And in today’s online culture you need a good reputation management strategy. Use your RSS feed to give your online reputation a boost.

The RSS feed is something your site visitors will subscribe to and by subscribing to your feed they are giving you permission to contact them over and over again. Of course, the feed is what is contacting them. It’s an automatic content delivery system that your site visitors receive after subscribing. It’s a great reputation management tool because your site visitors use the feed to make judgments about you and your business.

RSS stands for really simple syndication. That means you can become a syndicated columnist or author simply by writing a blog or developing a website. And when you make it work for you, your reputation will thank you.

Why Reputation Management Is Hard To Escape

It is difficult in life to escape getting a reputation. Everything you do tells who you are. That principle is even more important online where everything you do becomes a permanent record of who you are or who you used to be (and, consequently, who others perceive you to always be). Reputation management is the science of maintaining a presence online that you can always be proud of. It’s an activity that is inescapable.

Everything you do speaks. Online and off line. Whatever others see you produce becomes a part of your persona, or their perception of your persona. And it has a positive or a negative effect.

The idea behind reputation management is to present yourself in every situation in as positive a manner as possible and to address any negative or neutral concerns in a forthright and up front manner so that others see you as you really are. That’s a challenge in any environment, but doubly so online. That may be why so many people are shy of entering forums and making posts about themselves on blogs and other Internet properties. But you need not be afraid.

With a strong reputation management strategy backed by a solid philosophy, you can design your online perception from scratch and leave others think positively about you everywhere you go. It takes work, but you can do it.

Why Universal Search Is Reputation Management

It’s been a couple of years or so when Google introduced the concept of universal search. This is organic search on steroids. OK, maybe not on steroids, but more diverse than ordinary organic search.

Universal search is the fusion of several verticals into the search results for any particular search query. For instance, type in “Elvis Costello” at Google and you get Internet radio results followed by organic search listings with links to websites (remember when you got 10 of those and that was it?) and some images results and videos thrown in at the bottom.

That’s universal search: Several verticals on the same search results page. This is good and bad. If you were among the top 10 organic listings then you may have fallen off the first page to be replaced by a video, image, or Internet podcast result. But if you have a video clip of Elvis Costello, an image of him on your website, or an audio clip then it’s a positive.

The news here is that there are more overall search results on the page with fewer organic listings. The verticals have captured some of that real estate. Here’s the reputation management lesson …

What if you were Elvis Costello? Or replace Elvis Costello’s name with your own. Will you see image, video and podcast results? Should you?

Well, if a searcher were to search for your name, that’s what they should see. And if they did see that then you’d be boosting your reputation much more than you are now. Imagine having an organic listing with a link to your website, a video, an audio listing, and an image all showing up on page 1 of the SERPs. That’s some powerful reputation management. Wouldn’t you agree?

Favorite Places As Reputation Management

Google’s got a new way for local small businesses to engage in reputation management. It’s called Favorite Places. It seems like a simple program, starting with 100,000 local U.S. businesses with a bar code in their window. Yes, I know, sounds hokie, but that’s what it is.

The bar code is intended as a way for mobile phone users to scan and find out more about the business. What kind of information? You know, reviews, history, menus, etc.

Google is inviting other local businesses to participate by nominating themselves as a Favorite Place. Well, you join the Google Local Business Center, which you should have done already anyway. Then, if you get a lot of people searching for you at Google, you’ll get your own decal.

Apart from the silliness, it can be another reputation enhancer for the right businesses. But I’m wondering how many people will actually use the decals with their mobile phones?

What’s The Point To Reputation Management?

You’ve heard the term “reputation management” used, but what does it mean? Why should you focus on it? What’s the point? Is it just another SEO tool?

Well, yes, it is an SEO tool, but the point behind reputation management is more than just SEO. It might be truer to say that SEO is a tool to enhance your reputation management efforts.

The point behind reputation management is to increase the positive image building elements about you and your brand that appear online while degrading the negative as much as possible. You do this through the use of several tools, including SEO. But you can – and should – also use social media to assist you with your reputation management. In fact, SEO and social media go hand in hand to help you with managing your reputation.

But there are other things too. Social connections, for instance. Get your biggest fans to help you. If you can get your fans to evangelize on your behalf then your reputation management plan becomes easier to manage.

It’s easy to lose sight of the goal and start focusing on driving down the bad talk or to get fixated on your awards or other trophies, but don’t get sidetracked. Your real goal is to brand yourself and make a positive impression on the people you want to do business with. Reputation management is largely just being yourself. And I know you can handle that.

Branding As Reputation Management

Few online marketing concepts are as misunderstood as online reputation management. It is often thought of as a reactive model, but in truth it is proactive. Reputation management in its best sense is nothing less than effective online branding.

A recent survey shows the top online brands in 2009 are:

1. Google
2. Yahoo!
3. Amazon
4. Facebook
5. Ebay
6. Microsoft
7. YouTube
8. MySpace
9. Apple
10. Sony

The one thing that all of these companies have in common is a strong brand. Each one built its online reputation by building its brand. And the attributes that make them all reputable brands – and recognizable brands – are trustworthiness, helpfulness, and relevance.

The lesson here for the rest of us is to build trust by being helpful and being relevant. If you can do that in your niche then you will simultaneously be building your brand and your reputation. There’s no better reputation management than building a positive and recognizable brand in any niche.

The Surest Way To Protect Your Reputation Online

There is never a fool proof way to do anything. No matter what you try, in reputation management as well as in SEO or anything else, there is always a way to fail. But there is one way to ensure that you manage your reputation online well and that you at least give it a full faith effort to remain spotless. That one method is to provide excellent customer service.

While good customer service can’t ensure that no one will ever accuse you falsely or take a legitimate claim public unnecessarily, it will reduce the chances drastically. After all, happy customers have no reason to complain.

You can perform all the SEO tricks in the world, be diligent in how you present your web pages to social media sites, and consistently pound away at search engine listings until you get them all. But none of it is a good substitute for great service. Provide great service and people will talk about you. Provide a lousy service and they’ll talk but no amount of SEO will undo the damage. Good reputation management means never having to clean up a mess in the first place.

Should You Respond To Negative Comments About Your Business?

Should you respond to negative comments about your business on other websites? Ideally, you’d want to have those conversations on your own blog. A good strategy to use to get people over to your blog for a conversation about your products and services is to write a blog post that addresses a concern made publicly elsewhere. Then, visit the site on which the comment was made and make a short statement about the comment with a link to your site for the fuller explanation. Your comment might look something like this:

Thanks for addressing that issue. You might be interested in this explanation (and include the link here).

This tells people that you take their concerns seriously. It also tells them that you are willing to talk about it. But it also gets them to your blog to talk about it. By getting the conversation going on your website, you can control the flow of the conversation while giving people a chance to voice their concerns and deal with the issue directly where it makes the most sense to do so.

Call it reputation management. But we call it common sense.

The Reputation Management Conundrum

A conundrum is a difficult problem whose answer is or involves a pun. Many online marketers have begun to discover that there is such a dilemma with reputation management. As soon as you realize what the problem is you also realize that the solution has just as much difficulty attached to it. It is indeed a riddle. A condundrum.

So what’s the problem? I’ll try to state it in as simple terms as possible.

Reputation management involves positioning your name or brand in a positive light while monitoring what others are saying about you. You truly are “managing” your reputation. You cannot control what others say about you. All you can do is respond to them if they say something you don’t agree with. But there are some challenges in responding to every little bit criticism you receive. You will have some trouble if you try to respond to it all.

That isn’t the conundrum, however. The real issue is that the more popular you are then the more reputation management you need and the harder it is to manage that reputation. If you are a virtual unknown then not many people are going to be saying much about you – good or bad. But if you are very well known – a celebrity, let’s say – then you are likely getting talked about, both good and bad. The problem for celebrities is that they can’t possibly respond to every bit of bad press they get, and really shouldn’t try.

But what if you’re a business? Your reputation could rise to celebrity status. And what’s more, even if you start out a virtual unknown, you could be catapulted to stardom by your reputation management efforts. See the joke now?

In simpler terms, reputation management begins the moment you open your doors. No one knows who you are or what you have to offer, but that won’t stop them from sampling your services. Once that first taste of your business is out there, you immediately need to manage your reputation because that customer is going to talk to somebody. That’s online and an off line reality.

Online, information is forever. Build a website and your reputation is attached. Perform some online marketing through social media and your reputation follows. In many cases, it gets there first. Even a virtual unknown can have a bad reputation before the perceived need to defend it. So what’s the moral? It is this: That you must make a conscious decision early on in your online business to establish a reputation for good customer service, a great product, and develop a positive perception. Any little blip in that reputation armor of yours and you just may need more “management” than you can handle.

Your Most Important Reputation Management Tool

Reputation management is becoming more and more important every day. But there is more to reputation management than simply influencing search results for the positive while knocking down the negative results. Many online marketers who find themselves thinking about reputation management do so as a reaction to search results they do not like.

True reputation management begins with reputation monitoring. After all, you can’t influence or combat what you don’t see. It’s important to know who is talking about you and what they are saying. That’s where the reputation monitoring comes in.

Your most important reputation monitoring tool – and reputation management too – is Google Alerts. Google Alerts will notify you whenever anyone is talking about you. You simply sign up, enter the keywords you want to monitor, and every time that keyword is detected by Google you’ll get an e-mail alert. To make it work for you in reputation management, just use your brand name as the keyword you want to monitor.

All good reputation management begins with reputation monitoring and Google Alerts is the most important tool you have. It’s free.

Is SideWiki A Reputation Management Problem?

Google has rolled out another product – one that hasn’t seemed to gain too much traction in the short time that it has been available but that has received it’s fair share of criticism. The main criticism hurled at it is that it is a ticking reputation management time bomb. Is this criticism justified?

Scotland SEO explains why they’re a bit shaky in the boots about SidiWiki. On the other hand, Nick at Search Engine Optimization Journal doesn’t seem a great deal concerned. And Paul at TalkBiz has a very detailed post on how Google is plotting to steal the Web. Is it really that big a problem or just a bunch of hype?

Well, I can’t say that the concerns many of these people bring up are not real. They are. But should webmasters go around singing “the sky is falling?”

Personally, I think webmasters should write the Google staff and request some modifications to SidiWiki – I do believe it could post some reputation management problems for a lot of people. But it’s nothing to go to war over – yet. Most of Google’s new products take time to pick up steam. If SideWiki is like any of the others, we’re a long way away from universal usage of the Google Toolbar.

Can Video Marketing Be Used For Reputation Management?

Video marketing seems to be picking up speed and I think we could be entering the era of video marketing. That means videos will be used to reach audiences like never before. Why?

Videos, with their strong reliance on visual communication, allow marketers an opportunity to build trust among their audience. That’s a big plus and a huge opportunity for marketers. But there is an aspect to video marketing that hasn’t been discussed much: Reputation management.

Reputation management is the practice of using search engines to keep positive results high in visibility while pushing negative results down further. Videos are perfect for this.

One way videos can help you achieve your reputation management goals is in diversity of results. Ideally, you want your brand to return as many results as possible when people are search for information about you. Videos can fill one of the top 10 slots easily, especially if you upload your videos to YouTube and several of the other video sharing sites available. Be proactive in your reputation management and use videos.

When Do You Think About Reputation Management?

Reputation management is one of those things that most people don’t think about until they need it. But it’s one of the most important aspects of doing business online and you should think about it right from start. How are you going to manage your reputation?

First, you need to stop thinking about reputation management as a clean up exercise. Yes, you might have to do some clean up from time to time. But that’s not necessarily what it’s all about. It is about ensuring that you go about your business like a business and keeping a positive image of yourself in the blogosphere and elsewhere. But how?

For starters, you should engage in a dialogue with members of your target audience. Engage them with conversation in a comfortable environment – like on your blog or in a chatroom or forum.

By treating others as you would like to be treated, you can go a long way in ensuring that they see you as the expert and kind human being you want them see you as. Keep your head up, walk in a dignified manner, and be yourself. There is really no better way to manage your reputation – online or elsewhere.

The Best Reputation Management Tool You Have

Reputation management is quickly becoming one of the most important aspects of doing business online. You never know when a competitor, an employee, or a customer will go on the warpath and start messing with the world’s perception of you and your brand. But you can combat the negatives long before they start cropping up. And you can do it with a tool that you should already be using.

I’m talking about your blog. Your company blog is the best reputation management tool you have. You know why? Because you own the means and the velocity of production.

Look at it this way: A blog can be updated every day – even multiple times a day. And every blog post is a separate web page. The more web pages you produce that use your brand or company name, image, or likeness in, the more content you spread around. And the older that content is with the more links it can gain, the better off you will be in the long run. It makes it harder for the naysayers to move their content up.

Of course, you can never make it impossible for them. But why give them a small hill to climb when you can manage a daily blog and make that hill bigger. A blog is your best reputation management tool.

Online Reputation Management Is A Multi-Faceted Ongoing Project

New Internet marketers may not understand the terms that get used online and reputation management is one that gets confused a lot. To be sure, it’s not a one-time event. It’s an ongoing project when done right and it should be started long before you really need it.

I’ve met far too many website owners – and even some non-website owners – who think of reputation management as a last minute resort, or as a cleanup activity. Once they’ve met with someone online who is trashing their name and trying to ruin their reputation, that’s when they think about protecting it. At that point, it’s too late.

Online reputation management should begin the moment that you start thinking about building an online presence. Reputation management should be a part of your overall strategy for building a business online.

The tools that you’ll use to build and maintain your reputation online are many. Which ones you focus on depends on your personality, your business goals, and your budget, but here are a few ideas to get your mind spinning:

• Online video
• Search engine optimization
• Search engine marketing
• Blogging
• Article marketing
• Podcasting
• Display advertising
• Social media marketing
• Viral marketing
• Reciprocal push marketing
• Newsletter marketing
• E-mail marketing
• Link building

As you can see, the tools in your arsenal are plenty. And you can use them all together. The key is to develop a strategy and stick with it. Your reputation is too important to leave to chance.

Will Google Wave Make Reputation Management Easier?

Google announced its new social collaboration tool Google Wave at the end of May and since then that’s what everyone has been talking about. Mashable has an entire category of blog posts dedicated to it.

If Google Wave will be able to do everything that they say it can then it could prove to be as good a reputation management tool as anything. But it could also prove to be a reputation management pitfall. It will likely be both.

Think about it. You’ll be able to communicate in real-time with the entire world. Think e-mail, IM, and Twitter combined. Real-time goofs, gaffes, and bouts of genius all rolled into one. Still, pitfalls aside, if it can do all that it’s billed to do, it will be a revolutionary communication tool – even better than Twitter.

But a tool is only as good as the hands that are holding it. Do good with it or use it for bad, but it’s there. Google Wave promises some great reputation management benefits with the following features:

• Wiki
• Applications and extensions
• Embeddable waves
• Open source
• Playback
• Drag and drop file sharing

That’s powerful stuff and if you’re serious about managing your reputation online, you’ll find real usefulness from these applications.

When To Start Reputation Management

One of the most important aspects of doing business online is reputation management. But what is that precisely?

Many people have their own definitions of reputation management, but in nutshell it is simply the process of marketing yourself or your brand to the search engines so that you have mostly positive search results. Too many companies think about reputation management after it is too late. They’ve got a few negative search results appearing for their name or brand name and all of a sudden want help removing them. It’s not quite that easy.

For one thing, you can’t just take the results away. They are there forever. But you can influence rankings so that negative results slip down in the rankings while positive results rise. That’s the essence of reputation management anyway.

The best time to start reputation management is before you need it. Preferably, you start it the moment you go online and start publishing and doing business. The sooner you start the more difficult it will be for your critics to gain a foothold for your name and brand. Make it harder for them, not yourself. Be aggressive in protecting your reputation before you need to.

What Is Reputation Management?

Reputation Management has been a buzzword for a couple of years now. But what does it mean?

If you listen to some Internet marketing gurus you’ll hear that reputation management consists of signing up for as many social media profiles as you can. Or you might hear something that sounds a bit like search engine optimization and it could leave you with the impression that search engine optimization and reputation management are one and the same. They are not.

While reputation management involves the use of SEO and social media, it would be a mistake to thing that this is all there is to it. Online reputation management is a way for business owners to maintain a positive perception of their business using Internet marketing tools. Those tools go beyond SEO and social media. They also include:

• Your company newsletter or e-zine
• Your blog
• Forums
• Display advertising
• Other forms of marketing online

At the heart of reputation management is customer service. If you provide great customer service and treat your employees well then no one would have any reason to say nasty things about you. However, realistically, no matter how well you treat people, there will come a time when things just don’t go right and someone will attempt to mar your reputation. You should think about how you will manage that process before it happens. Reputation management is an ongoing strategy, not something you throw together when you need it.

Protecting Your Online Reputation Without Overdoing It

A reputation is a valuable thing. Businesses, both small and large, are required from time to time to defend theirs, while others provide such pristine service to their customers that they are virtually infallible. However, the best way to protect one’s reputation is to prevent slander from ever surfacing. While no one can control the information that is passed around on the Internet, via blogs, forums, articles and comments, there are many measures that can be taken in order to secure the name of your business in search results. From experience, many internet marketing firms have learned the importance of preventative Reputation Management versus that which must occur post-concern.

Hands down, it is always easier to prevent search results from returning bad opinions than it is to remove those that have already been showing up. The idea behind reputation management isn’t always to hide bad opinions, because there are many bad internet marketing practices in effect, and sometimes, slandering others is how some companies go about improving their own reputation. It’s logical - diminish the credibility of another and automatically yours will augment in comparison – but this is not an ethical practice, and like it or not, those of us whom actually market our businesses ethically must do so in the face of black-hat methods.

Since reputation management is not strictly preventative, there is hope. A significant portion of any effective reputation management effort does not come down to fighting fire with fire – in other words, and as an analogy to the political front, mudslinging will only fuel false accusations and unnecessary name-calling. Therefore, the key to effective reputation management is to take all the good things about your business or company and put them out there for the world to see, so that all the bad things will be shown in their true light as outliers in an otherwise, and formerly, unbalanced statistic-driven equation.

Blog posts, press releases, and reviews are just the start of all the examples of methods by which to distribute positive content about your business. A great way to show the public the truth about your business or company is to acquire the statements of satisfied customers and share them with everyone through any one of (or all) of the previously mentioned methods. There are two sides to the exposure needed to reach as many people as possible with these positive opinions – on one side of things, sending these opinions into high-traffic areas is key, while on the other end of things, performing techniques similar to SEO are required in order to present positive content to those searching for you by name.

All in all, depending on the circumstances, managing one’s reputation can be a task beyond the ability of anyone short of a professional and experienced Internet marketing firm, which is shy it is important to consult a firm like Reciprocal Consulting.

Search Engine Marketing As A Team, Not Separate Players

Search Engine Marketing may not be a science, but it can be viewed as the sum of it’s contributors, and their effect on your online marketing success. Too often, people view all of the separate Internet Marketing efforts in their own light, and fail to bring all factors into one whole focus. When it comes to maximizing your ROI, it may be tricky to determine whether a paid search campaign would benefit over a one geared towards natural search, or whether it would be better to analyze the competition than it would be to focus on expanding your own network. Whatever the case may be, the answer will likely be to test all the water.

It’s no secret that a Pay Per Click campaign can have an effect on of of natural search, and such an effect might benefit or hurt the other, but more than likely, your business will see better oportunities when its Internet Marketing efforts branch out.

The Social Media offers a network of users, and therefore potential customers or clients, that have already presented information about themselves and their interests that traditional advertisors would pay big money for. Targeting users on the Internet is easier than ever – which only means that more people are doing it – and it is therefore that much more important to expand efforts into all online marketing areas.

However, this does necessarily mean it will do you much good to pick 3 of these areas and run with them. Marketing your business online is as much about prior knowledge as it is about gathered information, which means that slow and steady will often win the race.

Let’s compare two businesses like the tortoise and the hare.

The first business wraps its efforts around a search and content driven PPC campaign, a natural search effort, the Social Media spectrum, and safeguards itself with reputation management, all the while gathering information about it’s top competitors. After a few months, they will see which effort is paying off the most, and focus primarily on that. However, they can utilize the others to support their main campaign, and during this time, they can see how various strategies affect eachother, and optimize accordingly. Additionally, their presence in the Social Media has established a brand for them, so when users see their ads, or their name in natural search results, they are more likely to visit their site.

The second business decides to pour its budget into a PPC campaign, and gathers information about their competitors. Seeing how their competition bids has given them the advantage to take that number one spot on sponsored search results, but they lack the online presence. Their click-through rate on ads is decent, but once on the site, users will generally decide to check out the other results before making a decision. Their bounce rate is high and visitor loyalty is rather low, since more than often, users will find the first business and recognize their name.

This model is just one scenario, but it illustrates the need to exapand efforts. The tortoise and the hare is a well-known story for a good reason – there is truth to the concept of taking one’s time, thinking things through, and making informed decisions.

Just How Much Has the Internet Changed Marketing Efforts?

For those of you just popping online before work, I’ll give you the short answer: To immeasurable lengths. For those with a little more time on their hands, I’ll try to sum it all up the best I can, but don’t be surprised if I leave a lot of information out – this is a very broad topic.

In fact, I may not get very far from a single topic concerning how the Internet has changed, because something occured to me the other day, as to just how different the world is with the Internet, and how hard it would be for most of us to go back to the early 90’s, before everything we know and love about said Internet. What came to mind was not how many great resources for information are available thanks to the Internet, or how easy it is to book a hotel, buy a car, find a friend, or stay in touch. I’d like to say that the simple pleasures of cuteoverload.com popped into my head, but the thought was not so quaint.

No, my mind decided to remind me how easy it would be for a 13 year old to ruin me. Odd, I agree, but hear me out.

In 1992, what would a 13 year old need to accomplish in order to get his or her opinion seen, spread and confirmed? Perhaps a paper route, a friend who’s parents worked at the Daily News, a good deal of editing, a petition…the list could go on, but to quickly convey my point, that child would need to go to great lengths to have even a few hundred people see his review on the newest Nintendo game, or perhaps his favorite place to eat in his small town.

Fast forward to 2008, and what do we see on the Internet? Blogs, review sites, forums – and lots of them – many members on these sites of which are 13-18 year olds ranting about their uninformed opinions, trashing companies, and incoherantly attempting to disuade the world from making the same mistake they did by going with the cheaper model. Don’t let their lack of formal education and bad grammar fool you – these people have an amazing influence on the world.

But a few hundred-thousand teens aren’t so scary, right? What can they do to hurt your business? Well, imagine someone searches for your company because they can’t remember the website URL, and just as they’re about to click on your site they see the next search result, an excerpt from a high ranking blog: “Company makes crappy products”. Or maybe it’s worse. Maybe, the excerpt under the result, chosen by the search engine, reads something more like: “Company owner John Smith likes little boys”.

Yeah, that’s pretty scary.

Fear not, friend, the Internet is a very big place, so the chances of someone singling out your business over the rest is as unlikely as the number of businesses out there are many; but who really wants to take the chance? The fact is, simple Preventative Reputation Management can save you a huge hassle, as well as a lot of spend, later on.

The basic idea behind Reputation Management is to populate search results with positive content concerning your business, and it is much better if all those good pieces of information reguarding your business show up in the first 20 results, instead of those frightening 13 year olds who know more about the Internet than a lot of adults, with a brutal opinion, and 120wpm typing “skillz”.

If you’d like to know more about how to protect your online reputation, please don’t hesitate to contact an Internet Marketing Firm such as Reciprocal Consulting today, and ask how.

Speak Like an Internet Marketing Guru

Internet marketing takes years of experience to master and is constantly changing, therefore requiring dedication to continually grasp in full. However, there are a few basics that anyone interested in internet marketing should know. When it comes to understanding the fundamentals, it’s all in the terms. ROI, SEO, SMO, RM, CI, PPC, etc. These acronyms may mean nothing to most people but to us as an internet marketing firm they are our bread and butter.

Here is a basic rundown of our services and how they can help our clients:

• ROI (Return on Investment) – the key to any campaign in a simple question: is it worth it? The ROI is the net of what is spent on a campaign verses the increase of leads, sales, customers, etc. Depending on your niche, certain marketing campaigns may not be best suited for you.
• PPC (Pay Per Click) – refers to the use of AdWords campaigns on Google, MSN, Yahoo, etc. A PPC AdWords Campaign is the sum of keywords relevant to the client’s website, which are used to target potential customers through bidding for sponsored ads, reaching them on searches, as well as high-ranking sites relevant to the site.
• SEM (Search Engine Marketing) – encompasses nearly every end of internet marketing, more specifically as pertaining to a campaign utilizing search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN to reach a targeted audience.
• SEO (Search Engine Optimization) – process of optimizing on-site and off-site specifics in order to increase the relevance of the website to specific keywords and search terms, therefore increasing page rank and ultimately increasing online visibility in searches, essentially, making your site more popular.
• SMO (Social Media Optimization) – targeting non-search groups on social networking sites, such as Technorati, Digg, Squidoo and various blog sites. SMO targets those that may not necessarily search for your keywords because they already belong to an online community which shares information on those search terms.
• RM (Reputation Management) – various augmented forms of SEO and SMO which populate remaining ranking positions on searches for a site’s keyword set. While SEO and SMO may independently secure a top-ranking position, RM will help to populate the remaining positions in order to protect the site itself from high-ranking blogs or review sites slandering your good name.
• CI (Competitive Intelligence) – utilizing various resources and databases in order to compare your site to your competition. By pitting your site against other sites, we get a better idea of which branches of a given campaign are excelling and which need a boost.

These are just the basics. For more information about these services and others, please visit ReciprocalConsulting.com.

Why Social Media Optimization?

There are many ways to optimize your website through SEO and PPC, but even if your website is showing up at the top of search results, there are at least nine more ranking spots that could be pointing to you. So why bother joining the world of Social Media Optimization when you have the number one spot in search results?

• An added online presence through SMO says more about your dedication to the internet community, which in turn shows that you care more about reaching your customers.
• Depending on which SMO sites you utilize, you can reach potential customers outside of direct search results. If someone is searching Google for your niche they will be sure to find you. However, if they belong to a forum, online community or message board dedicated to that niche, they may not bother searching Google and, furthermore, anyone who finds you on those sites is guaranteed to show interest in your business and will subsequently be more likely to become a customer.
• When coupled with SEO, SMO can push your profiles, posts and contributions to various SMO communities to search results beneath your website. This is an additional protection that falls under Reputation Management, but it is just one way to protect your name.
• Having a presence on multiple SMO sites can generate more links to your website, which adds a layer of security to your top spot on searches.

Basically, Social Media Optimization is an extension of SEO that reaches a large number of more accurately targeted potential customers.

There are many things to consider before setting up an SMO campaign. Everything from which sites you utilize to what your avatar on your various profiles will be, these things all have an impact on your image. Also, choosing keywords wisely can become the difference between an excellent campaign and an ineffective one.

If you’d like to set up a Social Media Optimization campaign for your business, Reciprocal Consulting can help.

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