Google Places Allows Responses To Reviews
Google has announced that businesses with Google Place pages can now respond to reviews about their business if they have a verified account. This is actually good for businesses and can serve as a reputation management tool of the highest order.
Already, if you are listed in Google Places with a link back to your website then you have a much better chance of achieving high rankings for your keywords than if you don’t have a Google Places page. The reviews will further make optimization for your keywords and company brand an important part of doing business online, especially for local businesses.
I share Frank Reed’s concern about responses to reviews on third-party sites:
From what I can gather this response mechanism is for reviews that are done in Google Maps only (I am willing to be wrong here if someone from Google would like to let me know). This would limit the ability for the business owner to truly manage his / her online reputation completely but it is a very good step in the right direction to make the Google Place Page an even more important part of every local business’s online presence.
On the other hand, the reviews are not there necessarily for the benefit of reputation management. Business reviews serve multiple purposes, but generally they are to help consumers get an idea of what to expect from doing business with a company based on what other consumers are saying. Allowing a business to respond to reviews simply gives potential customers more to go on in making a decision.
For instance, a business’s response to a review can tell a consumer whether the business takes feedback from customers seriously. It can also allow the business to provide more information to a particular case so that potential consumers can determine the true value of the complaint (after all, not all negative reviews have equal merit).
So while I share the concern for opportunities in reputation management that Frank Reed mentions, I’m also aware that businesses have that opportunity even without the ability to respond to reviews on third-party sites. Maybe not as much, but it’s there. Still, this is a good move by Google Places.
Can Reputation Management Services Erase Negative Reviews?
An article on BusinessWeek’s website asks if online reputation management services work. It’s a legitimate question and one worth considering. Just what does a reputation management company do and does it work?
First, you need to understand that if someone goes online and makes a negative comment about your business that you can’t make it disappear. Once it is online then it is a permanent record. Period.
Having said that, there are some things you can do to help diminish the impact of negative information about you online. One of the things you can do is try to use search engine optimization to push negative results down further and to increase the exposure of positive information about your company. Honestly, though, that’s not a perfect solution and it’s getting harder and harder to accomplish.
Another thing you can do is respond to information about you that you feel may be unfair to you. This is typically the response of companies that have grown in stature and want to be viewed as reputable.
It’s almost inevitable, once you grow to a certain size then you’ll encounter negative reviews of your company. It used to be that information spread by word of mouth and you had no way to control or monitor it. Now, it quickly makes its way online, which is a benefit to a business owner because you can actually read what people are saying about you and not just hear the rumors. That make it easier to respond to.
Online reputation management is not a cure-all panacea for every negative information you find about yourself. It is part SEO and part PR. But its purpose is to aid you in telling your story in a positive manner.
Reputation Monitoring: Where Reputation Management Begins
No reputation management plan is going to succeed if you don’t start at the beginning. And where is that? With reputation monitoring.
So what is reputation monitoring? Reputation monitoring is using Internet tools to monitor what your customers, clients, competition, media and others in the marketplace are saying about you and your company. While monitoring your reputation you should not just be concerned with your company name. You should be concerned with key people within your organization and each of your brand names.
The most basic and free form of reputation monitoring is Google Alerts. You can monitor what others are saying about you relatively easily. Simply create an alert with the word or phrase that you want to monitor. Here are some ideas to help you create alerts that will seamlessly allow you to monitor your reputation:
- Company name
- Tagline
- Motto or slogan
- Subsidiary names
- Name of every brand of product you manufacture or market
- The names of all C-level executives for parent company and subsidiaries
- The name of your media representative or PR manager
- Key phrases associated with each of your products and company
- Names of known key competitors and outspoken opponents
- Perceived weaknesses in your brand and company name along with subsidiaries
These are your basic reputation monitoring needs. You want to find out what people are saying about you, your company and your products. After you have a handle on what is being said you can then begin to plan a reputation management campaign to address marketplace concerns.
How To Manage And Enhance Your Reputation With Links
One aspect of link building that rarely gets talked about is online reputation management. Of course, in many ways, the reputation management benefits of link building are ancillary – they aren’t the main goal. But if you are cognizant of the impact that links can have on your reputation then you can influence your reputation online just by adding a few inbound links to your important reputation enhancement web pages.
For instance, let’s take your About page. Your About page likely has information about your professional reputation that you want your site visitors to know. But do you promote it?
Many webmasters spend a lot of time building inbound links to their important landing pages, as they should, but neglect to build links to their Contact page and About page. Instead, they let their internal website links serve as the means of driving traffic to those pages. But you can actually build reputation enhancing links to those pages as well. How?
Here are a few ways you can build inbound links to your reputation enhancement pages and use link building as a reputation management tool:
- Press Releases - When you send out a press release to online press release distribution websites, make sure that you include a link to your About page with important anchor text regarding your name or reputation. You might include a sentence like this in your press release:Â “(Your Name) is a recognized expert on guinea pigs.” Let “expert on guinea pigs” be your anchor text.
- Social Networking Profiles - When you link to your website from your social networking profiles, link to your About page. You might say something like, “For more information about raising guinea pigs see (Your Name)’s online bio.” Link “(Your Name)’s online bio” and let it serve as your anchor text.
- Social Bookmarking – Why not just social bookmark your About page at some of the popular social bookmarking sites? Ask your friends and most valued customers to do so as well.
- Like Button – Add a Facebook Like button to your About page.
- Request Links – Request links to your About page. You’d be surprised how many people actually will link to your About page if you ask them to. You might even provide them with some choices of anchor text for their links.
- Blog And Forum Signatures – When you comment on blogs and forums, occasionally link to your About page instead of your home page and other landing pages. You should vary your links anyway. Just be sure to throw your About page into the mix with appropriate reputation enhancing anchor text.
Reputation management is becoming more and more important online. Why not use the activities you are already engaged in to improve your reputation and the perception that others will have of you and your business?
Is Online Reputation Management Necessary?
We’ve heard a lot about online reputation management the last couple of years, but is it really necessary? Is this something that everyone should be concerned about?
The best way to answer this question is to ask another question in turn: Would you think reputation management was important if you suddenly found a group of people making disparaging comments about you, your company and your brand? If you answered that question in the affirmative then you’ve answered the first question as well, however, if you wait until then to start managing your reputation online then you’ll be starting too late.
The time to start managing your online reputation is before you need to. That is, before your reputation is in danger or being attacked.
Many people find out the hard way that reputation management is important. They find information about them that they didn’t create and that they don’t find complimentary. That’s when they want it removed. Sadly, however, you can’t remove it. The best you can do is bury it beneath other information about you that is positive. But how?
That’s a question for another blog post, but suffice it to say that online reputation management is a necessity for almost all businesses and persons. But when should you start? How about now?
Craigslist And Reputation Management
If you weren’t aware that Craigslist could be used for reputation management, allow me to point something out. Craigslist happens to have a very high PageRank and is one of the most trafficked websites on the Internet. So it has a lot of authority.
There are really two reasons why you want to use Craigslist:
- Perception – Your audience, or at least a segment of it, likely uses Craigslist. If they see ads on Craigslist that promotes your company and/or products then they’ll have a different perception of your company than otherwise. Craigslist says “down to earth,” “not stuffy”. Prove it by using Craigslist and speaking in a language that people can understand. Drop the marketingese.
- SEO – Believe it or not, ads on Craigslist can be optimized and rank. Use your company name in the title of your ads and you stand a better chance of getting your ad to rank in the search engines. Also, link to your ad from your own web properties. The inbound links will help the ad to rise in the rankings. This can help push negative comments about your company down in the rankings.
When it comes to reputation management, think outside the box. Craigslist is an open door.
Why Online Reputation Management Is Easy
One of the most talked about topics in the last couple of years has been reputation management. But most people intuitively assumes it means online reputation management. Not necessarily.
Anyone who has been in business for long knows that reputation management is just as important off line as it is online, but few people realize that it’s much more difficult to manage off line. Joe Hall communicates this very well in his blog post at Marketing Pilgrim.
I like his political analogy. It’s also true in business, though few people do it intentionally to harm a business’s reputation.
Here’s how it works, the whisper campaign. Someone tries a new restaurant in town and they didn’t like the salad. They tell their friends they didn’t like the restaurant. Now the friends go and tell their friends that the restaurant has a lousy salad. Pretty soon, everyone in town is talking about how lousy the salad is just because one guy didn’t like it.
That’s the simple version. Reality is much more complicated, but this is what company’s face off line. You may never know which customer didn’t like your salad, but you’ll know if you’ve only sold one of them. And the customer paid cash. So you can’t even track him down. Bummer.
But in all seriousness, if this conversation took place online then you’d know who said it and when. Even if the person used an anonymous name or fake name, at least there’d be a record of where it was and when. For instance, some user named Evil Twin tweeted it at 12:01 New Year’s Eve. You can always point to that tweet in your reputation management responses and follow any rumors that spread from it.
Online reputation management is easier than off line reputation management because there’s a record. And if you can follow the record, crafting responses is a whole lot easier.
One Google Tool That Is Perfect For Reputation Management
No reputation management campaign is complete without Google, particularly Google Profiles.
So what is Google Profiles? In a word, it’s your hub on the Google index. Whenever someone Google’s your name they’ll be presented with your profile at the bottom of the search results for your name – along with the profiles of anyone who shares your name. So why is it such a great tool? It isn’t just because it shows up on the SERP for your personal name.
There’s more to Google Profiles than simply listing your name and showing your latest passport photo. You can also include the links to all the places online where you can be found. You can link to your Facebook profile, YouTube channel, your Twitter feed, all of your websites and any place else online where you are likely to be found. If it’s important and it’s about you then you can link to it. That’s what makes Google Profiles such a great reputation management tool.
If you aren’t using Google Profiles right now for reputation management then I highly recommend that you do.
Will ‘Likes’ Boost Your Reputation?
A lot has been said recently about Facebook, its privacy policy and its attempt to re-brand the social graph with Like buttons on everyone’s website. It’s an ingenious idea, really. But how can you turn that into a reputation management tool for your brand?
First, realize that nothing works if you don’t use it. Secondly, if you understand that rising in popularity on the social networks is a game of give and take then you’re off on the right foot. It isn’t so much about the marketing as it is about the social and the media. The idea is to build relationships. When you do that with a focus on what is good for others will also be good for you then others will like you – er, I mean, ‘Like’ you.
The Facebook Like button has the potential to be the most popular reputation management tool to date. You simply place it on your website’s pages and let your visitors do the Liking. If they truly like what they see then they’ll help you promote it.
Here’s how that works in your favor (besides the obvious polishing of the ego): Those Likes will appear in each user’s public settings on their Facebook pages. Their visitors will see you and that could translate into more visitors for your website. As you gain more Likes, you’ll gain more prominence within Facebook. That, in turn, will push you up further into the search engine rankings – that is, your profile or fan page will move up in the rankings. That will also lead to more traffic and, potentially, more Likes. The Like button could actually be a viral reputation management tool, the likes of which has never been seen before.
Of course, as I said, if you don’t use it then it won’t work.
How Many Websites Do You Need For Reputation Management?
It’s almost common knowledge now that Google will only rank a couple of pages per domain for the same keyword. That means if you want to dominate the search results pages for a keyword then you’ve got to have more than one domain. But how many is enough?
For reputation management purposes, you’ve got to think a little bit deeper than keywords and SERPs. What you want are search results positions. But not necessarily the top 10.
Your reputation is your name. And your company name. So you aren’t concerned about generic keyword rankings when thinking about reputation management. You are thinking about your name and brand. And, remember, you want search results positions. Not websites.
Sure, websites can help you achieve rankings. But you can only have one domain name with yourname.com. After that, it’s a matter of variation and it would just look silly to have a string of domain names that used variations of your name and that basically repurposed all the same old information about you that no one else wants to read. So let’s get creative.
First and foremost, you do want one domain name that includes your name in it. It doesn’t have to be much. A few pages. Maybe a blog that you write to once in a while. Make this your reputation hub. Include a CV, some educational and professional history, maybe even some personal information. It’s a place for people who want to know a little bit about you to come to for information. If it is for your company then make it a company reputation hub.
After your own domain name and website, start utilizing the various social media sites. Stick with the big ones and be active in them. But don’t overestimate how much time you can spend working them. With just one hour a day you can be active in the top 5:
- YouTube
- Your industry’s top social network
If you’re active enough on these sites and you make your real name (or brand) your profile username then you will likely rank pretty high for your reputation management term on each site. That’s 5 good positions right there.
There are plenty of other reputation management strategies to add to this basic structure, but the key is to manage your reputation across the entire web and not just in the search engines or on your own sites. Make everything you do count for something.
How Videos Can Improve Your Reputation Management
Reputation management has become very important to online marketers. And video marketing seems to be picking up speed as well. In fact, video marketing is here and if you haven’t started your video marketing plan or even thought about how to use videos for your online marketing then you are behind the eight ball already. Videos are not only good for search engine marketing and social media marketing, but for online reputation management as well.
The idea behind reputation management with videos is two-fold:
- You want to use videos to increase your search engine marketing presence
- You want to use videos to improve your brand perception
Both of these initiatives is possible with videos and you can do both simultaneously. The search engine marketing aspect of video marketing can be taken care of with distribution of your video to the various video sharing sites as well as the embedding of video on your own website. The brand perception, however, is taken care of by the content of your videos.
Now is the time to stat planning your video marketing and your reputation management initiatives. Wait any longer and you’ll have no chance of catching that eight ball.
Reputation Management Begins With Brand Monitoring
Reputation management is not rocket science. It’s more like story telling. There’s a beginning, a middle and an end. The beginning is monitoring – monitoring your name brand to see what people are saying about you. The middle is what you do in response to that. And the end is the follow up.
You can go online and start posting all kinds of stuff about yourself and do it in a vacuum. Build a website. You should have one anyway. Start social media marketing. Do a little Twittering. YouTube your videos. And so on. But what are you doing it for? Do you have a plan? A strategy? Are you winging it?
Don’t wing it.
It’s better to start off with a plan. You can modify the plan later if you have to. But start with a plan. And the first item on your plan should be to see what people are saying about you before you start talking about yourself. How you approach your own brand reputation management could have something to do with what’s already being said. You can’t change what you don’t know.
There are some tools available for you to help you do better reputation monitoring. Here are three tools that you should start using right away:
- Google Alerts – It’s free. Enter your name brand and receive e-mails any time someone online mentions it.
- Twitter – Start paying attention to Twitter. If someone is saying something about your brand right now then you want to know about it. Conduct a Twitter search for your brand name. See what’s being said.
- Facebook – Facebook is now the most trafficked website online. If someone is talking about you they are probably talking about you on Facebook.
These won’t be the only tools you’ll use to monitor and manage your reputation online. But they are a good place to start. If you have no online presence yet then start with these three tools. Effective reputation management branches out from there.
One Little Known Reputation Management Tool
There are a variety of ways to go about managing your reputation online and I’m sure you’ve heard all the recommended ways of doing it, like:
- Your own domain name
- Social networking
- Article marketing
- Blogging
- Social bookmarking
- Direction submissions
- Forum participation
All of those are great tools for reputation management, but those aren’t your only tools. There is one tool that is owned by a prominent company online, but that few people have really considered. It’s called a Knol page.
The interesting thing about a Google Knol page is that you can write it like an article for an article directory, but unlike most article directories, Google allows you to include links in the article. And it can be longer than a usual article. The idea is to establish yourself as an authority in your niche and drive traffic back to your website. It’s a great reputation management tool if you use it correctly.
Can Your Website’s History Be Bad For Your Reputation?
Bill Slawski wrote a blog post about what famous social media websites were before they are what they are now. Those on the list include:
- Digg
- MySpace
- Yelp
I thought it was interesting to see what these websites were before they were the famous and popular sites that they are now. Then it dawned on me, could the histories of these websites come back and haunt them?
I doubt that any of these sites will suffer any lasting reputation damage due to a failed business model of the past, but it is important to point out that if you buy a used domain name, it could be damaging to your business model if that older domain has been involved in shady or black hat SEO tactics. Link selling and other nefarious promotional tactics will be attributed to that domain name and you could start off on the wrong foot, with the deck stacked against you before you even get started.
All that last paragraph really means is that you should do your due diligence before you purchase any domain names.
So what about that reputation? I think, once successful it doesn’t matter. If a previous business model for a domain name doesn’t work out it likely won’t affect what your website is today. There may be exceptions to that rule, but you should analyze any business model from every angle before you implement it. Sometimes a bad idea is just a bad idea and there is no real reason for failure.
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.
- 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.
- 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:
- Yahoo!
- Amazon
- Ebay
- Microsoft
- YouTube
- MySpace
- Apple
- 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.