The Reciprocal Consulting Blog

It’s amazing how a few words can trigger a train of thought a mile long. Seth Godin has a short piece on the art of juggling. So what does juggling have to do with reputation management? Plenty really. To quote from Seth’s blog:

Throwing is more important than catching. If you’re good at throwing, the catching takes care of itself. Emergency response is overrated compared to emergency avoidance.

Of course, it’s the last sentence that caught my eye (that’s his italics, not mine). You can apply the philosophy that response is overrated compared with avoidance to reputation management. Operating online with a policy of providing good products with a good service and you will develop a reputation for excellence.

However, what had me thinking was human nature. We do make mistakes, and they can sometimes be blown right out of proportion. Imagine a juggler that has been distracted for a moment – there’s a good chance they will drop the lot. And that can happen to reputations as well – take your eye off the game for a moment and suddenly your name is mud.

Unlike a juggler, you can protect yourself to a certain degree. By building a strong reputation early, it becomes harder to undo. Those that believe in you and your products will doubt any negatives until they can prove for themselves that what is being said is true. What is important in the reputation management process is to build a strong reputation in all the places you operate in.

This includes search results, social media, and your own websites. If you can develop that reputation from day one, you will lessen the chance of any stray incident or a disgruntled employee (or customer) starting a negative campaign against you. In simple terms – reputation management starts with your activities. Like a juggler, it takes constant concentration to ensure your business is doing everything possible to build and support your reputation.

If 2011 is like any other year there will be fads that come and go, perhaps even some that come and stay. What has been evident over the years is that some have proven to be good while others have proven to not only be bad, but to run the risk of getting your website removed from the search index. If you’re good at picking the winners and losers, then you don’t need to read on. If you want to protect your reputation, then the best piece of advice to offer is to be cautious.

The problem with fads is that they come and go. Some fads hang around, but they can still be dangerous. Some of the more notable include automatic software – the type that seeks out blogs to leave robotic comments; spins a document and then lodges it with hundreds of directories; and the type that automatically bookmarks pages in social bookmarking sites.

If automatic isn’t enough, there are still a lot of individuals offering to do the same by hand. Oh yes, they ‘hand pick’ the directories, social sites, and blogs – but ultimately, it’s still spam.

This past year we have seen groups touting local search as a ‘clever’ way to game the search results. Claiming a listing in many locations around the US, even though you’re sitting at home in the UK, or Australia, or wherever. Google will soon find a way to filter those tactics, then hit those websites that games the system right out of the ball park.

2011 will see new creative ways to get to the top of the search results. If they sound a little fishy, then they probably are. If you have spent a lot of hours building your business, and building your business’s reputation, then forget any of the fads as they come around – use a little caution to see if they are valid, and acceptable by the Internet at large.

What is your reputation worth? Reputation and brand awareness go hand in hand – in fact, they both rely on each other when it comes to building a successful business. Mention a brand, any brand, and you will have positive or negative views on that brand (unless the brand is unknown to you, of course). As a business, you spend a lot of time promoting that brand, and a lot of time building a positive image around the brand. So what happens when you lose that brand?

That’s an issue that is facing TwitterMoms.com right now. They have built their website and brand to a point where they have a huge following. More importantly, they have a good reputation amongst both parents and businesses that provide goods and services to parents. I can imagine their horror then when they received a notice from Twitter to cease using their brand name.

TwitterMoms is about to become SocialMoms.com, and while the transition will no doubt be smooth, they will still have to do a lot of work to rebrand themselves, and to transfer their reputation from TwitterMoms to SocialMoms. Being a very successful website, they will be back on track in a very short time. But what if your business wasn’t quite as successful? What if it was only doing reasonably well in a highly competitive niche?

That one simple branding error could cost you business. It is difficult to build a positive image that is attached to a brand. Lose that brand and you have to rebuild a new one, and with it a reputation. In highly competitive niches, that could prove to be impossible. Your brand and reputation are closely tied together – lose one, and you potentially lose the other. When deciding on a brand name, the more unique you are and the easier it is to remember, the better. While riding on the wave of another brand may make life easier initially, it could, over time, prove to be a huge mistake – just ask TwitterMoms.

Sometimes the smallest things can have the biggest effect on any business. There are reports from Australia that a leading business group ‘forgot’ to renew their domain name.  Not only did they forget, they were unaware that it had then been sold off in a domain auction for over A$30,000.  It wasn’t a brand name or business name that they could lay any claim to either – it was the very generic, and one would have thought, highly desirable hardware.com.au domain.

To add insult to injury, the business group that picked the domain name up was one of their biggest rivals. Any reputation that can be attributed to that domain name will now flow to that business’s biggest rival. That’s more than just loss of reputation, that is taking the power of your reputation and gifting it to your competitor.

Some would claim bad management, and perhaps it was. How did they lose a domain name that was that important? They simply forgot to update the email address in the registrant details.  The lesson here for all businesses is to keep a firm eye on the little things behind an online business. Your domain name, and even your hosting account – forgetting to pay either can see your site disappearing overnight.

Losing a domain name like that is really unforgivable. Allowing your competitor to pick it up and use it is even worse.  Do you know when your domain name is due for renewal? Is all your information up to date in the registrant details?  Perhaps you had better check!

The Internet is a dangerous place in more ways that one. We have all read stories of employers coming across disparaging remarks written by employees or employers using social media to check on potential employees. Reputation management has become an important issue for both businesses and individuals and the focus is not just on what others say. Your own words are just as important.

One of the worst aspects of the Internet has been the amount of online dishonesty perpetrated over the years. The result now is that people will often check Google or Facebook before making friends online. Trust has become the number one issue when doing business, and again, reputations are the key factor.

It does raise a number of questions. For example, if I did a search on your name, business, or brand right now, do you know what I would find? If not, then you have no idea how the online world is affecting your reputation. A second question – what are you doing to protect your reputation?

There are a number of ways in which you could manage your reputation. One method suggests filling the front page of the search engines with your data, often in the form of social media profiles. But then, what of social media? What is being said there? Reputation management starts at home and there are three key areas that you need to consider.

What you say – What you say online can and will be used against you. For example, if you condemn someone, or another product, you had better be right. If you are wrong, or if people consider your comment to be in poor taste, then your reputation is going to fall.  These days, you have to be careful about what you say in jest as well.

What you do – Customer service has once again become an important consideration – provide a good customer experience and they will return, often with their friends.

How you respond -  When individuals raise issues publicly, you need to be sensitive to the fact that the problem is in public. Others will, over time, see your responses. With that in mind, you need to be positive and need to be seen to be trying to resolve the issues in a friendly manner. If they get nasty while you remain positive and in resolution mode, your reputation should remain strong.

Reputation management focuses on what you do, what you say, and what others say. You can manage the first two while working to reduce the third.

Social media is becoming an important tool in people’s lives but we should be aware of what we say, when we say it, and how we say it. We should also be careful that unconnected threads aren’t connected by others to reveal sensitive information. A recent article from the AMA advised doctors on how they should approach social media, particularly when it came to social interaction with patients. The Australian AMA has gone a step further and advised doctors about the content of their discussions.

The Australian AMA points out the problems of seemingly unrelated discussions or comments and how they could be connected to reveal sensitive information. To quote from their article:

…..it’s the comments you made a month ago saying which hospital you work at, two weeks ago saying which ward you work in and then the comment from today about the adverse outcome for a patient you treated,” Dr Bonning said.

“When you stack those three things up together it’s suddenly very easy to identify who the patient was.”

It is very easy to make a disparaging remark about your competition, without naming them, and then to make other comments at other times which, when connected, make it quite obvious who you are disparaging. In our litigious society, this is an issue just waiting for a test case, and if it’s successful, a flood of follow-up cases.

You have a number of choices. You either track closely everything you and your employees say, or you take a great deal of care when disparaging others. The same is true when it comes to sensitive information. As with the doctors in the above quote, what seems like harmless comments today could become online reputation management busters tomorrow. While it’s smart to track what everyone else is saying, don’t forget to track your own conversations.

Google have changed the way search results are displayed and the new changes could make online reputation management just that little bit easier. The last modification to search results was to publish two related links on a domain for certain search queries. These queries include a search for domain by name, a search for a business by name, and a search for a brand by name. Google have now increased that from two related pages to a maximum of four pages.

You may wonder how that will help with reputation management. If your website is able to claim the top four listings, and you have a blog that is also able to take the next four listings, you will now have the top eight listings in search results covered. According to the Google blog:

As before, we still provide links to results from a variety of domains to ensure people find a diverse set of sources relevant to their searches. However, when our algorithms predict pages from a particular site are likely to be most relevant, it makes sense to provide additional direct links in our search results.

That variety of domains could well be your blog, especially if it is hosted on its own domain with the appropriate domain name. Don’t be surprised to see businesses now registering domain names using their business name with the term ‘blog’ or similar added to the end. We recently reported on an admission from Matt Cutts that exact domain matches rank higher than they normally should. Put the two together and you have two sites that rank highly for any searches on those domain names.

It’s only a small step since your reputation can be badly tainted in many other ways. Reports may not float to the top of search results based on your business name, but they could based on product names, perhaps a brand name, and through non-search entities such as social media. Still, every little bit helps, and this change will certainly go a long way to protecting a business’ reputation in the search results. All you need now is a blog that is ranking well – you do have one, don’t you???

There are two things that visitors are going to notice when they first land on one of your pages – how it looks and what it says.  Let’s assume you have hired a professional website designer to create attractive easy-to-negotiate pages, so your website looks great. What about the content?

One of the problems with search engines is that they generally rank old pages above new pages. Google, for example, may talk a lot about ‘fresh content’, but for most searches the pages listed are fairly old.  If your site has been around for awhile then those old pages are going to rank fairly well, even if the information on them is a little outdated.

This is where your reputation could take a real hammering. If visitors feel the information is too old, too out of date, or no longer relevant, there is a good chance they’ll hit the back button rather than seeking fresher content on your site. Flagging the fact that the information is outdated and linking to fresher content may not attract them either.

You have several options. You could redirect to fresher content as long as the new page is about the same subject. You could also rewrite the content to bring it up to date. It seems to be pointless having a redirect to new content when you could simply update the content on that page.

Reputation management starts at home – that is, it starts with what you say and do on your own website. While search engine marketing and social media marketing are all the rage at present, taking time to review those old pages on your website is equally important. Is the content still relevant, accurate, and able to answer the needs of your visitors? If not, give it a lick of polish and bring it up to date.

When it comes to reputation management, there are always two aspects that you must look at. What you do and say and what others can do or say to hurt you or your business. There are a number of measures you can put in place to protect your business and your brand, but how far do you need to go?

This question sprung to mind when I read that Facebook was likely to introduce an email system of their own. One of the questions I keep reading is whether you would prefer a Facebook email address or a Gmail email address. My initial reaction is one of  – why either/or? If you are running an online business then surely your email address is something like yourname@yourdomain.com?

However, returning to reputation management, in particular your brand, do you need to protect your brand by claiming it as an email address on Facebook? I mentioned there were two aspects to reputation management – what you do, and what others do. The big question here is – if you have a branded Facebook Fan Page and someone else claims your brand as an email address, can they hurt your business? While unlikely, it does have the potential to create some harm so with that in mind you probably should do everything possible to claim it.

Have you secured your brand on Facebook? If you haven’t then everything in this post could be moot.  We come back to that question – can someone else harm your brand or business by using either on Facebook or Twitter or any of the other major social media sites? If they can then perhaps you should look to securing them yourself before someone else does!

One of the most important components of social media marketing is your reputation on social sites that you develop a presence on.  There are several activities you can undertake that work to increase your reputation amongst followers, and often work to encourage newcomers to also follow you. Here are six activities that you should consider.

1 – Promoting Others - spend a little time researching what others have to say about your brand, product or service. If someone has written a good blog post detailing how to use your product to advantage – promote it with a link to the post.  Followers will appreciate the information and of course the blog writer will appreciate that A) you have bothered to read their content, and B) you are promoting it for them.

2 – Respond – responding to people who reach out is vitally important. If someone follows or ‘Likes’ you, a quick and simple welcome personalizes the relationship. If someone asks a question, respond to it in a timely fashion.

3 – Give Credit – if a question is asked and you decide to write a blog post on the topic, give credit to the person that asked the question. They feel that their question was important, others see that you take questions seriously, and you are also sending a message that you do actually read comments and responses, even on Facebook, or Twitter.

4 – Provide Value – people follow you for a reason and, generally speaking, it’s because they have some expectations. If you have promised early notice of specials then deliver. Failing to deliver will see people leaving you quite quickly, telling the world along the way that you fail to deliver.

5 – Stay On Topic – stay loyal to the niche around which you have created your profile. If you have several niches, then develop separate profiles and build followers for each. While the occasional cross-promotion is generally acceptable, don’t over do it.

6 – Be Social – it’s not just about you or your business. Don’t forget the social component. While readers don’t want to know about what you had for breakfast, you would be surprised at how many people do want to see the human side. An engagement, wedding or new baby by a staff member will often see a stream of congratulations. If you, or that staff member can respond, so much the better.

Social media marketing is not always about promoting a brand, product or service. However, in delivering on those six points, you can be doing just that, but in a way that highlights the ‘social’ nature or your marketing. Just for a change – put yourself in your followers shoes!

Scrolling through Yahoo! Answers today, it was quite a surprise to see some fairly serious questions. Generally speaking, the questions asked revolve around relationship problems, school homework questions, and diaper issues. While I am sure those questions are important to the people who ask them, it is the serious questions about business that are of more interest to us. As a business owner, these questions can be real gems when it comes to enhancing your reputation as an authority in your niche.

What sort of questions get asked? Here are a few examples:

• How do I change the language on my HP Laptop?
• I can’t attach my lens to my Canon AE-1; it won’t attach. Why is this?
• Is there any way I can get free counseling?
• What would be a good party for teenagers in the winter that’s not lame?

The questions are not rocket-science type questions, yet by providing a good accurate answer your are creating two situations – one instant, the other delayed. The instant situation – readers will ask ‘who are you’ and follow any links. The second situation? The more often your name appears in answer to these types of questions, the more respect you will earn. This will further enhance your reputation in your niche.

One mistake that most people make is to constantly link to the home page of their web site. Don’t. Link to internal pages that actually have the information related to that question. If you don’t have a page that answers that question, link occasionally to your Facebook Fan Page, or one of your popular social media sites. By linking to Facebook, readers may well follow and ‘like’ your Fan Page.

As a final thought, Yahoo! Answers can be a good place to generate ideas. If you cannot link to a page on your site that answers that question – why not? Time to create one. Yahoo! Answers is popular, it is the perfect place to prove your knowledge, and it can reward you with links, traffic, and authority.

The Internet is by no means a young entity anymore. Over the years sites have come and gone and sites have risen to fame only to drop off again in popularity. Human nature is often such that we follow the crowd. A site becomes popular, we check it out, perhaps even register our details, then never return again. The question you have to ask yourself is whether or not those tracks will come back to hurt your reputation.

Reputation management strategies often focus on what others can do to hurt our business. Have you ever stopped to think about your own past activities? I well remember the stories that abounded many years ago when Hotmail was popular. People thought it clever to use fancy addresses such as ‘sexylegs99′ or ‘hotstud01′. What is worse, they didn’t blink an eye when adding these as contact details on job applications – then wondered why they never received a call to an interview. The problem is, when your young and carefree, these activities are fun and few think of the long term consequences.

Those email addresses don’t exactly identify you so you may wonder how they can effect your reputation. They probably wont, however, they could be indicative of other online activities. For example, did you also have a Myspace presence? Can you remember the login or the password? Can you go back and remove any offending material? Can you even remember the sites you were active on? Those are questions that only you can answer.

We have already seen situations where employers have undertaken simple Google searches on job applicants to see whether or not they have any unsavory footprints on the net. Have you taken the time to check your own past. Do a Google search, and go beyond page one and two – you never know what sort of gems you may unearth!

If you are looking for an ironclad reputation management solution – sorry, there isn’t one. But there are some things that you can do to increase your reputation online and off line. Follow these 6 steps and you’ll do yourself wonders to increase your reputation online fast.

1. Establish your web hub. This is the place people go to find information about you. All of your social media profiles should link from this page, or website. You might have a blog on this site; if not, at least link to your hub from your blog. It is the central place of information about you and your brand online.
2. Blog daily. Your blog may be your hub, but it doesn’t have to be. It should, however, promote your hub like crazy. And you should blog daily. It would hurt also to have multiple blogs. You can start blogs for niches within niches, related niches, hobbies, or anything related to your business that you have something to say about. Blog often to each of your blogs, but blog daily to your main one.
3. Establish your social media presence. This should include a profile at the top social media sites (Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook and Flickr) plus to top two or three niche-related sites for your industry. Don’t just put up a profile and forget about it. Be active on these sites and interact with your audience regularly.
4. Build links. Don’t just build links to your main website. Do that, but also build links to your blog and your social media profiles. The way to do that is with a standard bio that you use for articles, guest blog posts and even speaking engagements. Use your standard bio for everything.
5. Support a cause. Pick something that you believe in and make it your community service project. Promote it, donate to an organization that promotes it and volunteer your time. You’ll be surprised at the pay off that comes from these efforts.
6. Excel at customer service. Produce content, give away your time, be generous, be good at what you do and always respect your customers. If you treat people right then they will migrate to you because they see the value in what you offer.

Reputation management is nothing new. Keep doing the good stuff and let the bad stuff wash away. Don’t do anything you’ll regret later.

Yahoo! Answers is the most popular Q&A site online. But it’s not the only one.

These sites are good for traffic if you know how to ask the right questions and if you know how to answer questions to pique the curiosity of others. The secret is in answering questions that are related to your niche, that position you as an expert in that niche, and that demonstrate your respect of others online. That translates into reputation management and good Internet marketing.

The following 10 websites are reasonable alternatives to Yahoo! Answers for delivering the benefits that you receive for Q&A sites like those:

• http://www.allexperts.com
• http://www.answerbag.com
• http://www.ask.metafilter.com
• http://www.askville.com
• http://www.yedda.com
• http://www.quora.com
• http://wiki.answers.com/

Unfortunately, I can’t attest to any statement about which of these sites is the best one. The best Q&A site might be different for you than it is for someone else. I’d recommend that you visit each site and search for questions related to your niche to get a feel for the types of questions and the number of questions related to your expertise that appear on those sites. Also, look to see how many other answerers there are related to those questions.

If a Q&A site has a lot of questions related to a particular niche and few responders to questions then you’ll likely do better at that site as opposed to a site that has a few questions related to a particular niche with a lot of people responding to them.

Online reputation management has become an essential part of doing business on the Internet. But how do you go about it? What are the important tools that you use to manage your reputation online? Here is a list of 10 reputation management tools that we recommend.

1. Your blog – If you don’t have a blog then I recommend one. The search marketing potential of a single blog outweighs almost everything you’re probably used to.
2. Your website – Your company website is the best reputation management tool you have. Unfortunately, most people never tap into its full potential.
3. Google Alerts – Use Google Alerts – they’re free – to notify you whenever your name or brand are mentioned.
4. Twitter – Twitter is the most important real time tool on the Internet. It’s also a great communication and marketing tool.
5. Facebook – The most visited site online. It’s where your friends are. It’s also where you enemies are. Work it well and it can pay off big.
6. LinkedIn – LinkedIn is a business networking tool that is becoming more and more important every day.
7. Keyword Research Tool – Study your keywords, find new keywords, and learn what people are searching for. Give it to them.
8. Quora – Quora is a question and answer site that allows you to prove yourself a knowledgeable expert in your field.
9. Social Bookmarking – There are hundreds of social bookmarking sites online. You can pick 10 of them and make a solid reputation for yourself by making new friends and sharing with them information about your niche that you find valuable.
10. Your Service – Seriously, it doesn’t matter how good you do other things, if you don’t provide a good service then people will tell their friends about it. Provide a knock out service and let them tell their friends about that.

You’ve likely heard of Yahoo! Answers. Thousands of people flock to the site every day to ask, and to answer, questions. For the answerer, it’s a great way to make oneself an authority on a subject. You answer questions and people respond with their own answers.

Quora is another question and answer site just like Yahoo! Answers. One of the best parts of Quora is that people can vote on your answers. The more people who vote for your answer the more likely you are to increase your reputations. Answers with the most votes rise to the top of the heap and the answerer gets a boost in reputation.

I think Quora is also a more attractive looking site than Yahoo! Answers. But there aren’t as many people using it yet. Nevertheless, it presents another chance for you to make your mark in a particular industry and be seen as an expert in your field.

Question and answer sites like Quora and Yahoo! Answers present a great way for people like you to make themselves a perceived authority. All it takes is a few minutes a day.

Reputation management is a type of marketing that can either be handled proactively 24/7 or it can be forgotten until you need it. I don’t recommend the latter course. It’s too important to leave to chance or fate.

But I do believe that everyone is involved in reputation management to some degree. You may not know it, but you are managing someone’s reputation even if not your own. Care to know what I mean?

As it goes, every activity you perform online helps someone. It might even hurt someone. Search engine optimization, social media, pay per click advertising, you name it, all of it is benefiting someone. And if you approach your online marketing initiatives in the wrong way, you could just be benefiting the wrong people.

For instance, let’s say you are chatting it up with some friends on your favorite social network. Someone says something and you retort. Unfortunately, you didn’t think about what you were about to say in time and you make an embarrassing comment. You can’t take it back. Your competition could have just scored a point.

That’s how serious this game of reputation management is. One little slip up could cost you in terms of potential business, mass perception or in other small ways.

You can’t afford to be nonchalant about your reputation. Manage it well and it will help you. Mismanage it and it might haunt you forever.

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.

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.

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.