The Reciprocal Consulting Blog

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:  “(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?

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?

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.

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.

We’ve discussed online reputation management a few times on this blog. But we haven’t really made a huge connection between Twitter and reputation management. Is there a connection? Can Twitter be used as a reputation management tool?

As a matter of fact, it can. And it really should be. I wouldn’t leave it out.

Consider these facts about Twitter:

• It’s a great way to connect with hundreds or thousands of people simultaneously
• Attracting followers on Twitter means that people are in interested in YOU, in what YOU have to say and how YOU say it
• Twitter messages are now being indexed in real time by all the major search engines
• Twitter is great for driving new traffic to your blog or website
• If not already taken, your name as a Twitter profile could end up being a top 10 result on Google (that’s great reputation management)

Reputation management is a multi-channel proposition. Make Twitter one of your channels. It is one of the best online reputation management tools to show up in years.

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.

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.

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:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.