Ok, here should be a comprehensive guide to managing your own online reputation and the things you SHOULD be doing to preserve your own/brand name. If you’re here, you’ve already shown an interest in making sure you’re doing what you can to keep your head above the proverbial current of the internet. Or you’ve found yourself in an unpleasant situation and are facing unwarranted negative press/publicity and are seeking ways to rectify your situation.

The following list assumes that you are aware of what the internet is, how to work a search engine and that you have your own webpage. You know, the basics. Here’s our Top 10 Reputation Management Tips:

1/ Structure Your Website Around Keywords

Fairly obvious for some, but you’d be surprised how many companies fail to structure their websites for SEO  (Search Engine Optimization) purposes. You need to imagine what people would be searching for when they’re looking for your specific business (and other words relevant to your business type and/or location) and tailor your site to focus on these words. SEO is a big market and it can take months to pick up a healthy proportion of the tricks of the trade, but the least you can do is name your pages aptly – i.e. no ‘Page 1′, ‘Page 2′ or ‘Page 3′ or ‘Untitled Page’ extensions. Having a url that reads http://www.yourcompanyname.com/productname.html for example will ensure that at the very least your page will rank highly in search engines for specific searches pertaining to your company/the products you sell.

2/ Employ Proper Writers

There is very little that’s more off-putting to a reader than poorly written content on websites. It doesn’t matter how good your product is, or how interesting the subject material is meant to be – if it isn’t written properly people will not only not want to read it, but will think less of you for it. There are different ways of bringing somebody onboard to maintain a high level of quality. You can bring on dedicated Content Writers who are typically full-time staff (on temporary or permanent contracts) whose job it is to specifically generate new content from scratch to put on your website(s). Content Editors are similar, but their job is focused more on revising existing material. Then you have Copywriters whose job is to write (/generate content) about a topic/product in a way that ‘advertises’ the material at hand. You don’t have to take on a writer full-time though if the project is small enough, as a lot of writers will do freelance jobs too. It’s usually advisable to have somebody on the company payroll to handle any potentially sensitive subjects though!

3/ Handle The Social Networking/Media Scene

Unfortunately social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter have now been around so long that you can no longer pass them off as ‘New Technologies’ (or a form of ‘witchcraft’). Facebook especially, whilst not the original social networking medium on the internet, now has over 500 million users worldwide. In fact, that’s how many users they had before they made a film about the website. That’s right, the website is so popular they made a film about it. So you can bet your hind legs people use it. And more importantly, they expect you to use it too. We’ve covered on this website previously the importance of managing your presence on social networks, so I’ll make this as brief as possible. Even if you don’t feel you have time to commit to running a social networking site alongside any other official business websites you have, you still need to have a profile people can find. If you don’t have control over a social networking page pertaining to your company/brand name, who does? There’s nothing stopping anyone else setting up a page with your name on it and making a mockery of your business, so don’t give them the opportunity. It’ll take less than 15 minutes to set up a page even for the most technologically shy out there.

4/ Ensure You Are Sharing (Pre-Approved) Photos/Images

This one often gets overlooked even by the biggest companies/establishments. In the era of Web 2.0 and UGC (User Generated Content), everyone is a web publicist. And everyone wants pictures. Of everything. Even if it’s just for research, people will use search engines to look not just for websites, but images and pictures related to their keyword-based searches. So if somebody wants to search for, say, Oatmeal-Powered Motorbikes, and your company sells them; when they search for images of Oatmeal-Powered Motorbikes it should be YOUR Oatmeal-Powered Motorbikes they see. Image searches will display pictures relating to the search, and provide details of the image and provide automatic links back to your website. Also, you might want to have profile pages for key members of staff who might be the subject of User Searches – it helps with SEO and having official pictures of staff makes it less likely for searches returning results irrelevant or compromising pictures.

5) Addressing The World of the Blogs

People like to feel noticed. They like to feel appreciated, like they’re being kept in the loop and respected enough to be addressed directly. A blog can be a great way of presenting yourself to your market in the most professional manner possible. This can be done in the form of a personal blog from a company director, or a less personal company blog detailing business related updates (amongst other forms of blogs). Not only are you creating another website relating to your business that can rank in search engines results (potentially increasing traffic to your site too), but you can use them to relegate potential negative/rival content too. If you’ve got a good grasp on the internet goings-on, you might want to speak to existing ‘bloggers’ about doing pieces on your business. We’ll cover this later on in the week in more detail, so stay tuned for that – it’s not to be approached casually as it could backfire!

6/ Documenting Interviews / Podcasts

Another way of getting more positive content out there is by releasing interviews and podcasts from prominent members of your business. Interviews don’t have to be live question and answer sessions, but simply addressing a list of the most Frequently Asked Questions in a new and refreshing way. With the likes of iTunes and YouTube readily available to host videos, you can again give people content over multiple platforms to cover your bases. Don’t throw together a basic picture-based slideshow made from Windows Live Movie Maker or something pants like that, as making feeble efforts at videos makes you look ‘out-of-touch’ with the internet and will do more harm than good. But video diaries are great, and people can ‘subscribe’ to new content coming out of YouTube (and various other) accounts, and the more you do the more attention you will attract. Just, don’t go saying anything you’ll end up regretting – get your content reviewed by people who aren’t just going to blow sunshine up your *** prior to releasing anything.

7/ Set Up Your Own Review Sites

One of the things the era of user generated content sites have spawned is the concept of review sites. These are pretty self-explanatory; people go to these sites to either say lots of nice things about you, or it gives them a chance to moan and display their dissatisfaction with their experiences with you. Let’s face it, nobody’s perfect and you can’t please everyone (without going out of business), so there are going to be people who feel aggrieved with your business and service. If you’re having issues (or wish to prevent potential issues from arising) you might want to consider setting up your own, branded reviews site. If done right, it will rank in search engine results higher than the defamatory content and is another opportunity to show the internet all the best parts of your business. It’s best not to ‘fake’ positive reviews (or post false content anywhere online in general), but asking customers to send you feedback and being a bit selective over the submissions that make the final cut is OK.

8/ Press Releases

This is a very good way of getting high-ranking positive content out into the world of t’internet. While you have your own website(s), and now Social Networking Profiles, YouTube/iTunes channels and Official Blogs, you’re going a long way towards dominating the first page of search results pertaining to those ‘keywords’ we discussed earlier. With ‘Press Releases’, you can put official pre-approved content on 3rd-party websites too (ones that don’t belong to you!). This is a good alternative to Blogging if you don’t have the time to do both, as it offers a one-time official statement/story about your company and – here’s the important part – you get to write it (or at least have copy approval). It usually costs for this service for a good press release site, but is ultimately worth it. You also don’t want a bad/poorly performing site to host your content (counter-intuitive, right?) as it doesn’t help you in the likes of Google rankings. But yeah, go nuts. Throw in some pictures, some “official company quotes”, write it in third person – you get a lot of freedom to play around with formatting but one of the key aspects is that it has to be interesting enough to read, so make sure it’s something worth writing about. Words for the sake of words wont add any value to anything.

9/ Own Your Brand Name

Again, this might sound like stating the obvious, but there’s actually a bit more to it than you might think. One thing you really need to do is make sure that you control basic derivatives of your primary domain name. For instance, if I were to have www.kenisgreat.com (which I don’t, but, well – maybe one day), I’d also be sure to have www.kenisgreat.co.uk too. If somebody else were to register the .co.uk derivative, I’d have absolutely no control over the content. Which wouldn’t be as bad if it were being run by somebody else also called Ken, and we were competing for popularity, but what if it wasn’t? What if it was being run by somebody called… Dave… and Dave specifically wanted to make a website dedicated to the absurd implication that Ken isn’t great? This is perhaps one of the most important things you should have control over, as people will regularly bypass search engines if they’re familiar with your brand name. Users can type in web addresses speculatively, expecting to find information pertaining to your brand. And if they don’t find you, they might then go to a search engine to look for you. Or, if they find something they don’t like, they might not seek your business at all. You don’t have to have different websites for different domain names (which can actually be counter-productive for SEO purposes), and in fact the more URLs (and references to the different URLs) you have pointing to the same webpage will improve its performance and site traffic. Visit a domain registration website for the different domain extensions available. You don’t need them ALL, but a healthy selection of the most common is advisable. Also worth considering are derivatives of the brand/company name itself. So www.brandname.com might become www.thebrandname.com or www.brandnameuk.com – it’s up to you. You could even register www.brandnamesucks.com – just incase some other joker decides they want to.

10/ Watching Out For Negative Content

Perhaps the most important part of Reputation Management is being able to respond quickly and decisively to negative content as it arises. And it will, there’s no getting away from it – this is the internet; freedom of speech and such. Not knowing if somebody is trash-talking you is the biggest mistake you can make though, as defamatory stories (true or otherwise) about you only need so much attention before the seeds of doubt are planted and start to take root. Obviously, you can’t spend all day watching the entire internet for people posting compromising material. That’s crazy. No person can be reasonably expected to do that. Which is why there’s software out there that’s been designed to do it for you. You can create ‘Google Alerts’ which basically performs continuous searches for specified search terms and returns new results. You can choose how often to get updated, or what time of content you get updated with, and choose where these results are sent to. This would include having them sent to an email address that’s connected to a smartphone device, so you can keep up to date, on the move, all around the clock. If you were so inclined, that is. You might also want to look into setting up RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds – similar system, but less Googlefied (a real word, honest). This basically takes feeds from all over the internet; monitoring the likes of blog posts, news entries, audio and video and relaying the information in a uniform format.

There’s a lot you can do to manage your own online reputation, and the above list is by no means exhaustive. Also, the above advice only covers the things you can/should do, and there’s a lot you should specifically stay clear of too. We’ll shortly be doing a follow-up post to this covering the Top Ten Don’ts of Reputation Management which you should also probably take note of. Meanwhile, if there’s anything you need help with or would like to discuss this topic further, check out the reputationmanagementfor.com homepage. We’ve been doing this a while and we’ve gotten pretty good at it!

What’s reputation management got to do with a guy who rarely goes out of his house, you may wonder. But, then like all great ideas that go ka-ching ka-ching and rakes in the money, this one is  so simple that you’re going to kick yourself for not having thought about it first.

Drum-rolls for Jason Sadler, a guy who wears T-shirts for a living and has made $85,000 this year doing just that. Jason wears T-shirts for all kinds of people – people like you and me, celebrities who have a new line of products to promote and even companies looking to get the word out about their products. He blogs about it, Tweets about it and even does live video streaming wearing the T-shirt with logos his clients have paid him to wear on YouTube.

Talk about having a light bulb moment and even as you say “why didn’t I think of that” Jason labours on for his clients who can get him to wear a T-shirt for $1 on Jan 1 and $2 for Jan 2 and so on till Dec 31 he gets paid $365. He is so busy that he plans to recruit an assistant in 2010 and expand to Europe and South America and is going to charge $2 for Jan 1 and $4 for Jan 2 and so on in 2010 with the – “two dudes in your shirt” marketing tag as he calls it.

Here’s a guy who will Tweet your grandmother’s birthday wishes wearing a T-shirt or inform the public of new line of products or even get your online reputation given a quick boost like Bill Cosby did with Jason’s help. 

Online reputation management has found for itself a new dude in Jason Sadler and his quirky idea and he works hard for his clients on Twitter, Facebook and Youtube. I give a thumbs up for this great idea.

SEO Online Marketing

So often when a company is looking to hire somebody for the intenet to help with marketing they will hand it over as an IT issue rather than a marketing issue.  This is often because companies still don’t get and understand how the Internet can help or hinder a company.  When you talk about advertising in a newspaper they get what quarter of a page looks like, SEO on the other hand is very subtle and often not obvious.

So many times I’ve heard in the past people saying I am getting my cousin, brother, friend to do our website, or our graphics designer is building our new site and so on.  One thing runs true no matter whether we are talking about online or ofline business, Location, Location, Location.  If I ran a large department store, would I build it on some little housing estate on the outskirts of town, or would I build it in the the prime shopping areas where the footfall would be 1000′s of times greater.

So taking that same attitude, would you get someone who has never ran a successful website online to help you with your online marketing, build your website and ultimately control you reputation online?  I hope your answer would be no.

When do you start your online marketing?

Again one of the biggest mistakes is to wait until your product or business launch and wonder why nothing is coming through your website.  We like to plan at least 6 months ahead to get the ball rolling, work on our marketing strategies,  start our SEO campaign and build good quality content.  Don’t leave it till the day you open for business as you will be dissapointed.  Of course you can also use Adwords to get the ball rolling but rlying on just this form of marketing can be costly.

Make sure to leave a budget for your online marketing, I remember talking with a developer who had built 200 serviced apartments to rent out as holiday lets.  They had spent £30,000 on towels and allocated £1,000 for online marketing and website….  Need i say more.

SEO and Reputation Management has to be part of your marketing strategy, there is only 10 places available on the first page, make sure you are planning to take one of those spots.

What’s amazing is how big companies still have no real understanding of reputation management on-line and how it effects them.  Here are some examples.

KFC

The Google search shows kentuckyfriedcruelty.com these kinds of search results can effect not only business reputation with customers but also shareholders.

Apple’s Iphones

This result is number 4 in Google could certainly put people off buying the Iphones.  The issue with negative results showing for your product is you never know how much it’s hurting and costing the comapny.

negative content results about iphones

Holiday Inn New York

Many hotels around the world suffer from sites like tripadvisor which normally have way more negative comments than positive ones.

Holiday Inn Hotel Reputation Online

So these are just a few quick examples of household brands who have not fully understood the need for managing the content on the first page results of search engines.  It’s no easy task and requires commitment from the company as well as the online reputation company.  Some industries naturally have a tougher job than others, take hotels for example, because of the nature of the industry they encourage 3 rd party websites to have content on them so they can make commission of bookings.  These 3rd party sites learnt very early on that customer feedback creates lots of fresh original content.  The problem created by this approach of course is more often than not people will write remarks when they have had a bad experience rather than a good one, so more often than not the content is normally negative rather than positive.

So how do you protect your brand and company reputation?

There is no quick solution to this, it’s really about creating good quality content  and keeping on top of the social network sites.  When we are creating content we put it into categories:

1. Top quality – this content is written for the main website and any press releases.
2. Middle quality – this content maybe out sourced and used for social net work sites and micro sites.
3. Lesser quality – this is used to fill the Internet with positive stories and helps push and support the top quality content.

Although we offer SEO services much of our work is creating positive content for clients and managing the whole online presence.  It is an ongoing battle making sure you keep on top of the online world, 1 or 2 articles a week just won’t do it if you have a global brand and you are going against 1000′s of people writing about you.