Reputation Management Online

Weapons of mass destruction to your company’s reputation…  so often we talk about the doom and gloom of reputation management and how sites like scam.com, ripoffreport.com, facebook.com to name a few can be used to attack your brand, company or individual’s name.  We have to talk about the negative side of not taking action all the time because businesses and celebrities just don’t get it.  Even if they do they quite often don’t allocate resources or funding to help prevent attacks on-line until its to late and the damage has been done.  You only have to look at what happened after the France – Ireland game with Thierry Henry’s hand ball, people are already saying they will boycott Gillette products on facebook and twitter, one profile has already generated over 50,000 followers in less than 24 hours, amazing.

So being Friday, thanks giving and also a new moon, I thought I should talk about all the positives of reputation management and how it can help drive traffic to your site.

So by developing a reputation management strategy, what you’re really doing is taking advantage of all the different sites and channels out there.  Sites like the BBC.co.uk are great example of taking advantage of technology, they were one of the first to take advantage of blogging and podcasts.  Putting out lots of positive content across all the available mediums not only helps prevent negative content but also allows you to attract more potential customers when they see positive customer feedback and stories.

Social network sites are a fantastic way to get news out quickly and effectively, many developers have been quick to take advantage and build applications for almost everything from your laptop to your iphone.  One of our clients next week is going to the RSNA  which is the largest conference in the world, the sales guys can walk around taking photos, interviews and general feedback instantly.   Anyone can become a journalist nowadays.

Creating pages on Facebook and allowing people to become a member is another great way to build a following of your product or service.  Cool applications that allow you to twitter can then be publish to your site and facebook at the same time.  There are 1000′s of great widgets and applications to choose from.  Blogs are also another great tool, again providers like wordpress have tools you can download to your phone so when you are sitting in the airport bored and feeling like you are wasting time you can bang up a post.

In today’s world where customers expect things to be instant its critical you keep your on-line presence up to date.  What’s almost as bad of course is if you don’t keep content up to date, I know I have to really get into a strict routine each morning to make sure I keep my blogs, twitter etc up to date.  If a customer finds a blog that has not been touched for 6 months, it can send out a negative message, is the company still running?  Do they not care about keeping information up to date? And so on.

The internet is becoming a really noisy place, so it’s important you use every tool possible to shout the loudest, much of the work we provide for our clients is daily posting and writing news articles and so on, the benefit of this is just how much traffic this can generate to your site.  You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand the more nets you throw out the more fish you will catch.

Using on-line PR sites is another fantastic way to also get stories to the top of search engines, often these types of services offer links to your own site, so more often or not if it’s an interesting enough story you can also get traffic.  If your really lucky and people start to Digg it, reddit, tweet it etc then it can really take off and generate a lot of traffic.

It’s very easy now quickly to generate over 50 plus urls all promoting your company and publishing articles and press releases you have written, ultimately you have more control and more of a chance at keep positive stories at the top of the search results as well as attracting more traffic and ultimately generating more sales.

Reputation management in my eyes is advanced search engine optimisation (SEO), its about developing a online presence which attracts more customers and at the same time control the content.  In very simplistic terms when ever you type in a search result there is always at least 10 results on the first page of Google, if you only have one website (and assuming it is optimised) then when someone searches your business you have absolutely no control what the other 9 results will show.  It’s a bit like owning a shop front but only using 1 tenth of the window and allowing anybody else to use the rest of the window for what ever they like.

Reputation management must be part of a companies strategy going forward the old ways or going out the door no longer can you rely on the traditional PR ways and damage limitation solutions, of course they have a part to play, but a shrinking part.