While reading an article on social media and online reputation monitoring, I came across a paragraph that explained how the author monitors the social activity of her business partners and subcontractors. I found this to be very interesting.

The author explained that she first acquires the usernames of some social media profiles for any potential contractors and business partners. She then Google’s those names to see if there are any that are not divulged (NOTE: Sneaky tactic No. 1 can tell you a great deal about potential partners; it may be worth a try).

After locating all the social media profiles for potential business partners, this author explained that she rolls all of the feeds those people’s social activities into one master feed. (NOTE: Sneaky tactic No. 2 could very well be a way for employers to keep tabs of their employees; could be worth trying).

But if that isn’t enough, the author went on to explain how she runs the master feed through two filters. The first filter is a filter that looks for important keywords that she monitors. This is done to see how much those potential partners might actually know about important concepts they’ll be working with. The second filter, however, is really telling. The author explained how she uses red flag type words – “sex”, “drugs”, “party”, etc. – to see how personal and revealing her potential partners are while online. If there are any strong red flag signals that second filter will show it.

(Sneaky tactic No. 3: Ouch!)

Yes, this is very sneaky, but it can sure tell you a lot about the people you are working with or considering working with. This is also evidence of how important it is to monitor your own reputation to make sur that you are presenting yourself the way you’d like to be seen – by clients, potential partners, and anyone else. It sure adds a new spin to reputation management. Doesn’t it?

Online reputation management consists of three things. That is, is falls on the intersection of three specific disciplines, which are:

1. Public relations
2. Marketing
3. SEO

Where these three disciplines meet is where online reputation management hangs its hat.

First, public relations. This is the discipline that involves courting the media to engage them in a conversation that you hope will cast your business and brand in a positive light. Note that there are no guarantees. You are trying to persuade media – general and specific – to portray your business in a certain way, but they have their freedoms and you must respect that. Nevertheless, working on your relationship with media personalities can go a long way to casting your reputation in the best manner possible.

Marketing is different than public relations. Marketing is customer relations and market positioning. It doesn’t traditionally involve the media unless it includes paid advertising. The point is to build a brand and communicate your brand’s values to the market using communication strategies that tell your story.

SEO, or search engine optimization, the practice of writing online content in such a way that search engines favor it over your competition’s.

When you position these three disciplines side by side, you have online reputation management. Don’t leave it to chance.

One of the most important principles in business is to always be improving. Whether you are discussing bottom line concerns, marketing, product development, or customer service, continuous improvement should be your motto, or at least on your mind.

Companies to seek to improve their services and their processes while focusing on the customer are the companies that seem to make it in the marketplace. That’s not to say that these companies achieve perfection. In many cases, they are far from perfect. Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Dell just to name a few. We can all point to their weaknesses, but we know that these companies are continuously striving to be better. That’s how they come out on top and stay there for a long time.

Small businesses can learn from their larger counterparts when it comes to a strategy for continued improvement. Have you talked to your customers lately? Know what they want?

There are a variety of ways to stay in contact with your customers and to solicit feedback on your products, services, and processes. Especially online. But if you hope to be a leader in your field then continuous improvement needs to be on your lips every day. Don’t just speak it. Do it.

You know how important SEO is. Rankings, traffic, etc. And credibility. There is no substitute, right?

Essentially, once your credibility is shot, it’s hard to get it back. You can lose your search rankings and regain them. Sure, you hate to lose to the competition, but wouldn’t you rather your customers know that you are credible and trustworthy?

You hope you never have to choose, but if you do, make sure you choose credibility. You can’t trade your integrity for a ranking. Well, you can, but you shouldn’t. Rankings are temporal, they change. But your reputation is a near constant. It can change, and often does. Your credibility can grow in the eyes of your target audience, but it can shrink at as well. You hope you’ll always be seen as credible and you should strive for that as a goal. And in the meantime, work on those rankings. But don’t let them control your life.

The king of online reputation management, Andy Beal, is now turning on Dave Carroll, a musician who used a viral video to teach United Airlines a very important lesson in reputation management and the use of social media in customer relations.

Says Beal:

The follow-up doesn’t teach us, or United, any new lessons, but obviously Carroll’s not going to give up his 15-minutes of fame so quickly.

Could this stint backfire on Caroll? It well could. If the music listening public thinks he is simply trying to milk his situation for fame and to advance his career then there could be a backlash, or people could simply not buy his albums or attend his concerts. Viewers of the popular TV show “The Bachelorette” this past season got a sense of this when a musician by the name of Wes Hayden lasted for a long time on the show even though he had a girlfriend back home. His only interest in joining the show was to advance his music career.

Fans of the show were not endeared to Wes even as he carried out his charade. They were happy to see him go. I’m sure his music career didn’t take off like a jet plane when it was all over.

What’s the point? If you have a legitimate complaint and you’ve tried to work it out with a company through their customer service channels, feel free to badger them with social media. You’ll likely meet with success. But once the company has responded and given an indication that they’ve learned their lesson, it’s time to leave well enough alone. If you take beating up on bad customer service reps too far, you’ll end up needing your own brand of reputation management. Then you might as well just be a scumbag – like Wes Hayden.

The New York Times features a great article on reputation management for small businesses. To summarize, the key points made in the article are:

• Start by monitoring your reputation
• Use local search sites to manage your reputation
• When addressing negative feedback, don’t get emotional or take it personally; respond only after you’ve had a chance to cool off and reflect on it a bit then send a professional, courteous response to your critic
• Promote yourself through local search sites

Online reputation management is an ongoing activity, not a one-time reaction to negative feedback. The place where most people make the biggest mistake is in responding to negative critics. If you are professional and courteous you’ll find that many critics will soften their critique of you. You could win them over. Site like Citysearch, Yelp, and Superpages are great for local small businesses that want to be proactive in managing their reputations.

Twitter is being hailed as one of the best marketing opportunities to to arise over the last five years. As a marketing tool for small businesses it can really level the playing field. Unfortunately, like everything else on the internet, Twitter has become the victim of hacker attacks and the implications for reputation management are huge.

If Barak Obama and Britney Spears can have their accounts hacked and Tweets sent out in their names, everyone’s accounts are vulnerable. At present it is only the big name tweeters that are being hacked, however hacking seems to have its own community and it wont be long before there are hundreds of hackers attacking the site.

What can the hackers do to your business? A lot. Simply spreading false information is bad enough. Imagine having hundreds of customers turning up at your front door because someone has ‘twittered’ a $1 everything must go sale! Or ‘tweeting’ that one of your products has a major flaw and is being recalled. The problem will be exacerbated because you won’t be able to access your Twitter account to send out the correct information.

What can you do to protect yourself? Generally speaking, Twitter is a great tool for marketing. If you are reasonably careful and don’t reveal any of your account details, particularly to suspect requests for those details supposedly from Twitter (phishing emails), you should be okay. There are however other ways you can protect yourself, particularly if you a regionally based.

One aspect of Twitter that appears a little crazy is the hunt for followers. If you have been caught up in the flurry of following as many people as possible in the hope they will follow you – stop, and at least think about it for a moment.

If you are regionally based, the only followers of importance are those from your region.  Having followers from across the planet will do little for your business. If you are going to seek out followers, only seek out those that will gain from your marketing strategies. Your marketing strategy will fail miserably if you have a thousand followers, but only a handful of potential customers or clients.

Twitter can be a great marketing tool. It can also be a great reputation management tool. Used unwisely and it could potentially be a great reputation management killer as well. One final tip – subscribe to your own tweets either through a dummy account or through a personal account. You will at least know immediately if there has been an unauthorised use of your account.

Things are starting to happen. President Obama’s stimulus package is now in place, and people are just plain tired of being miserable. Besides, it’s spring. We’ve endured the winter, the economic kick in the gut, the financial fall out–but life goes on. Some people are fortunate enough to get new jobs, and even the real estate market showed a small sign of life last month. If you’re a small business and you’ve been limping along, it’s time to make some plans.

Eveyone has had to tighten the reigns, and even though it’s going to be a slow comeback, it’s time to think about the future. We had to nix those three and five year goals we made back in 2007, 2008 because it’s a “new economy.” But that doesn’t mean that you can’t regroup and make more realistic plans.

Stage Your Comeback by Asking These Questions:

What have we learned?
What are we really good at?
What’s the meat and potatoes of our business?
What areas can we specialize in?
How can we protect our business financially?
How can we best care for our employees and meet our financial goals?
What online and traditional marketing techniques have worked in the “new economy,” and what has proved less useful?
Who are we networking with–and who should be we networking with?
Are we using our tools (website, blog, e-newsletter) to build an online presence?
How can we incorporate “green” practices in your business and personal life?

Everyone’s office is leaner. Perhaps you moved your small business home, or had to cut your staff. Perhaps you sold off some of your product line or tailored your services to meet the market. Maybe you’re now offering maintenance to your customers more than you’e selling them new products. That’s okay. Now you know–what works and what doesn’t.

Begin to stage your comeback. Most likely, it’ll be a bit more conservative than those goals you made back in 2007/2008, but we’re different now. We’re all grateful to work, grateful to have a business, and we’re adjusting.

Your small business could make a difference–in your community, your online community, with your loyal customers who have stood by you. As you move forward–know that as our country rebuilds, you’re part of the new foundation.

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One of the best ways to ensure that only good things are being spread about you online is to take up those first several spots on the search engines yourself. How do you do that? Well, here are a few ways.

• Article marketing. Places like Ezine Articles tend to rank fairly high for specific keywords, so if you are targeting your main keywords in your article marketing, these are the articles that will show up in the search engines.
• Blogging. Blogs are much loved by search engines, so using one that will provide plenty of keyword exposure for your business and will give you a good chance of getting up there in the rankings.
• Link building. When you use link building techniques to boost your own business site and blog posts, you`ll beat out a lot of the lesser sites that may only mention you once to complain.

Getting your own articles, blog and website into the top ten spots on the search engines will mean that you control what people see when they do a search on your business or even keywords. It takes a lot of work, but reputation management is worth it.

I’ve discovered over the years that the one thing that is most important for any business – no matter what industry you are in or how big or small you are – is to build trust among your target market. Regardless of the strategies you use for marketing your business, you’ll never get anywhere if you cannot convince people to trust you. Trust is very important for building relationships and maintaining balance. So how do you build that trust?

The most obvious thing, of course, is to be honest. Nothing builds trust faster than admitting a mistake. And nothing shatters it more than ignoring or denying a mistake that is obvious to everyone else. But aside from that, how else can you build trust as you go about marketing your business?

• Articles – Articles are a great way to build trust. By signing your name at the bottom of an article loaded with great (free!) tips about your niche, you are telling people that you are a trustworthy and credible business source.
• Blog - A daily blog can go a long way to building trust, but you have to give it time. Success doesn’t happen overnight. The way to build trust through a blog is to be consistent with your posting and to provide valuable information to your target market over time.
• Hold promises to a minimum – No need to get all excited about what you promise to your clients. Promise a little and deliver a lot is much better than promising a lot and delivering a little. Set your clients’ expectations low (but not too low) and exceed them. There is hardly any better way to build trust (except to be honest).
• Be confident, be competent, and overdeliver – This may be restating what has already been stated, but confident business people like doing business with other confident business people. Be proud of your accomplishments. If you are competent in what you do then that is easy. Oh, and deliver more than you promised!

Building trust is one of the most important things you can do in business. By being consistent in what you promise and deliver, and delivering more than you promise, you can build the trust factor into your business as you build your business from the ground up.