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Archive for the ‘Reputation Management’ Category
Thursday, August 20th, 2009
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.
Tags: credility, reputation, SEO
Posted in Reputation Management | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, August 19th, 2009
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.
Tags: music, musicians, Reputation Management
Posted in Reputation Management | 2 Comments »
Friday, July 31st, 2009
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.
Tags: negative criticism, Reputation Management, small business
Posted in Reputation Management | 2 Comments »
Saturday, April 4th, 2009
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.
Tags: online marketing for small business, Traditional Marketing for Small Business
Posted in Business Writing, Networking for Small Business, PR for Small Business, Reputation Management, Tools for Small Business, Traditional Marketing for Small Business | No Comments »
Saturday, January 3rd, 2009
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.
Tags: articles, links, Reputation Management, search engines
Posted in Reputation Management | No Comments »
Saturday, August 9th, 2008
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.
Tags: small business marketing, trust
Posted in Branding, Local Internet Marketing, Reputation Management, Small Business Internet Marketing, Traditional Marketing for Small Business | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 1st, 2008
One of the most important things you can do for your business online is to set up profiles at all of the social bookmarking and networking sites. If you don’t, someone else could.
Online, anyone can essentially steal your identity and pretend to be you, making promises in your name and not fulfilling them, doing all sorts of damage that you’ll spend hours upon hours upon hours cleaning up and still not sure if you got it all. That could be worse than cleaning up a negative credit report!
It’s up to you to protect your brand online and one of the best ways to do that is to set up profiles in your business name or brand and actively engage other social media marketers through those profiles. Even if all you do is set up the profile and never use it you’ll at least stop others from using your brand name illegitimately. Many social sites offer link juice for the links from your profile to your website so that alone is worth the effort. But actively using your profile by networking with others in those social sites could lead to additional business as you develop relationships. Not only will you be protecting your online reputation, but you’ll be building your business brand in a positive, forward-moving way.
Tags: Branding, link building, online reputation, social media marketing
Posted in Branding, Reputation Management | 2 Comments »
Monday, June 9th, 2008
Here’s an interesting experiment in reputation management. I like the way Aaron Wall concludes his piece:
Compare the above scenario with having a blog in the marketplace and building fans one at a time. Sure connecting with people one at a time is slower, but it is much less risky too.
If you are thinking about paying someone to do online public relations for you or you think that buying a review is going to get people excited about your business and you DON’T yet have a blog, I’d suggest you ditch the paid review idea and start a blog. Even if you hire a ghostwriter to write your blog for you, the monthly expense will do you much more good long term than any paid review will ever do. Plus, Aaron Wall makes a convincing case that when negative publicity goes viral it is as difficult, or more, to stop as positive publicity. And you can’t control what other people are going to say about you. You’d be better off letting them say it on your own blog than on someone else’s. Why? It’s an environment you can control.
When people comment on a blog, even if it is a negative comment, the blog owner benefits because the comments register as content and if you get enough of them then that pushes the blog post further up the search rankings for one of the important keywords. Do you really want to risk hundreds of negative comments on a positive review that exists on someone else’s blog when you could have your own blog ranking for those comments? And, get this, people are less likely to leave a negative comment about you on your own blog than they are someone else’s so merely having a blog is a small deterrent and reputation management tool.
When it comes to online reputation management, start at the basics. Own the property, allow people to speak their mind freely, and answer their comments about your company and its products with real language from real people. Engage and re-engage.
Tags: blogging, online reputation management, paid reviews
Posted in Reputation Management | 1 Comment »
Thursday, May 15th, 2008
Internet marketer Jane Copeland expressed some dismay over a people search engine called Spock.com. Essentially, this service allows anyone to set up a profile for anyone else and then the search engine will draw from various sources around the web to include information about you and anyone can go up and add information about you, whether it is true or not. There are several things wrong with this, but rather get into those and harp on things that will take more than a few blog posts to fix, let me suggest a few ways you can use this service as a positive reputation management tool.
First, you should set up your own profile before someone else does. As Jane Copeland says in her blog post, it can be a royal pain to fix inaccurate information once it is published. If you set up your own profile then you can set the pace for the information about you before someone else does. Plus, by including some basic information about you – websites you are connected with (and that includes social networking profiles) and people with whom you are connected – then the service can go from there to add other stuff that it finds about you. That leads me to my next two points:
- Be careful what you say about yourself online. Everything you do online is public record. If you’d be embarrassed by it, don’t let it get online. If you think that 20 or 30 years from now something can come back and haunt you, or if it’s something you wouldn’t want your children or grandchildren knowing about you, then don’t let it get online – anywhere. Even in the most private and secure areas of the Net.
- Update your Spock.com information periodically. This is not something you have to pore yourself over every day. Who knows if this service will be popular in the future? It could, like many other website concepts, just die. And if so then no bother. But right now, it’s alive and well. As long as it is live, it has potential dangers. From a reputation management perspective, it is better if you go in and update the information than if someone else does. So, once a month or so, just go by and make sure the information is accurate and up to date. If something is no longer true, add a change to the news segment (but pay attention to Rule No. 1 above). You don’t have to tell the world everything about yourself. Just make sure that what you do tell them is accurate and reflects your own sense of self worth and privacy.
Finally, don’t play dirty pool with other people’s online information. That’s bad karma, and besides, if you wouldn’t want them doing it to you then don’t do it to them.
Tags: online information, people search, Reputation Management, spock.com
Posted in Reputation Management | 1 Comment »
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