Take Charge of Your Online Reputation - Monitoring Your Reputation
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The first thing you should keep in mind is that this isn’t really a new problem, it’s just moved to a new media. The earliest reference I could find to online reputation management after some quick research with Google dates to 2003, and compares it to the political phrase “spin control.” Now, the phrase “online reputation management,” without quotes, returns 806,000 hits in Google. And it’s no wonder. With so many people participating online on social sites, web forums, blogs, and in many other places, a flood of user-generated content could damage your company. But you can’t always see the tide.
Fortunately, there are tools that can help you find out how you’re viewed online. I’ve already mentioned checking the search engines. Many people put their names or the names of their companies into the search engines to see what comes up. You can actually set up alerts with the major search engines to send you a notification whenever certain terms get a new mention in their indexes. You’ll want to set up alerts for your own name, your company name and the names of any recognized members of your staff (you can bet the PR folks at Apple have alerts in for more than just Steve Jobs!). You may also want alerts for at least some of your products.
You will probably want to set up similar alerts with blog search engines. Feedster and Technorati are good places to start. Yahoo and Google also have blog search engines.
If there are sites or portals that are specific to your industry, you’ll want to check those at least once a month. SEOs, for example, would want to run searches on Search Engine Watch, Search Engine Land, and perhaps one or two other sites. Since you should be trying to keep up with the latest information in your field anyway, this may not be too onerous.
So what should you do if and when you encounter some negative press? I’ll be covering that in my next article. For the rest of this article, I’ll cover some of the things you can do to help you build up some positive momentum and publicity online.
One thing that you should NOT do, however, is panic. In late August last year, Search Engine Lowdown ran a post which talked about the response of some Shaolin monks demanding an apology from a Japanese “ninja” who claimed online to have beaten all of them in unarmed combat. It’s clear that the monks wanted to be taken seriously; on the other hand, hiring a lawyer to fight someone who has said something that no sane person would take seriously is probably not the way to accomplish this goal. The author of the blog entry on Search Engine Lowdown remarked that he couldn’t help laughing at the idea “of a bunch of monks sitting behind their lawyer’s table in a crowded courtroom.”
Next: Getting Seen in the Right Places >>
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