One of the hottest topics that transcends the public relations, social media and search marketing worlds is online reputation management.
There are plenty of CEOs, executives, brand and business managers that are facing the dilemma of what to do about their company and brand reputation online. Some have been oblivious and have no real idea what customers and the marketplace are saying about their brands. Some are dealing with motivated dissenters blogging about negative issues and soliciting followers. Yet others are experiencing another kind of energetic consumer - evangelists.
Search engines are fantastic for finding things. They’re also a significant contributor to influence online. Blogs, forums, social networks and media sharing sites all offer venues for customers to express their opinions about brands - good and bad.
The influence of search visibility as well as word of mouth on social media sites (the social web) is too significant for companies with any kind of brand equity to ignore. Any company publishing content online or that has customers engaging with content online (producing, interacting or just reading) is a candidate for an online reputation management effort. That covers just about every company in business.
Don’t wait until somebody decides to launch a “yourbrandsucks.com” site because by the time a web site ranks well in the search results for your company’s brand names, you’ll be hard pressed to compete. It’s possible and will take both time and expense. It’s much better to be proactive about your online reputation management.
As with all things involving social media, the first step is listening. To find those dissenting and evangelizing customers early on and before they have a major impact, it’s impotant to implement a social media monitoring effort. This also includes monitoring search results on different types of search engines. There are plenty of tools to do this ranging from Google Alerts to Trackur to Radian6.
In the course of listening, those opinion makers and their followers will become evident and the task of qualifying current and future influentials will be an important next step. Some companies have enough community management staff to address nearly every concern they come across. A great example is what H&R Block and Zappos are doing by listening on Twitter.
Dissenters can be engaged by customer support staff and evangelists are often engaged by marketing staff. Other situations might necessitate legal, PR or product experts. The process of listening, qualifying and engaging opinionated customers online presents tremendous learning opportunity for companies that want to champion communicating on the social web.
A SEO-centric and proactive approach to search repuation management involves monitoring both search listings and social media, optimizing and promoting content in more locations than just your own domain name, analyze the effect of your efforts and refine as necessary.
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