Brand-Building & Reputation Management

If reputation management is a headache you’re already encountered, or if you’re one of the many businesses where your reputation could be attacked through no fault of your own, then you should prepare yourself to get busy on social media. The many social media channels are a proactive reputation management gift to anyone who would like to fend off a possible reputation attack, or fix a disaster that’s already happened.

Social media is the cost-conscious way of tweaking your brand in any direction you like: compare a cost of zero with the hefty price tag that comes with traditional media. And if you’re the type who doesn’t like to try anything until the big boys have tried it first, bear in mind that brand-giant Pepsi has decided to forgo its traditional superbowl ads on TV in favor of social network promotion online. The saving? Word is they’ve put aside $20 million to use as prizes for social media campaign, which involves competitions. Could that have been their previous budget for the superbowl ads?

Of course you can launch a paid social media campaign, which can set you back up to $10,000.00 per tweet. But I wouldn’t recommend it. This is missing the whole point of social media in my opinion, and if you do it right you could get exactly the same result without the disapproving looks (yes this kind of advertising can actually get you unfollowed on Twitter) or the hefty price tag.

Let’s have a brief look at how you might create a social media campaign

Facebook

All social media campaigns begin with opening an account and following best practices to make sure you don’t alienate your new network.I haven’t found a better or more comprehensive guide to using Facebook than Mashable’s. Highly recommended whether you’re new to Facebook or a seasoned user.

Create a Facebook Group and Fan Page for your product or service. Don’t beat people over the head about it, but share useful content and build friendly networks and your reputation will take care of itself. If you do a good enough job of this you could even find that a few of your friends are prepared to put themselves on the line to defend your reputation.

Twitter

Personally I consider Twitter the best reputation management tool of all. You can monitor what people are saying about you through the many Twitter search tools and address the comment if they’re bad. You can build fantastic friend networks, and like Facebook, if you’re a good Twitter friend, your contacts will likely do a great job of defending your honor online. Twitter conversations are often indexed, so can be searched through the engines, and not just through 3rd party Twitter tools.

Digg

If you can come up with a story or event that is so newsworthy that it hits the first page of Digg, you’re basically made. Online this is like making the front page of the NYTimes. Digg is not as much fun as it used to be though, and getting a story to hit the front page can be stressful. Personally I prefer to use Facebook and Twitter for fun and effectiveness.

What Else

There are many other social media channels that you might like to explore. Used together they can help you build a truly amazing social media campaign for brand building or reputation management.

Online, as in real time,  your brand is your reputation and your reputation is your brand. Any negative material about you or your business that shows up in searches for your relevant keywords needs to be fixed fast.

M

ake no mistake: those unflattering words can damage your business, reduce conversion rates and cause existing clients to look elsewhere. Here is a collection of effective strategies employed by professionals to make those nasty pages go away.

Before we get into technicalities, I’d like to mention three things not-to-do. First of all, don’t panic. The Web is not a static place and nothing is un-doable. Second, don’t even think of retaliating. This can only end badly and you’re far better occupied creating positive content for yourself. Last, don’t bother asking someone who has posted bad things about you on the Net to take it down. It’s 99 percent certain they won’t: save your dignity and show them what’s what with the following:

Strategies for reputation management:

1. It’s not just a matter of getting positive pages to rank above the reputation management challenges. It is a matter of pushing those bad pages so far down in the search results that even avid searchers won’t see them.
2. The first step is to create a complete list of keywords/phrases that might possibly be used to search for your service, or that might turn up the unfavorable material, including the company name as this is probably targeted too, and target those in web pages that you will optimize and promote for good ranking.
3. Arrange for posts on other people’s blogs that have good ranking: an active blog can have posts indexed immediately and will often show up in a search same day. If this is not something you can arrange, then contact a professional blogger.
4. Skillfully crafted content on your own website can do more than anything else to push down unfavorable web pages in a search. If you can’t do it yourself, then tell your story to a professional SEO copywriter, and let them take that load off your shoulders.
5. Create social media profiles: in particular LinkedIn profiles can come high in a search quite quickly for your keywords. Also, Twitter home pages rank well and quickly.
6. Create a Naymz profile: particularly good for ranking results.
7. Social media activity can significantly boost the ranking of your chosen pages with a strategic campaign of linking back to them in posts and articles. Open a number of social media accounts such as FaceBook, Bebo and even MySpace.
8. In particular the use of Stumbleupon to boost client’s pages so they climb above unwanted results.
9. Create a Flickr account and post photos of company, employees, company parties, products, and anything else positive that will utilize relevant keywords.
10. Create a Wiki on WetPaint
11. Create multiple pages on sites like Squidoo and WetPaint (which is my first choice these days).
12. Submit a series of press releases announcing worthy events in your business or niche, and, or developments in your career for example. Don’t forget to use relevant keywords.
13. Create a podcast or video interview–can be with you or an industry leader–post it to your website and a number of other sites such as YouTube.com. An interesting video (if things are bad you might even doing one addressing the claims of your accusers) can create a tremendous amount of buzz in a very short time. Here’s a video about creating podcasts.
14. Get on Yahoo Answers and create some relevant buzz there.
15. Start a blog if you don’t already have one and publish as many posts as you can with well-written, useful content targeting keywords that will compete with the undesirable pages. If you don’t have time then pay someone to blog for you.
16. Add a sub-domain to your main website and launch a PPC campaign targeting all the relevant keywords for this site.
17. Write articles and have them posted to other websites. Even better, have your satisfied customers mention you on a blogs and websites using your keywords if you can arrange that.

There are other strategies, but this is a manageable number that will get you results. Importantly, they aren’t too difficult to arrange. There is one other thing you should work towards: There must be some reason why another person posted unflattering material about you or your business to the Web. Get to the bottom of it. Find out exactly why and make sure that no one else finds grounds to reflect you in an unfavorable light online or off. Be the best you can be and treat people well and the Internet will be great to you.

Overwhelmingly, and tragically, online businesses approach the subject of reputation management entirely from the wrong angle. That is to say they don’t manage their reputation at all until disaster strikes.

Without any doubt Proactive Reputation Management is the way to go.

If you lay the groundwork your reputation is going to be a lot easier to protect. In fact, if you’re truly proactive in your approach, you should end up in a position where no one single miscreant could possibly affect the way your audience or client-base sees you. The stronger your online network, and the wider your reputation, the more difficult it would be for any entity to affect your status online.

So how do expert reputation management gurus go about protecting themselves? Most professionals talk about ‘strengthening your brand,’ but give very little concrete advice on how you should go about doing this.

Strategies like providing a great product or service are common sense, but it’s not always enough. There’s always going to be the odd person who doesn’t see your product for what it is and raises the roof because he or she feels they have been sold short.

It all starts with a rock-solid network. If you have good connections online, you will have an approachable group of supportive friends and associates who will be happy to help you out with some social media voting-up, and who may even bring along the strength of their networks too.

Creating an interactive blog or website can be a vital tool, as reputation management expert Andy Beal, owner of Trackur mentions in his interview with Martijn Ros.

When a company creates an interactive online profile, it’s effectively telling its stakeholders -customers, investors, employees, etc- that it cares about the community and wants to be a part of the conversation. When an online reputation crisis hits, companies that have an social media profile are more likely to be given the benefit of the doubt and more likely to be able to respond quickly, within that channel.

I advise my clients to look for the “centres of influence.” Where are their stakeholders hanging-out online? When you understand the types of social media your stakeholders are using -maybe they prefer blogs over forums -you’ll increase your chances of successfully engaging them.

Social media channels that you may find useful for establishing a thriving social network, depending on your market and your niche, include:

FaceBook
MySpace
Twitter
Plurk
FriendFeed

Next, consider a creating a large amount of press release activity. Certainly you can do some of it yourself, but if you could be mentioned in press releases issued by other companies that’s a whole lot better. If you have been generous with mentions for members of your own network, this shouldn’t be at all difficult to arrange.

Great places to post online press releases are PRLeap and PRWebDirect.

Many social media channels also have associated tools that will help you to monitor your reputation free of charge. Take Cherpa for example. This application allows you to type in a keyword or phrase and you’ll immediately see where the buzz is across Twitter. It’s amazing. Of course it has many other uses, but reputation management is a major one. Personally, I see it as such a useful tool it’s almost worth joining Twitter just for the reputation management possibilities alone.

Another free tool to see where you’re mentioned online is Google Alerts. It has its uses but I find it quite limited, especially when you compare it with a comprehensive tracking tool.

Trackur is not free, but it’s the best reputation tracking software out there. If you have had problems in the past, or if you are expecting reputation management crises, then this would be a modest investment that could really pay off in a big way.

There is a class of social networking sites that is not so much ‘social’ as professional, and while these won’t do you much good if you have a lot of negative stuff directed at you on the Internet, they are still powerful resources for getting the word out about you positively.

LinkedIn
Xing
Ecademy
Ryze
Yorze

LinkedIn has a facility for having your professional associates leave feedback about you. While the system can be abused, it still has it’s uses and the person leaving feedback has to have a LinkedIn account and cannot comment anonymously.
To get the maximum benefit from this kind of site, you need to take a different approach to that you’re used to on FaceBook or Twitter. To get an idea of what’s acceptable and what’s not, you might find these tips for using professional networking sites over at the Washington Post quite useful.