Reputation Management For Online Businesses
If you own or operate an online business and aren’t actively monitoring the web for content related to your business or products, you’re going to eventually get burned by information you don’t even know is there.
Take my Wordpress Review Plugin, WFReview, for example. I wanted to make sure that I knew of any and all negative reviews of the product, or complaints even, and I wanted to know as soon as possible after the content showed up. I went to www.google.com/alerts and setup a few alerts that would notify me if my name, product name, business name, product misspellings, etc., ever showed up on a blog that Google recently indexed or found the RSS feed to.
Sure enough, a few days into the launch of WFreview version 1.0, I received some google alerts that hit on my product name. Thankfully, the alerts notified me of blogs that absolutely LOVED the product and were singing it’s praises from the mountain tops.
The real lesson here is you need to be proactive with your reputation. Everyone takes a beating sometimes, even if it’s totally wrong and unfair. Start by monitoring the easy stuff, your brand names, your business names, employee names, product names, COMPETITORS keywords, and anything else unique to your industry. This way, you get a TON of email that tells you 2 things:
- The trends in your industry as they apply to you. If someone is talking about your product as it relates to your competitor, that’s a good thing. Offer to sponsor the blog or post even. Get your banner right up next to the content, even if it’s neutral. People will recognize your brand and will be more likely to click through to your site.
- What others are writing about. Odds are if someone with a huge following is writing about your product, you can guarantee you’ll see some traffic from the post. Take the effort to contact the author to correct any misinformation or give MORE information. Giving them a very generous affiliate commission on your products is another surefire way to keep your name in thier posts.
Follow some others too, http://search.twitter.com is an excellent resource to find out what people say about you. Check it often and be sure to use misspellings of your keywords/products.
If a social media platform has an API, odds are great that you’ll be able to integrate a scheduled search function in your own reputation management system, which I’m sure you’ll be building after you do a few Google alerts and mentions of your business and products start rolling in…
Popularity: 2% [?]