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Author Christina Laun

Provided by Kelly Sonora at http://www.mastersincriminaljustice.com

With the advent of online tools that make it easy to share information, meet new people and keep in touch faster than ever, reputation has taken on a twofold dimension. Individuals and businesses no longer have to worry about their reputation in real life but in the virtual world as well, making it twice as hard to keep up with what’s being said. There are some ways that you can work to manage your online reputation, however, whether you’re doing it for yourself or for your business. These resources provide tips and tools to make it easier to track, control and manage your online reputation so you stay on top and in control of your personal and professional image.

Tips

Here are some general tips to consider when managing your online reputation.

1. Create official online profiles. Don’t let just anyone talk about you online. Create your own profiles and websites complete with the kind of information you actually want to be available about you.
2. Check what people are saying about you online. Whether good or bad you can do yourself a favor by finding out just what is being said about you online. Use some of the tools mentioned later in this article to keep yourself in the loop.
3. Stay on the ball. Don’t get lazy about monitoring your reputation. If necessary, perform monthly checks to see if there’s any information about you that could be potentially harmful.
4. Google yourself. The simplest way to find out where your or your company’s online reputation stands is to Google yourself. See what kind of results pop up first. If they aren’t what they’d like them to be, you’ve got some work to do.
5. Assume everything can get on the web. Both in your personal and professional life, what you say online and off can come back to bite you. Be safe and assume any emails, conversations or photos out there can eventually end up on the Web.
6. Choose your words carefully. If you are blogging, running a website or just have a social media profile, be careful what you post. Unless you’re looking for controversy what you say may cause you problems in the future.
7. Know your weaknesses. If you know your business has a particular weakness or are just familiar with your propensity for getting wild on the weekend, keep this in mind and have it as your top priority for checking on your online reputation.
8. Protect yourself from hackers. This may seem like it goes without saying, but many people fail to adequately secure their online information. Make sure yours is as safe as it possibly can be.
9. Keep social networks private. One way to deter prying eyes is to keep your social networking profiles private to all except those you approve. This will keep casual viewers from seeing your information, good or bad.
10. Consider pseudonyms.If you do want to keep a blog or engage in hijinks on internet message boards, create a name for yourself to hide behind so you can’t be easily tracked.
11. Be proactive. Instead of waiting until you have an issue with your online reputation, stay ahead of the game. Search for what’s being said about you regularly so you’ll stay up-to-date.
12. Act fast. If you do find something said or posted about you online that you feel could be particularly damaging to you, take action immediately. Whether its your friend posting photos from your Vegas trip or someone you don’t know slandering your business, taking care of it sooner rather than later is best.
13. Keep your cool. You may be incensed at what someone has said about you online, but don’t let it show. Keep your anger to yourself and off the internet where it can do more harm than good.

Articles

These articles provide some useful and informative reading material for anyone wanting to know more about online reputation both for businesses and individuals.

1. Protect Your Online Reputation: This article from SEO Chat lays out some basics for monitoring and protecting your online reputation.
2. Ten Tactics That Could Save Your Online Reputation: The CEO of Trakur gives some great advice in this Mashable article on how your company can avoid reputation meltdown.
3. How to Manage Your Online Reputation: This article goes through a number of tools and how to use them to keep your reputation intact.
4. Social Networks Become Powerful Tool in Online Reputation Management: Find out how social networks are playing a bigger role than ever in online reputation from this short article.
5. How to Create Online Reputation Tools for Your Brand: Worried about the online component of your company’s brand? This article gives some advice on creating custom tools to monitor and control your online rep.
6. Online Reputation Handbook: You’ll find just about everything you ever wanted to know about online reputation in this helpful handbook.
7. Manage Your Online Reputation: Lifehacker gives some great tips and pointers, as well as links to tools that can help you get control of your reputation.
8. How To Protect, Fix Your Online Reputation: From keeping problems from arising to fixing them when they do, this article is full of helpful advice.
9. Using Social Media to Manage Online Reputation: Find out how social media can be a help, not just a hindrance, to online reputation.
10. Basics of Online Reputation Management: Here you’ll learn the basics of getting your online reputation in order.
11. Managing Your Reputation Online: Technology Review provides this informative article that can help you understand and take action when it comes to your virtual reputation.
12. Online Reputation Management for Individuals: Online reputation isn’t just a concern for businesses, and this article explains how individuals can keep their name in good standing as well.

Personal Identity

These tools can help you manage your numerous online profiles, monitor your personal reputation and more.

1. ClaimID: Check out this program that uses OpenID to manage your personal identity over several sites, meaning you only have to remember the password for one, not numerous ones.
2. FindMeOn: Want to connect your identity over several sites? FindMeOn lets you do that while keeping your information private and secure.
3. FreeYourID: Make maintaining your online identity easy, with this tool that bases it directly on your name.
4. Garlik: If you’re worried that your identity may be more than marred and straight out stolen, give this tool a try. You’ll be able to search for mentions of you on the web that might involve identity theft.
5. myOpenID: Don’t worry about having multiple logins with this OpenID site.
6. SpyShakers: Try this tool to get access to any of your profile passwords remotely. It specializes in protecting your information from spyware.
7. TypeKey: TypeKey allows you to integrate your blog into your OpenID, allowing you to manage pretty much everything with one main profile.
8. Realmee: Here you can create a personal profile that will allow you to more easily control what others can see of you online.
9. LookUpPage: Want to control what people find when they search for you? This site helps out, by giving you a central page that comes up at the top when your name is searched for.
10. MonitorThis: Try out this site to monitor and track keywords over multiple search engines, giving you clues about who’s talking about you.

Professional Identity

Keep your business’ name out of the mud by protecting it with these helpful tools.

1. Trust-Index: Find out how well your business is trusted with this tool.
2. Google Alerts: With Google Alerts you can get email updates of the latest google results based on your name or other topic of your choosing.
3. BoardTracker: Whether you post on boards yourself or want to see if anyone else is talking about you, this tool makes it easy to filter to threads.
4. Vanno: Get an online reputation the democratic way, with this site that allows others to vote on the stories, videos and blogs about your company.
5. Serph: Use this search tool to look up your company and find out just what kind of buzz is going around the web about your company.
6. Searchles: This social search engine can help you keep up with the news out about your business.
7. Omgili: Search through the numerous forums out there to find out what people are saying about you using this helpful tool.
8. BoardReader: This tool is especially useful, allowing users to search through forums, videos, Twitter conversations, IMDB and more.
9. Joongel: Zoom in on the type of media you’d like to search with this online tool. Choose from videos, photos, shopping sites, and more.
10. Techrigy: This company makes it easier and simpler to monitor your business’ reputation online.
11. Keotag: Match blogs with tags that reflect talk about your business or related topics using this tool.
12. UpdatePatrol: This tool makes it easy to watch websites for updates and changes, which can sometimes be useful when you want to know what a particular site is saying about you.

Blog Tools

With the great proliferation of blogs out there, it’s worth your time to keep track of what’s being said about you on them. These tools make it easy and convenient to do just that.

1. Zuula: If you want to get posts just from blogs, try out this search engine. Users can also limit results to photos or videos.
2. SezWho: Follow who’s important in the blogging world and what they may be saying about you with this tool. Also useful to find out where your personal blog may stand.
3. Technorati: Whether you’re blogging personally or professionally, listing your blog with Technorati can be a big help in managing your online reputation. You’ll get updates whenever someone links to your blog so you can keep tabs on what people are saying about you or your business.
4. BackType: BackType is a service that lets you find, follow, and share comments from across the Web, allowing you to keep track of where you’ve been and what you’ve said on blogs.
5. TweetBeep: TweetBeep will let you keep track of conversations on Twitter than mention you or your business or anything else you’d like to track.
6. co.mments: When you sign up for an account with this site you’ll be able to track comments and conversations that can influence your online reputation.
7. Blogpulse: Keep your finger on the pulse of what’s going on in the blogging world, especially in relation to your business using the tools offered on this site.
8. Trendpedia: For businesses, this can be a valuable tool to track when and what your business is getting attention for and how you’re doing compared to your competitors.
9. Twist: Twist allows users to compare mentions of several different topics and view recent tweets about each one, making it easy to track info about businesses.
10. monitter: This tool lets you do much the same as Twist, but you can monitor topics in real-time or by geographic region.
11. Buzzlogic: Track buzz in the blogging world with this site, and find out just who’s word matters when it comes to blogs.

Profile Management

These tools make it easier to keep track of your social networking profiles and your online reputation in turn.

1. Comwat: Use Comwat to organize your social networking profiles into one so that its easier for others to find and easier to control what they see.
2. onXiam: Here you can establish a central online identity, use this identity to link up all your other sites, and even promote this new online location as well.
3. OtherEgo: Show off everything that you’re involved in on the net through this centralized site.
4. Zoolit: Check out this landing page service that makes it super easy to manage all the social networks you’ve been using.
5. Venyo: From lengthy blogs to simple comments, this site allows you to access everything you’ve done online, building up a trustworthy reputation at the same time.
6. ProfileMat: Pull all your existing online profiles together into a “mat” and allow users to comment on this new singular profile instead.
7. SimplifID: This site allows users to organize the online world by creating one central place you can access your blogs, social networking sites and more, allowing you to categorize it by type of viewer.
8. SocialURL: Here you can connect all your online identities by linking your social networking profiles to one URL.
9. ProfileBuilder: Want to create a professional looking profile using material from your existing social networks? This site lets you do just that, keeping or blocking the elements you choose and giving you a super useful home page to visit.

Managing Your Reputation

These tools allow you to hunt down what’s being said about you and find out just what others think of you or your business.

1. Naymz: Give this site a try to get feedback from people you’ve worked with, customers and friends.
2. Rapleaf: Here you can look up your personal or professional reputation, rate other people and businesses and get your own ratings.
3. RepVine: Using a search engine is the easiest way for people who want to know about you to find out more. This site helps you to control what they find when they do this.
4. Keotag: Manage the blogsphere with this site that allows users to find tagged blog posts over several blog search engines.
5. TrustPl.us: Are you trustworthy? This site works by analyzing your or more like your business’ trust scores and giving you a ranking.
6. FriendFeed: Whether you want to keep up with what your friends are looking at or keep up with what’s being said about you personally, this site is a useful tool.
7. Social Media Fire Hose: This helpful tool tracks your name, brand or product across sites like Digg, FriendFeed and others that specialize in social media.
8. Radian6: This tool makes it easier to monitor social media, often to the benefit of businesses who can use the information to their advantage to build better reputations and products.
9. Cision: For a fee, this tool can help you monitor “100 million blogs, tens of thousands of online forums, and over 450 leading rich media sites.”
10. Web of Trust: Ensure your website is considered trusted by joining up with this site. After all, no one wants to be associated with a dangerous site– it’s just bad for business.

General Tools

If you haven’t already, bookmark these sites which can be a big help in maintaining your reputation positively online.

1. Digg: Check out Digg regularly to see if anyone has submitted stories about your or your business.
2. Reddit: Similar to Digg, this site will allow you to see how much interest there is you on the Web.
3. delicious: This social bookmarking site is a good place to see if your webpage or information about you or your business is being passed around by others.
4. Flickr: Think there may be some less-than-impressive photos of you out there? Trying searching this photo site to see if you come up.
5. Facebook: Facebook can be a great place to network, just make sure you keep your profile free from things you wouldn’t want spread about you.
6. MySpace: With millions of visitors, this popular social networking site can be a great place to get your and your business’ name out there.
7. LinkedIn: Here you can create a professional profile that will allow you to interact with others in your profession in a safe and positive manner.
8. Google: There’s no easier way to find out what your online reputation is than to do a simple Google search.
9. Rollyo: If you want a more customized option for searching, try out this great search engine that you can tailor to your online reputation finding needs.
10. Furl: Another social bookmarking site, here you can track who’s interested in your sites.
11. Twitter: Whether you want to communicate with others or track the buzz about you on the net, Twitter is an essential tool.
12. Wordpress: If you’re going to start a blog to be the face of you or your company, this site makes it easy to do so.

Author:  Dustin Woodard

Online reputation management is increasingly important as more and more friends, family and employers search your name. Even if you are always on your best behavior online or you have a fairly unique name, as the population swells and more people become creators of content on the web, there’s a great chance that people will mistake others activity online as your own!

Controlling or managing search rank for your own name is fairly easy for an SEO (search engine optimizer), but what can the average person do? Below I outline a number of free, quick, easy and effective ways to populate the first page of results for your name. I highly recommend people start creating content for their name now as it will be much more difficult after waiting for someone else with your name to muddy the search results to spur you to action.

1) Create a Blog
Even if you build just a one-page site using your name on a free blog network, you can quickly use your blog to create pages about yourself and link to other pages you are going to create on this list. Use your name in the blog name.
Estimated time to complete: 10 minutes
Free Options: Blogger (blogspot), Wordpress, LiveJournal

2) Create a Wiki
Several wiki platforms have done a great job of creating publishing tools that are even easier to use than most blog technology. Though wikis are best suited for group collaboration, the will also work well helping you link to your blog and other pages. Use your name in the wiki name.
Estimated time to complete: 10 minutes
Free Options: Wetpaint*, Wikia

3) Register your domain
If you are lucky enough to have [insertyourname].com (or .net, .org, .info) available, snatch them up. The $8 a year fee is well worth it even if you don’t actively build a site using it because, at the very least, you are preventing your competition (other people with your name, or people who don’t like you) from ranking high for your name. Even better, use your domain for the site or wiki you are going to create.
Estimated time to complete: 5 minutes
Cheap Options: GoDaddy, Yahoo,1&1

4) LinkedIn
Set up a LinkedIn profile and make it publicly available. Add background info like education, employment history, awards or certification (or anything else you are proud of). Add links to your other sites/pages.
Estimated time to complete: 5-10 minutes

5) Jobster
Some people are a little shocked when they find out their Jobster profile shows up in search. Not you, because you want it to! Create a jobster account, allow it to be publicly available, fill out a little employment info, answer a couple questions, but write it keeping in mind that your current employer could come across it.
Estimated time to complete: 5 minutes

6) Myspace
Myspace pages tend to show up in search as well. Though Myspace has probably ruined more people’s reputations than helped, you will create a clean Myspace page for your name and, if you feel the urge, put the racy stuff on a different profile.
Estimated time to complete: 5 minutes

7) Flickr
Flickr accounts and images have a great chance of showing up in the engines, especially for image searches. Creat an account, upload a few photos you like and label them with your name.
Estimated time to complete: 10 minutes

Comment on Popular Post
Sometimes I see a commenter’s name show up in search. Find a popular blogger site or newspaper site that allows comments, and find a post that you feel comfortable commenting on. Use your real name for the name field. Try this on a couple sites.
Estimated time to complete: 5 minutes

9) Employer Site
If your employer features profiles on their website, ask them to add one for you. If not, talk them into it or author a post on their blog (if they have one).
Estimated time to complete: 5-30 minutes, depending on your company

10) Join a Forum
Do a search for a forum that you might want to participate on. For example, if you are into guitar, you should search for “guitar forum.” If it looks like a place where it would be easy for you to make five or six posts, then sign up and use your name for your profile name. Make your five posts and fill out your profile page with information about you and use your name at least once in the profile description.
Estimated time to complete: 15 minutes

*Disclosure: I work for Wetpaint, but honestly believe their wiki solution is the best option

In the future, Facebook might also be an option. They recently allowed profiles set to public to be crawled, but they are showing logged-out status of your profile, which is basically your name and picture right now. Eventually, I believe, Facebook will open it up to show your full public profile (probably in ‘08).

Keep in mind, Google usually only shows two results for any one site. That’s why I have you contributing on multiple sites. A couple more tips:

• If you ever receive a great interview or bio online, link to it from your sites.
• For online activity that you don’t want to be associated with your name, use a nickname or “handle” that is completely different from your real name.
• If you have stiffer competition for your name, you may need to spend more time building out and linking to the various options I list above.

Author: Cynthia Mosher

Building a name for yourself is essential to success in today’s internet business world. People want to do business with and offer their money to people they feel they can trust. These ten steps will go a long way to helping you build a reputation of trust with your visitors.

1. Present a Real Face
Showing your web site is a legitimate physical business you will boost your site’s credibility. The simplest way to do this is by providing a physical address and telephone number for voicemail contact. It also helps to post a picture of yourself or your office and place a list of memberships you belong to such as the chamber of commerce and professional organizations for your business field.

2. Provide Authority
Give authority site links to research and information you present. Even if the reader does not check your information, seeing the respected source of your statement instills trust in your information and your site. And just the opposite - don’t link to outside sites that are not credible. Your site becomes less credible by association.

3. Highlight Your Staff
People like to know who runs things behind the scenes. Offer brief “about us” information for your staff, even if it’s just you and your partner, freelancer, or virtual assistant.

4. Share Your Experience and Expertise
Are you an expert on some topic? Make that known on your site, in your About Us page and wherever appropriate in articles and resources. List your education and accomplishments in specific areas of knowledge and training.

5. Be Reachable
People like to feel there’s a real person there to communicate with. Give a personal email address and answer promptly. Provide a physical address, telephone number and fax number if you can. A customer help desk is a good addition for a busy site too. But most importantly, respond to their needs as soon as possible.

6. Present a Well Designed Site
Lots of people judge a website by its cover. Provide a professional look but keep it user friendly and consistent. Your design should be appropriate for your business and inviting to internet users of varying experience.

7. Keep it Simple
That snazzy flash page may dazzle some but for many others it will simply be overboard and they will click on by. Use the basics that load quickly and perform well for all internet users and don’t require them to update their computer software to view your pages. People are looking for information and they want it quickly and easily and don’t want to upgrade to get it.

8. Provide New Content Regularly
A site with the same content your visitor saw last month or even last week will give a feeling of absence or abandonment. Keep things current. Place new content weekly if you can. A blog is a great way to do this and you can schedule the content delivery to make it easy.

9. Keep Ads to a Minimum
Advertising should be for products or services you stand behind and should not constitute a large part of your site’s presentation. Featuring a new product or service every month or even every week can be fine. Just don’t bombard your reader with ads. It conveys a feel of your selling interest superseding your sincere interest in your customer

10. Present Clean, Error-free, Functioning Content
Spelling mistakes and broken links are a real turn-off. As an internet business owner you rely mostly on the written word to convey information and professionalism about you and your business. It is important that you present the best you can for your visitors and that it be functional and accessible when they need it.

Use these ten steps to establish your business online. Not only will you gain trust and respect online, you will gather a devoted audience that will spread the word. That’s the best advertising that no money can buy.

Internet Reputation Management

by Jak Smith

It has become common practice for people to surf the web for news and information about people, places and companies. Researching new products and services is commonplace. It is expected that a prospective employer will conduct a thorough online search of any serious candidates for employment. Google has become the online manifestation of Orwell’s imagined “Big Brother”. If the algorithm has dealt you a bad hand, it is best you learn how to confront it rather than hoping it will disappear by itself.

As a service to the companies and individuals for whom a search yields negative results, or may suffer from this precarious condition in the future, we offer insights into the world of online reputation management.

You are Not Alone

With the advent of bloggers, RSS feeds and web sites, anyone can define a person’s or company’s identity and challenge a website’s reputation and integrity. The rise and expansion of consumer generated media offers the public an opportunity to express their views. And this is being done at an unprecedented rate. People are expressing their views unabashedly, often with no regard for the consequences of what they are writing, and with little for concern for the veracity of their comments.

The more a product, brand or company is exposed to public attention and scrutiny, the greater the likelihood that someone will want to challenge its reputation. This can include dissatisfied clients, customers and competitors, who may have legitimate complaints or rumor mongers and vindictive web site wizards, whose sole purpose is to challenge another website’s integrity. For example, 29 of the Fortune 100 Companies have at least one negative postings when “Googled”. These postings range from bad business practices and discrimination, to accusations that companies are connected to paramilitary death squads.

Negative postings are not only surfacing on large or even medium corporate search results. Stories, rumors and press accounts that date back a decade or more are also traumatizing ordinary people. Seemingly innocent pranks and mischievous adventures that college students may have engaged in, have appeared in top positions of search engine listings seriously damaging their reputations, careers and lives.

You Can Take Charge

Combating the tribulations of a negative Google listing means taking charge of the search results that come up for your name, company, etc. If left to the vagaries of the search engine’s algorithm, you can easily fall victim to the whims of arbitrary conjecture, opinions and rumors. When you decide to take charge, you need to confront the search engines in a proactive and forthright manner, rather than adopting a passive or defensive posture.

Online reputation and search engine optimization professionals will tell you that it is no longer an issue of “if” you should be managing your online reputation, the question is “how” you should be managing it. And don’t assume that just because you are happy with the results of your own personal search today, that situation will continue indefinitely. Being on guard means:

1. knowing that the situation can turn against you and
2. having the ammunition to combat the rumor mongers when they strike.

Like the proverbial lawyer who, when deciding to represent himself, discovers has a fool for a client, most people, even those who are comfortable in the world of the internet, are not competent to deal with the major league players when it comes to online reputation management. When you are up against a challenger that has Google on its team, you don’t want your teammates to be from the minor league, even if they can boast a relatively high batting score.

Working With a Pro

Successful ORM, focuses on having sufficient links to blogs, articles, press stories and allied web sites so that when a search is run for your name, all of the material you have positioned appears. The problem starts when a stubbornly entrenched negative press story or blog, appears on your page, and it overpowers all of the listings you have put in place, how do you dislodge it?

Measuring Success

Regardless of who actually manages your ORM campaign, what is required is distribution of positive content and strategic participation in online discussions which results in the creation and posting of positive content on your site. A successful search engine reputation management program ensures that those looking for information about you or your company will see favorable content wherever your name or your company appears as search results.

Author: Artima

PARTICIPATION BREEDS PASSION

While listening to and participating in the conversation can seem intimidating and sometimes overwhelming, the benefits of doing this are impossible to ignore. Beyond the value of simply getting customer feedback, you can create relationships with each and every one of your customers, which was impossible before the blog. Participating in this conversation offers several benefits:

• Creates customer evangelists.

•Builds trust among your entire customer base.

• Helps you become a thought leader in your industry.

• Lets you share and gain knowledge.

• Provides product feedback.

• Uncovers new growth opportunities and new markets.

In fact, the ways in which blogging benefits your business are limited only by the creative ways you can find to use blogging, be they through internal blogs that get your employees the information they need to know, external blogs that help you become a leader in your industry, or product-specific blogs that let your customers interact with you in a meaningful way. Whether an individual is a saboteur or an evangelist, every relationship you create and every time you step outside the boundaries of your company, you can create positive new experiences with each and every individual with whom you interact.

CREATING CUSTOMER EVANGELISTS

One of the most powerful benefits of blogging is that it helps you create evangelists. In their 2002 article, Creating Customer Evangelists, Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba tell us that passionate company evangelists can inform and empower your customers to carry your brand’s message to others.

Customer evangelists are powerful tools. When you give other customers the power to embrace your brand, they will take your brand’s message with them wherever they go, telling others about their experiences with your company and thereby extending your brand in a positive way that would not have otherwise been possible. Passionate messages can spread like wildfire; as soon as one passionate person enters a community, the dynamics of that community completely change. Most customers will become happy evangelists for your business and products if you provide enough positive experiences.

They need to love your company and your products, even if your products aren’t “perfect.” Creating passion isn’t about making people like you; it’s simply about using your passion to fuel more passion. The reality is that companies that create a stir, live on the edge, and try new ideas are going to be both loved and hated. And, just as in any relationship, sometimes you can’t be sure whether a customer is a true friend unless you listen to what he or she has to say. A blog is the perfect place for that.

BUILDING TRUST WITHIN YOUR CUSTOMER BASE

The best way to build trust is to be consistently trustworthy. Doctors earn trust after years of being fair, caring, professional, and knowledgeable. Similarly, your business builds trust with your customers in the real world by delivering on your promises. For example, if you promise to have the best prices but don’t, you are betraying your customers’ trust; if, however, you deliver on that promise consistently, customer trust increases as a natural result. Blogs are a great way to build trust, because they allow you a real person, and not some corporate marketing brochure to communicate with your customers, users, and community more regularly than any other medium allows. Ideally, your blog should attract at least one posting per day as a result, you have an opportunity to build trust by delivering on your promises daily.

BECOMING A THOUGHT-LEADER

Thought-leadership isn’t a new concept; it was proposed in the 1960s and finally given a name in the 1990s. The term refers to the ability to lead by proposing new and innovative ideas. The modernday application of thought-leadership with regard to business has been applied to companies that publish respected industry newsletters, participate in conferences (or host their own), and generally disseminate information in the hopes that more people will be exposed to the company and willing to invest in its products. The strong appeal of thought-leadership–based marketing makes a lot of sense, as becoming more visible relative to respected information ultimately means more interaction with customers and potential customers. The challenge for most companies engaging in a thought-leadership campaign is that it can be expensive. Maintaining newsletters, attending and speaking at conferences, and remaining publicly visible isn’t easy or cheap. Blogs provide a unique opportunity for thought-leadership in that they allow businesses to publish information people want in the way they want it. Add to that the ease of finding, subscribing, and contributing to blogs, and it’s obvious that blogs are one of WHY BLOG?

This question is an important one. Paul Chaney, a prominent blog consultant from Radiant Marketing Group, compiled this list of reasons why a business should blog:

• Search Engine Marketing Blogs give you an increased presence on major search engines like Google and Yahoo!.

• Direct Communications Blogs provide a way for you to speak directly and honestly with your customer.

• Brand Building Blogs serve as another channel to put your brand in front of the customer.

• Competitive Differentiation Because blogs give you the opportunity to tell your story over and over, they help set you apart from the competition.

• Relational Marketing Blogs allow you to build personal, long-lasting relationships with your customer that foster trust.

• Exploit the Niches Blogs help you fill your particular industry niche.

• Media & Public Relations Blogs are excellent PR tools. The media calls you, not your competition.

• Reputation Management Blogs enable you to manage your online reputation.

• Position You as Expert Blogs enable you to articulate your viewpoints, knowledge, and expertise on matters pertaining to your industry.

• Intranet & Project Management Blogs make great, easyto- use applications for internal communications within an organization.

This may be one of the least well-known and underutilized areas of blogs. the easiest ways to engage in a thought-leadership campaign. The challenge, of course, is that you still need to create material, research and comment on news, and generally discover and impart information of value as you would via any other medium. Most companies that are highly attuned to their industry are aware of these challenges and are already addressing them.

TRANSMITTING VS. ENGAGING

Most businesses and companies function in a “transmission” mindset. When they have a new product, they exhibit some kind of advertisement be it a sign in the window out front or a national television ad. They try and create buzz by displaying SALE ! in advertisements and in the window, in great big letters that are impossible to miss. The reality is that people don’t want to be talked at, they want to be talked with.

Companies around the world are beginning to realize that while transmission-based communication is an important part of getting out your message, far more effective tools are at their disposal. Dialogue is a powerful way to broadcast your message while simultaneously getting customer feedback. Before blogs, press releases were one of the best ways to communicate news about your company. You’d send the press release to a local paper or wire service, hope that some fraction of journalists would pick up on it, and then you’d gain some exposure for a fairly low cost.

The problem with press releases and similar transmissionstyle endeavors, though, is that after the press release leaves your company, you rarely see any return. Traditional response rates for transmission-based advertisements, such as television ads, radio campaigns, and press releases, is reported to be a measly 1 percent. At best, you might see an article or two in the news, though most likely it will just be a regurgitated piece from your press release. Or worse, you hear nothing at all. Tools such as blogs allow you to go beyond the press release and traditional media coverage. They help you engage with your customers and create a real dialogue.

These dialogue-based initiatives don’t replace press releases, advertising, or focus groups they compliment them. Consider Boeing, a leading aircraft and aerospace manufacturer, which began ramping up the production and marketing of its new plane, the 787 Dreamliner. The company used the traditional transmission-style marketing: press releases, launch parties, media tours, interviews with engineers, and the like. However, Boeing also allowed Randy Baseler, vice president of marketing, to blog (www.boeing.com/randy). Through his blog, Baseler was able to extend the message into a dialogue that included information about a Boeing competitor’s offering, the Airbus A380. Baseler responds to posts on other blogs, discusses what other blogs are talking about, and reads a vast cross-section of flight and aviation blogs. This blog allows Boeing to use a transmission-style message, which is great for getting the cold hard facts out to the world, as well as a personal dialogue, which is great for communicating passion, having a conversation, and listening to what customers and aviation enthusiasts think.

Search Engine Reputation Management (SERM) involves both search engine marketing and search engine optimization. Unhappy consumers, political groups, competitors and disgruntled employees may have an interest in posting negative information about you and your company. We take control of search engine results employing optimization as well as marketing to manage and control damaged corporate identities and reputations on the internet.

Author: Rob Sullivan 

Over the past few articles I’ve brought you different tactics you can use to help build quality links to your site.And while I am going to continue to bring you even more of these tactics I thought it would be good to step back and take a big picture look at why link building is important.Further, I wanted to look at other things you should be considering when you are doing your link building: Namely managing your online reputation.

As the web evolves, reputation management becomes even more critical to your online business. This is because many people will form their opinion of your or your business based on the sites found around you.

An upset former customer can do a whole lot more damage to your reputation online that you may suspect. If they are a popular blogger, for example, and are able to call on their network of sites to help promote their negative view of you, it can have a detrimental impact on your search rankings.

This is because they can use a tactic called link bombing to rank higher than you for your name or the name of your company.

What do you mean links can be bad?

Just like how you need to build links to improve your link popularity and ultimately search engine rankings, links from other sites can work against you.

Let me give you a practical example:

If you do a search on Google for “miserable failure” or “failure” you will see that President George Bush’s White House bio is ranked number one. This is an example of many thousands of sites linking to the site’s bio page, with the anchor text “miserable failure” and “failure” in them. Google then counts these links as votes for the site for that phrase. Since the site receives the most votes it ranks the highest.

But this is just one example of using links to negatively influence search rankings. There is another where personal sites and blogs have used similar linking strategies to outrank corporate websites for negative terms.

I once talked to an attorney who was ranked #2 for his own name behind a blog site which went on about how terrible an attorney he was and how you shouldn’t hire him.

The blog site took advantage of the system by requesting links on the attorneys name from other bloggers, thus moving it ahead of the attorney’s own site.

It is this type of tactic which can be used against you because in this case, short of legal action, the attorney would have to build even more links to his site for his name than the negative blog.

In the mean time, however, the blogger continues receiving links as other sites which link to him now request the same links. It becomes a snowball effect. One link leads to three, which leads to ten, then a hundred, then 500 then 1,000 and so on.

That is the real power of blogging – the ability to quickly build links back to your site on virtually any phrase you chose to target.

And since bloggers have that much pull, they can (and in many cases do) use that ability against you.

But it doesn’t have to be just bloggers that do that. Any site that has the pull can post a derogatory page about you and flood the web with backlinks, through submissions to thousands of directories and other sites which don’t check for quality and will accept automated submissions.

And the kicker of this is, by the time you realize it has happened to you, it’s almost too late.

That’s because those links were submitted months ago and have passed Google’s aging policy. The only way you can combat this is to build a similar number of positive links and wait the same time until Google approves the links and adds them to your link inventory.

As you can imagine that can take some time so in the meantime your site suffers because of these negative tactics which were begun months ago.

So how you do combat negative links?

There is no real way to combat them. Once they are there they pretty much exist forever. The only real strategy is to ensure that you continue to build high quality relevant links to your site. Thus, you are essentially taking preventative action against those who may not have your best interests at heart.

That means using the tactics I’ve described in some of the recent articles, and continuing to monitor your link popularity.

It also doesn’t hurt to subscribe to services like Google Alerts. I use this to monitor a variety of keywords both in the news and in the organic rankings.

You could create an alert for your name and receive emails whenever there is a mention of your name – either through the news, or when a site begins to move in the organic rankings.

Then you can monitor a few sites to ensure that nothing magically appears ahead of you that is negative in nature.

And if you do find a negative site that appears on Google’s radar, at least you can take a somewhat proactive stance and begin building positive links at an increased rate, to keep them down in the rankings, and solidifying your position.

Summary

I don’t want to scare you with this. It’s not something that is rampant on the web. In fact, the average person has no idea how to “trash” you online, other than perhaps posting a negative comment on your website (if you allow commenting).

All I wanted to do with this article was to let you know that such individuals do exist. And they do have the power to supplant your positive online image with a negative review of you even if it is untrue.

But if you follow the rules of good link building you can help prevent such attacks from happening to you.

Online Reputation Management involves both marketing and public relations along with search engine marketing. Visibility and high search engine indexing with good publicity which displaces negative publicity is the goal. This results in a increase in positive web presence, helping you own top spots in search engine rankings. Online Reputation Management enables you to protect and manage your reputation becoming actively involved in the outcome of search engine results.

Cincinnati Enquirer - Facebook prank turns bad - December 21, 2007

ComputerWorld - Online reputations under threat - December 7, 2007

Kremlin Seeks To Extend Its Reach in Cyberspace - Washington Post - October 27, 2007

Philadelphia Inquirer - New web site is not fair to doctors - October 15, 2007

Washington Post - Ten Ways to Generate Good Web PR - October 10, 2007

Dealing with the Damage from Online Critics - New York Times - October 4, 2007

Office gossip has never traveled faster, ‘thanks’ to tech - USA Today - September 9, 2007

Defending Wikipedia’s Impolite Side - NY Times - August 20, 2007

The Saboteurs Of Search - Forbes.com June 6, 2007

USA Today - Your Internet Image is Everything - USA Today - April 5, 2007

Trash Talk
- Wall Street Journal - March 19, 2007

Harsh Words Die Hard on the Web - Washington Post - March 7, 2007

Your past is lurking online - Boston Globe - Feb 25, 2007

Internet Defamation can carry a Big Price Tag - Asian Tribune - October 12, 2006

Delaware Supreme Court Declines to Unmask a Blogger - New York Times - October 10, 2006

Harsh words Die Hard on the Web - Washington Post - March 6, 2006

Bias, sabotage haunt Wikipedia’s free world - Boston Globe - Feb 12, 2006

Hotel Reviews Online: In Bed with Hope, Half-Truths and Hype - New York Times - Feb 7, 2006

Delaware Supreme Court Declines to Unmask a Blogger - NY Times - October 6, 2005