31 Places to Monitor Your Reputation Online
With the explosion of Social Media in the last 6 months, there's a lot of new places that marketers and business people need to start monitoring their reputation on. From search engines to forums to social news sites, knowing who's talking about your company, its executives, your products or services online, is every more important. Social media, whether marketers like it or not, is here and it's where Word of Mouth Marketing is starting and it also affects Search Engine results. So with that in mind, I compiled a list of places to keep an eye on. Feel free to comment, I'll add places if I've glaringly omitted a site.
Search Engines
Search Engines are the foremost place you should be looking
at managing your reputation. Who’s
ranking for your company name, executive names, product or services? Your own website should be, if its not, its
wise to figure out why you aren’t and another person is. You should also be concerned about who is
ranking around you, the classic example is a search for the brand term “Starbucks.”
Directories
The directories, although they can be outdated, are still a
place to make sure you are being represented in the proper way. When directories list your site, sometimes
they misspell things, or get a description of a site completely wrong. If you paid to have your site included, make
sure the submission is exactly how you want to be represented.
- DMOZ
- Best of The Web
- Yahoo
- Industry Specific Directories
Social News Sites
One of the newest places that you need to keep an eye on for
how your company, services and products are being represented. Although there isn’t much you can do to
correct inaccurate information on these services, you should be aware it is out
there and where its’ being reported.
Bookmarking Sites
It’s great when people can bookmark your website’s pages and
share them. It’s a headache when they
tag them wrong, or put in a wrong description and you start receiving traffic
from them for all the wrong reasons. Like Social News Sites, there’s not a lot you can do to correct these
errors, but knowing about them is half the battle, and knowing allows you to
prepare how to handle the inaccuracies.
Social Networks
Have you secured your company’s MySpace page yet? Yes, as silly as it sounds, a MySpace or
Facebook page for your company would be a smart move. It would stop impostors, and you could get
the added benefit of being able to spread the “true” news to a whole network of
very interested “Friends”.
Photo Sharing Sites
Photo sharing sites are a great place to share your logos,
product pictures, and even photos of events your company is sponsoring. It is also a place you need to monitor for
your company’s name, products and services. Like bookmarking sites, tags and descriptions can be added to photos,
and although you cannot do much to change someone else’s perception, it’s about
being aware of its inaccurate presence.
Blogosphere
The wild, wild west of the internet, where a bad name can be
created with one blog post, otherwise known as the Blogosphere. The most recent example of this is Jennifer
Laycock’s incident with the National Pork Board. Within hours, the blogosphere went wild with
this story. There have been other
incidents like the Kryptonite Bike Lock incident, Microsoft’s giving laptops to
bloggers, and Edelman & Walmart’s Flogging come right to the forefront of
my mind. You need to keep an eye on the
blogosphere, set up feeds to check what’s being posted about you, or look to
see what kind of “buzz” is around your reputation.
Be aware, and come up with a game plan how to fix your problem if one creeps up. Also making sure to “claim” your site/blog/name on services like Technorati and MyBlogLog are essential. The last thing you want is an impostor getting a hold of your brand and doing damage.
Other Sites
There’s a few other places that you should be aware of that
don’t particularly fall into a “category”, but are equally important because of
either the weight of their “perceived” authority or the viral effects and
ability to spread news.
- Forums
- Message Boards
- Wikipedia
- StumbleUpon
I tried to round it to a number, but I think 31 on is just enough for any marketer to keep an eye on. How about you, do you have any place in mind that I missed? Feel free to comment below!
Related:
8 Online Marketing Tips for Libraries
Social Media Sites: A Handy Reference Guide
What you have said here hits the issue right on the head. Online Reputation Management is becoming more important to a company's reputation everyday. As the Internet gets bigger and more diverse, ORM will continue to deserve more attention. For more information please visit: http://www.blizzardinternet.com/whitepapers/online_reputation_mgt.htm
Posted by: Michael Buczek | February 15, 2007 at 11:44 AM
I can add here answers websites such as Yahoo! Answers and the video sites such as Youtube. ps. I did a search on Yahoo for the term "starbucks" and two of the top ten results I saw had the word "default" as the title tags leading to int'l Starbucks sites. An opportunity for an SEO Guru to help them out?
Posted by: Sherwin | March 01, 2007 at 11:43 PM
Sherwin -
Normally I include those! I don't know where my mind was and why I didn't.
Social Video and Social Answers. I think I'll make a follow up article. Thanks for REMINDING ME! doh! *face palms* .... totally forgot!
Posted by: Li Evans | March 02, 2007 at 06:37 AM
Great post. I'd say review sites tend to have more direct commentaries on businesses and their reputations; they're getting reviewed after all, and people's opinions are being solicited. Yelp.com seems to be up and coming, but there's another one called repptide.com that specifically targets reputations for people as well as businesses. They've got a pretty unique system to track changing reputations.
Posted by: Christopher | June 06, 2007 at 12:49 AM
Thanks for bringing this to my attention, I have reviewed it myself now. A very enjoyable read
Posted by: jeff paul | December 20, 2008 at 10:29 AM
Not many people actually use DMOZ for searches in the same way that Yahoo is used, so the directory itself is of little value in generating traffic. However, its data can be freely downloaded, and any website, however small, can use it.
Posted by: knutselen | December 11, 2010 at 04:18 PM