Online Marketing Tips Video: Online Reputation Management

By Li Evans

This week's online marketing tips video is all about online reputation management in social media and search marketing.  It's a little different look beyond just monitoring with Google alerts and buzz monitoring tools (the first tip).  Buy building relationships and loosing your grip, these tips can also help you with your reputation online.

Reputation Management Online Tips Video Transcript after the jump....

Reputation Management Tips Video Transcript

Hi and welcome back to Tuesday's Tips in online marketing. I'm Li Evans of Search Marketing Gurus and Serengeti Communications.This week I'm back with three tips in Online Reputation Management both for Search and Social Media. So these three tips are going to apply looking at your search engine results in google, yahoo and msn and also in different kind of social media sites such as forums, or on blogs. These are places where you can monitor your reputation and keep an eye on what people are saying about you. So lets get to it.

Know What People Are Saying About You by Monitoring

We're going to look at tip number one. Tip #1 is "Monitor"! Monitor, Monitor, Monitor. There's a lot of tools out there that can help you monitor your reputation. Free & easy, quick and easy tool is Google Alerts. You can subscribe through your Google reader to different types of key words to monitor and Google will basically send you whenever it finds something a list of all these different sites that are actually using these keywords. That can be your brand name, the CEO's name or any kind of company name, services, things that people are talking about that you want to monitor, you can use Google Alerts to help monitor that.

There's also a whole bunch of buzz monitoring tools out there, such as Radian 6. That is a tool that basically monitors the different social media sites and takes into account how people are talking about you, there's a little bit of sentiment analysis going on there. So you want to make sure you are doing some kind of monitoring so you can keep an eye on what people are saying and then you can react to it whether it's good, its bad or it's in between, you can decide because you are actually monitoring.

You Can't Manage Your Reputation on the Internet, But You Can Build Relationships

The next tip I have for you. tip number two is "Build Relationships". You cannot "manage" your reputation out on the internet, it's very, very difficult. But, what you can do is manage relationships. You can build relationships with people inside forums, whether they are the community leaders or they're bloggers, you can get out there and actually build relationships that can help you in a crisis situation. If you've established a really good foundation of relationships, a lot of times, bloggers or community members will come to your defense when something bad is happening. So this is a really great way to help get the word out about you, but also your reputation in crisis situations.

Give Up the Idea that You Are Still in Control

Third and final tip I have for today is "Don't Try to Control". You can't control what people are saying on the internet, its just impossible. People will say what they want to say and how they want to say it. They'll take your brand, they'll take your logo, they'll take your icons. They'll turn them into things you probably never even thought about. This is actually something really great. This is showing customer evangilists just going out there, they love your brand, they love what you are doing, so don't try and control and stiffle what's going on. You need to be able to have a thick skin if they are saying bad things or embrace it if they are saying good things and doing things you might not have thought of. So don't try and control the situation. This really helps with reputation management too, because, again it helps in establishing relationships and building them up so again if you get into these kind of situations where its not quite what you want to be in, you have a little bit of foothold in the community to help you keep your reputation going in a positive manner. So those are your three tips for Tuesday's Tips in Online Marketing. I'm Li Evans of Serengeti Communications & Search Marketing Gurus. As always you can find a transcript of this video at SearchMarketingGurus.com. We'll see you next time.

Comments

[Amber Naslund]

Hey Li,

Thanks so much for the shoutout, and for the awesome video overview. I'm always encouraged to hear the "listening and engaging" conversation continuing. It's so very important to doing this social stuff well, and getting out of it more than you put in.

Thanks again,
Amber Naslund
Director of Community, Radian6
@ambercadabra

[Brennan]

Great tips. Having a company that does online reputation management and monitoring I think the "don't try to control" is a huge tip. Most of the time when a brand tries to control or tries to smash out opposition with force it usually just makes the problem even worse.

[Kyle]

Trying to control is the worst thing you can possibly do, though it depends on how you are trying to control. Look at Starbucks, they have done an excellent job of crafting a forum for their customers to feel important. Also check out AirCheese http://www.aircheese.com as a monitoring tool. Though it is still in BETA form, it's a really solid tool for managing online reputation and social media.

[Michael]

Some Really Interesting stuff here. I am trying to build my reputation around quality service and the willingness to help. Thanks for your tips

[Michiel]

Many people forget to focus on building relationships with their forums. If you can get a dialogue and keep it going your points about having some back up really come through improving your reputation at least with a wider audience. (Everyone else commented on not trying to take control but that is also a really difficult task to master but important).

[Nick Stamoulis]

Def. important to monitor your name and your businesses name online to make sure you grab any negative press that is finding its way into the search results.

[Ronnie Sullivan]

Very nice post

[Karl Foxley]

These are great tips. I've been using the Google Alerts plugged into my iGoogle page for a while now to great success.

Thanks for sharing,

Karl Foxley