A Few Tips for 21st Century Online Reputation Management
There are many different reasons to be online and active in the internet communities related to your business. Beyond the obvious networking capability, sometimes it’s necessary to play a little defense. Your online marketing campaign may vary in structure, content or strategy, but overall, it’s all about 21st century customer service and managing your rep.
Your campaign therefore has different objectives than one of simple converting leads into customers. Used in tandem with paid search or various other tactics, your focus on reputation management pays off in customer loyalty and the creation of brand ambassadors (those people who believe so strongly in your product they do the marketing for you, see affiliate marketing).
Campaign objectives:
Primary: Maintaining a presence on all the top social media web sites.
Secondary: Controlling the information Google serves to leads and prospects. Dominating your name with web pages we create.
Strategy:
Site structure & optimizing the existing web site (Site maps, deep linking, etc…)
Bidding on name in Google and Yahoo paid search
Paid reviews
Press releases such as PRweb.com
Profile pages on social networking sites with your targeted keywords as usernames.
IE: twitter.com/chrislitchfield
Build a growing community on these pages. Interact with key players, becoming an unofficial resource for information about your product or service.
Forum posts and profile creation. Directories related to your industry.
Blog development and using the blog to confront rumors about your business head on.
Short list of general social networks:
Linkedin
Myspace
Facebook
Digg
Stumbleupon
Youtube
Reddit
Propeller
Delicious
Squidoo
Flickr
Webshots
Buzznet
last.fm
Technorati
The golden boy is Wikipedia. Adding your name or company to the directory is a risk, as others can edit it in on objective manner. (So they can talk about lawsuits or bad press, but can’t slander). However, Wikipedia will flood your site with visitors. Unfortunately, search engines will ignore this link.
If your industry is especially contentious, such as a MLM, try creating a separate “facts” website dedicated to responding to online rumors or threats.
Your deliverables are:
Targeted URL becoming 1st on major search engines.
All online threats have an official or unofficial response linkable everywhere the threat is. Response to the threat is in detail. Don’t avoid this confrontation, engage it & make waves.
Your name or your companies name appears in top results for social networking sites alongside your corporate site. You get your LinkedIn, Facebook & Twitter accounts ranked highly, you win.
To create more content and partnerships with other industry partners, creating brand ambassadors.
|
