Ideas for Business

When it comes to your image, or the image of your brand, reputation management is a word you need to know.  The internet is a very powerful and quick force and a negative comment on a blog, Twitter, or forum can literally spread across the internet in minutes and can result in a loss of business and profit. That’s where reputation management comes in.  Monitoring what is said about you on the internet and responding when appropriate can reduce the spread of negative comments, but the real damage is done when the negative comments gravitate to the top of Google or Yahoo.  Here are a few tips to manage your reputation before it becomes a problem.

1. Check your website on www.statbrain.com, checking your stats on Statbrain creates a link within their site.  This link tends to rank well on the search engines and can prevent negative comments from showing up on top of the search engine.

    2.  Check your stats on www.alexa.com, it has the same effect.

    3.  Check your site on www.compete.com,  (same effect also)

    4.  Check your site on www.websiteoutlook.com (same effect also)

    5.  Create a Twitter profile using your business name.

    6.  Create a naymz.com profile using your business name.

    7.  Create an aboutus.org profile using your business name.

    8.  Create a facebook.com profile using your business name.

    9.  Create a linkedin.com profile using your business name.

   10.  If these don’t keep the negative comments off the first page of the search engines, give us a call because you need a professional.

Powerhouse Online Retailer, Amazon.com said that this holiday season was their, “best ever”.

One of the busiest online days to shop is December 15th, and Amazon customers ordered 6.3 million items that day. Which is a significant increase compared to last years 5.4 million on their peak day.

Unfortunately, Amazon has not released any dollar figures and wouldn’t say whether the average value of orders had changed. Many people are debating if the sole purpose of this increase was because of the online retailer giant or because there simply is just a larger demand to shopping online.

I bought a couple items online this holiday season. It was simple and convenient. The prices are typically the same, if not cheaper and with a lot of the items having FREE shipping, it doesn’t hurt the wallet as bad as it used to. It was easy and I am sure I will end up doing it again in the near future.

Surprirsed? Yeah, me neither. According to Nielsen Mobile, surprisingly (sarcasm) Google is the leading force in mobile search in the US. With iPhones, Google Androids, Blackberry Storms, and other internet capable phones, the mobile web is on the fast track for either booming success or failure due to overload.

Source: Nielsen Mobile

What I mean by failure to overload is this… We all know that mobile browsing is going to be huge! But when it does,
will the mobile web have the capabilities, functionality, speed, and content to feed the eagerly needy consumer market?

An article from Mobile Marketing Watch states an interesting statistic, “According to an M:Metrics March 18, 2008 survey,
85 percent of iPhone users access the Web for information and are 10 times more likely to search the mobile Web than
cell phone owners.”

A site that does well in mobile search has:

Remember, mobile plays a significant role in the future of the internet.

Andy has a simple but effective tip for business bloggers. He writes:

Sign your blog posts with your name, not your credit union’s name.

He’s writing for credit unions since that’s the industry he covers, but any online business would do well to follow his tip.

Basically, he’s reiterating one of the fundamentals to blogging and social media: be a real person not an impersonal, faceless company. It only makes sense to use your name if you’re going to use a personal channel like blogging.

Also, use your name in your other social media interactions like forums and social voting sites. You gain a little bit of friendship by sharing your name. And anyone that feels like they know you will be more likely to visit your blog.

For more social media tips, check out his whole blog post: Joining the Conversation, Being the Conversation.

A while back I had a Twitter discussion with a few smart Minnesota based marketers, @cbensen, @albertmaruggi and @bestbuyCMO about the importance of customer service and community building that turned to a variety of ancillary benefits. Connie mentioned that community building is a long term investment that continues to pay dividends. Albert pointed out that SEO & community building can be 2 separate tactics with SEO having nothing to do with community. Barry wanted more of an explanation, which motivated this long overdue post.

An increasing number community managers have become visible within social media sites like Twitter, on blogs and Facebook from various sized companies. We’ve even interviewed people with those types of responsibilities from Dell and Comcast.  I’ve been thinking about how the content creation and outreach efforts of a community manager can also be of benefit to an organization’s search engine optimization efforts. 

My opinion is that it would actually take extra effort to make community building work and not realize the positive effects for SEO.  Many search engine optimization consultants that engage social media channels have noticed how their efforts resulted in community building effects.  Building up profiles on various social media sites and participating in communities to share and promote content attract links, but it also builds trust.  It makes perfect sense for off page SEO efforts to involve community building but as @TysonFoods mentioned recently, the best person to work in that capacity is a someone within the company, not an agency. That is a topic for another post though.

Community building with SEO effects in mind isn’t so different than Public Relations or Interactive Marketing with SEO in mind. Content + links = better search visibility. That’s simplifying things a bit, but you can get more search engine optimization basics here.

Community building with SEO benefits typically involves:

• Monitoring brand terms as well as keywords important to the organization using a social media monitoring tool
• Create content and interaction destinations: blogs, social profiles
• Content with unique urls can be linked to
• Content that is optimized with keywords and proper IA is good for search engines and good for users
• Content that is relevant and useful will attract links from those empowered to publish (bloggers, blog commenters, forums, consumer reviews, consumer generated content such as images, video, audio)

Social media monitoring is keyword based as is SEO.  Socia media monitoring counts links and SEO builds links.  Encouraging or “energizing” evangelists of a brand also builds content ala CGM and attracts links.  Some of those links go directly to the evangelists’ own content and some will go to the brand itself. Search engines discover and follow these links and when factoring in context and keywords used, will use that information when sorting documents in search results. ie, Content + links = better search visibility.

My question for community managers is, are you leveraging any SEO keyword research and insight to assist word choice when building profiles, creating content and outreach online?  I would not suggest any kind of overt keyword usage that wouldn’t otherwise make sense, but becoming better informed about keywords in a search context can add to the bottom line results of your efforts. And in this economy, who doesn’t want to show more value for their efforts?

            Subscribe to this Feed