When prospective customers, clients or even employees are searching for you, what will they find within the search results? Could there be something there that isn’t favourable? It might be that it’s through no fault of your own – a disgruntled employee or a competitor posting anonymously perhaps, or it could be because you’ve done something in the past and have now learned from it and implemented new rules, procedures, policies etc so that it won’t happen again. But who knows that? Have you told people?
If you don’t control your brand online, someone else will. Managing your online reputation is best practice.
If you make a mistake, the chances are that someone online is going to pull you up on it. But the old saying of, “honesty is the best policy” stands strong. Put your hands up to it and address it… Don’t be fooled into thinking that it will just go away… because it won’t.
How do you assess your online reputation?
For many people searching for information the first page of the search results is as far as they go – without expanding the search term that is. And most users won’t look past the second, so look at a couple of result pages, from each of the search engines, for keywords relating to the following:
- Your Name
- Company
- Brand(s)
- Products / Services
- Employees
- Usernames
The results will vary based on your location and search history. So in order to get the most accurate search results you’ll need to log out from your account on the search engine e.g. if you’re using Google disable personalised search.
Grade your findings
I find the best way of recording your results is on a form using the following headings:
- Search Engine Used
- Keyword Phrase
- Date
And before you ask, yes you’ll need to do this for each search engine and for each keyword…!
Your column headings should be something like these:
- Position in Search engine
- Link to URL
- The type of result (e.g. PDF, word doc, blog post, website, news item etc
- Opinion (e.g. great, good, ok, could be better, poor, worrying…)
Once you’ve listed 20 search results for each keyword phrase and search engine, add up the results to find how many were positive, negative or indifferent. This will tell you whether you need to build your online reputation or manage it.
Build and manage your online reputation
The following steps are the basics for building and managing your own online reputation:
Protect Your Name
- Purchase all relevant web domains relevant to your company – yes all of them. It’s a small investment in comparison and it supports/protects your brand
- Register your username with these five essential social networks, if you haven’t already that is: Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn,Twitter, Naymz (Then use KnowEm.com to identify all the other platforms that your desired username is available on)
- Manage your social media presence using tools like:
- CoTweet, HootSuite and EasyTweets for multiple Twitter accounts
- Ping.fm to distribute tweets to multiple social profiles at once
- Disqus to track your comment threads
- Atom Keep to update multiple profiles at once
- and SocialStream to aggregate multiple social accounts
Monitoring what is being said
When building your online reputation you’ll need to monitor what is already out there in the social space. The following tools will help you keep track of the ‘conversations’ and help you can identify opportunities your obligations to participate and to handle any customer service issues:
- Google Alerts Track web results, news, blogs, video and groups for free
- Yahoo Alerts Track web results, news, blogs, video and groups for free
- Twitter Search A simple search for any mentions of a particular keyword phrase on Twitter
- Search Technorati Tracks mentions of your blog or specific keywords amongst other blogs
- Social Mention like Google Alerts, but designed specifically for social media
As your online presence grows so will the amount of tracking you have to do. This is not a negative thing as it shows transparency in what you’re doing. But if you always remember to be accessible, build credibility, be authentic and respond to criticism you’ll be on the right path.
As always, happy to be challenged and educated 
Little Note about the above: It isn’t meant to be a definitive list or a complete ‘how to’. I’ve written it only as an introduction to online reputation management – so please, always seek guidance and advice if you’re unsure…
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