I’m live blogging a reputation management session at SphinnCon Israel. The moderator is Vannesa Fox (ninebyblue). The speakers are Shira Abel (Abel Communications), Sam Michaelson (Fiveblocks), Dan Gerstenfeld (Interteam), and Gil Reich (Answers.com).

Shira Abel: How to Control the Noise (and deal with a management reputation problem)

Look at rep management issue as an opportunity. Companies and individuals are often judged by how they handle the issue and control the noise. The Lower Merion school system installed webcams in the laptops of students, and people found out about it, and the news media went crazy.  What should they have done? Think about breaking the story themselves. Do something immediately after the story breaks – silence costs reputation and trust. They should have given out as much info as possible…but they didn’t. If there is more information and noise coming from one side, then that side will win in reputation.

Gil Reich: How to use Q and A sites to build your reputation

Engage others. Create value. Be memorable. Bring friends.

Example: Best Buy Metals. Owner joins Yahoo! Answers and give out useful info, then talks about himself, then gives more useful info. As long as you are contributing value, you can get some self-promotion out of it. Other Yahoo! Answers searchers will see the answer and get value from it. Yahoo! Answers are also searched by Google – turns out that his answer is ranked #2 for this specific question.

Another example: give a lot of good quality, targeted answers to build up reputation in a competitive market. One guy’s answers are ranked very high in shopping because he answered a lot of questions about a specific product niche.

Answers sites: Yahoo! Answers is largest ranked (43 mil), WikiAnswers, then Linkedin Answers (for whole site).

Q & A Sites: Community Q & A sites get about 100 million unique visitors/month from the US alone.There are both consumer and B2B sites, many sites allow multiple answers, some are wiki sites, some have questions open for days and best answers are selected (opportunity for more traffic if your answer is selected), and consider horizonal vs. niche answers sites. Niche sites are stackoverflow, wikianswers. Aardvark is another one. Yedda is an Israeli site.

How to become an answer god: Ask questions, answer questions with useful questions, interact and follow-up when you’ve answered or asked, don’t lose control and remember everything is listed by google…forever.

Quick ROI Analysis – answering questions at 7 mins per answer is a lower cost/conversion than cost/conversion on a successful PPC campaign. Over 90% of people who use business Q & A find it useful for business-survey results. (This is my favorite quote: “if there are A-listers in the industry you are stalking, then you can use Q & A to attract their attention.”)

Dan Gerstenfeld: 67% of top executives regard their company’s online reputation as vulnerable. How would you want your company to be presented in a crisis situation? Take control of the situation by putting info on it on your website: answer questions, give information (positive and negative), and the SERP results will reflect how you are proactively handling the issue.

How to be proactive? Define an overall PR and social media marketing strategy. Adopt a hands-on approach with good listening tools and handle all responses yourself. Be proactive. Network with others online. Create a place online that people know about, that people will know where to go to if a crisis breaks out. Optimize your content online.

Sam Michaelson: Reputation Management Pitfalls for the client and the service provider

Client pitfalls: biggest thing that clients do wrong is not being prepared in advance. Look at the names of people in the company  – and buy the domains of their names as well as the defensive use of the names (such as thispersonsucks.com). Own your own name! Make sure you own your own keywords and properties related to the top ten search results.

Another pitfall: Clients forget to use simple means when they are available, such as calling someone to take down the bad info if you know the person. Sometimes it’s that easy!

Service Provider Pitfalls: Really bad to optimize pages that have comments on them because you never know what the next comment will say. Optimizing pages that might change (news sites, wikipedia). Don’t forget to take control of the top ten sites…bad things may be coming.  Not setting clear expectations may be a problem – you will always get a client coming back after months thinking you’re giving them poor results. Not optimizing sites you build into top spots. Missing what the client really wants. Misunderstanding the perception of your role.

A few conclusions:

1. Have a reputation management plan and be proactive.

2. How you handle a reputation management issue affects how people see you in search engine results.

3. Think about a Q & A answers strategy to build your reputation AND rank for search engine results.

4. There are a lot of missed opportunities and pitfalls in brand management – avoid the big pitfalls.

This is the story of the “flip side” of online reputation management – when monitoring one’s online reputation brings an unexpected bounty of good news.

I won an award. A great, wonderful award. How did I learn about the award? A Google alert arrived in my inbox!

I always recommend that companies set up online “listening posts” for mentions of the company name, staff names, and industry keywords, at a minimum.  It is impossible to stay on top of all the chatter and noise online without them. If we want to know what our fans, critics and friends are saying online, we have to be listening to them. You never know when a critic will write about your company in their personal blog, mention an employee personally on Twitter, or talk about your organization’s programming on a host of online forums and social media networks. Unlike Domino’s, we don’t want to be caught unaware of a viral video that puts our company in a bad light.

What we cannot forget is that the flip side of reputation management is listening to the good things people say about your company online.

And that’s what happened to me two days ago. First, the Google Alert arrived at 10pm to my email inbox:

Google Web Alerts only offer a short excerpt of the online mention, which is not often enough to understand the context. It is advisable to click the hyperlink and read it for yourself.  I wanted to know more, so I followed the link back to WebHostMagazine.com and found this:

Wow. Pretty cool, I thought.

Two hours later, this TweetBeep (a type of Twitter alert) arrived in my email inbox:

So, of course, I traced the alert back to the original Tempus Group online “tweet” and found this:

Which prompted me to respond with this tweet to Tempus Group:

The lesson here? Don’t forget to set up your listening posts!  For monitoring Twitter, I use TweetBeep, Twitterfall, and a TweetDeck “search” is always open for “@askdebra.” I use BoardTracker to listen for keywords mentioned on discussion forums, listservs and chat groups. I use Google Alerts to catch any links or keywords scanned by Google, and I have set up a watchlist on Technorati to monitor certain keywords mentioned in blogs. I also created an alert on Socialmention to pick up anything that the other alerts missed. Of all of them, Google Alerts, Socialmention and TweetBeep are by far the most useful.

In fact without Google Alerts and TweetBeep, I would have missed a great honor and award!

Which listening posts do you use, and which are most helpful?

image by dbking

ReadWriteWeb’s Lidje Davis recently posted a very thought-provoking article entitled The Unforseen Consequences of the Social Web. In the article, Davis notes the many ways that that one’s actions on the social web can adversely affect one’s own reputation.  The flip side is how other peoples’ actions on the social web can affect your reputation as well. “Reputation Management” means monitoring and tracking of one’s own brand, creating appropriate online personas, and developing an encompassing reputation strategy.  The best way to manage your reputation is by creating a proactive reputation management strategy.

Why should an organization spend its time to create a proactive reputation management strategy?

• There is no delete button on the internet. Your posts, and comments about your organization live forever. A great example is when I searched under the terms “L’Oreal+Israel” using Google: the third and fourth listings were entitled “Boycott Israel Campaign” and “L’Oreal: Makeup for Israeli Apartheid.” These campaigns are at least 10 years old. Is this really what L’Oreal, Israel, wants its customers to see at the top of the search page?
• Current comments about your organization can spread like wildfire and affect your organization’s ability to raise funds successfully. As Elaine Fogel writes in Network for Good’s blog here, “one negative media report on a nonprofit can set it back to the point where it may not recover. A nonprofit’s main asset is its reputation.” No one wants to give money to a company with a poor reputation.
• Inability to react quickly to negative online publicity and conversation will damage your reputation as well. See my previous post analyzing two online reputation management cases for examples.
  
• If your organization’s online brand is not up to date, it will also affect fundraising. Imagine soliciting major donors…but donors researching your company find negative listings in the top ten Google search returns.  Or better yet, what if Twitter searches for your organization’s name show many negative comments? Smart donors search online first for information about organizations. You want the top online results to be positive.
  

A little bit of proactive attention to your organization’s online profile can prevent problems down the road, and find allies, collaborators and donors. That said, how about getting started? I suggest a few starter actions, listed below.

• Set up “listening posts” to monitor online conversations about your organization.
  
• Buy your domain name, those related to your organization, and potential common domain name misspellings.
• Create a blog so that your organization has a platform from which to issue its own stories.
• Pick two social networking sites to join where your stakeholders hang out,  and begin to converse with people there.
• Create an organizational social profile on a handful of social networking sites. You don’t have to be active on them, but you’re ready to be if need be, and it will help increase your organization’s search engine rankings.

Resources:
Ask Dave Taylor asks: What Is Reputation Management? Dave answers this question thoroughly.
Social Media Optimization’s blog post:  Five Steps to Managing Reputation Management.
Reputation Advisor’s Six Easy Steps to Personal Reputation Management.
Chris Bennet on Reputation Management.
Search Insider’s 17 Search Engine Reputation Management Optimization Tips.

If your organization wants to delve deeper, there is great information available online. Here are some of the best management reputation informational posts that I found:

• The “mother of all” resources and tips to manage your online reputation was compiled by Jacob Share at Job Mob. He lists 170+ Resources and Tips to Help Manage Your Reputation Online. This post gives a thorough list of online tools to manage your reputation and specific steps of how to “clean up” one’s reputation in each participatory media sphere.

• Brett Borders’ Copy Brighter blog speaks only to online reputation management, with wonderful posts about managing one’s online reputation, how to deal with “impossible” online reputation issues, and more. If you want to know more about this specific area, I’d start here first. Ditto for finding answers to your questions regarding online reputation management and strategies.

• Marketing Pilgrim focuses on the search engine that determines all of our reputations, Google, and how to adjust one’s rankings within Google.  There are very practical ways to increase your organization’s Google rankings in the post Google Reputation Management: Fix Your Google Reputation and Remove Negative Results. Some are quite easy to implement. Though the article focuses on fixing a negative Google reputation, it is worthwhile to read and implement these strategies proactively so that your organization controls as much of its reputation as it can.

• Marketing Pilgrim also put together a great guide called the Free Online Reputation Management Beginner’s Guide. The guide includes social media monitoring tools and practical advice on how to address negative consumer-generated media.

• The New Zealand State Services has an article about monitoring social media buzz. The article focuses on creating RSS feeds for each social media tool, and specifically how to do this for Wikipedia. Since Wikipedia references boost Google search engine rankings, it is important to stay on top of the chatter on it.

I hope that this inspires you to dip your toes into proactive reputation management. Let me know what you find!

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