Managing Your Reputation

Remember the old adage; “First Impressions are everything”?  Research shows 70% of people do research on a company or personbefore doing business with them. Trying a new restaurant…Google it!  Joining a local gym…Google em!  When potential clients are researching your company, a single negative link – think, disgruntled employee, bad dining experience, customer service error – in the search results can ruin your chances at a signed contract.  Online Reputation Management is the newest solution for helping customers see (in search results) all the good that is your business.

Reputation management is more than just eliminating damaging articles and blogs on the first few pages of a search result listing, Reputation Management is responding to this negativity with positive comments, responses, or articles to show your business in a brighter light.  Blog master, Alyssa Gregory at Sitepoint.com seems to coin the process best; “ORM (Online Reputation Management) is the process of following online references to a brand, company, person or service while having a plan in place to deal with any negative feedback. You can think of it as a three-step process, although they may not always occur in this order: 1. Monitor – ongoing research, 2. Evaluate – consider the feedback, source, outlet to come to a decision about the risk, and 3. Act – comment, rebut, draft a formal response, or simply ignore”

There are a few ways to help prevent the need for intense damage control by filling up Google’s first page with information you want your customer’s to find.  Getting your registered website under a branded domain and providing a relevant and frequent blog are the first steps.  These personally written antidotes about your business or ideals, with your businesses name scattered across them will earn their way to Google’s heart quickly.  In additional to business specific blogs, social networking is the next best way to spread your name like wildfire.  I’ve spoken of the importance of Facebook previously on this site and its efficient way at reaching a broad audience quickly.  Myspace, Twitter, Wikipedia profiles, and LinkedIn are other great methods of professionally networking your business.  These consistently appear high in search results per their large international following.  Under the same concept, Snapfish, Kodak Gallery, and other photo displaying mediums can create a face or photo with your brand.

In addition to these tried and true methods, consider link building.  Kaboodle, Digg, and StumbleUpon are all great examples of quality sites accepting your article reviews and kudos to help increase the number and quality of incoming links from external sources, thus increasing the web page’s link popularity and search engine placement.  If all of these methods are still trying your patience, head straight to the horses mouth and submit your links directly to Google, Bing, and Yahoo themselves.

Many SEO and Internet Marketing companies seem to be selling this new service like hot cakes.  If it’s not something you’re currently willing to bank roll, consider the 16 free reputation management tools from the experts at Sitepoint.com. You might already be using Google Blog Search – check out similar, BlogPulse and Technorati.  This ORM expert also elaborates on Twitter and link monitoring followed by a list of other useful free tools.

Make sure you have your best face forward for that fateful first Google meeting!