25
Online Reputation Management
Productivity takes a hit if you have to spend time cleaning up a mess. The bigger the mess, the more time gets wasted on clean-up. Needless to say, preventing or containing messes can boost productivity and give you peace of mind, which enables you to keep your focus on your top priorities.
That’s why it’s so important to know what’s being said about you and your company online, and who’s saying it. “Reputation management” refers to being aware of what is being said about you online so that you can work to remove inaccurate or defamatory content, respond to legitimate complaints, and capture positive comments and testimonials. The term can also refer to techniques to reduce the impact of unfavorable content via search engine optimization techniques.
Let’s be clear: if you’ve done something unethical or have shoddy business practices, you’re better off cleaning up your act and making restitution than trying to suppress legitimate negative comments. And, as discussed in Chapter 24 in regard to online directories, other people have a right to their opinions and to speaking those opinions online. They aren’t required to like your products, and they may say so publicly. Reputation management should never be seen as a way to cover up bad business practices.
That said, it is important to understand how you and your company are viewed in the marketplace so that you can make course corrections as needed and reap the benefits of glowing reviews. And, inevitably, incorrect information will make its way online, so it’s also important to have a way to become aware of erroneous content and straighten out misunderstandings. We perform all of these tasks daily in the real world without really thinking about it. Reputation management is just the online equivalent of staying plugged into the grapevine to see what others are saying.
Reputation Management Basics
You’ve created an online presence for yourself via your Website, Facebook and LinkedIn pages, blog, Twitter feed, and other Internet activity. This presence becomes part of your personal and professional branding, which is why it’s so important that everything you post online be consistent with the professional image you want to project. Yet at the same time, other people are free to tag you in photos, mention you in their blogs and Facebook posts, refer to your company and products in articles and reviews, or Retweet your Twitter content. You control what you post yourself, but how can you possibly track everything posted by others, including people you’ve never met?
Google Alerts is a first line of defense. It’s a free tool that enables you to track keywords any time they show up on the Internet, and those keywords should include your name, company name, and product names. Anytime your keywords are used, Google Alerts sends you a report which includes a link so you can see for yourself. It’s not perfect; I’ve found it to work well for content on blogs and Websites, and less so for content on Facebook and other social media sites, but it still snags a tremendous amount of information and is useful as a basic reputation management tool.
Online Reputation Management SocialMention.com, which I talked about in the dashboard chapter, is also valuable as a reputation management tool. SocialMention fills the holes left by Google Alerts by focusing specifically on social media and covers an impressive variety of site types. While no program will capture everything, Google Alerts and SocialMention used together should give you a very comprehensive picture of what the market is saying about you (and how much they’re talking about you).
If you’ve been online very long, you’ve discovered that many people have a name that is the same or very similar to yours (and perhaps to your company or products). One way inaccurate information finds its way into the Internet data stream is via mistaken or confused identity. Most of the time, these mistakes are honestly made, and can be cleared up with an e-mail or a clarifying post. If you find that you’re frequently being confused with a particular person or company, you may want to add a note in your Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) stating who you’re not.
People in the public eye (which includes prominent business-people as well as writers, speakers, and educators) may sometimes be the victim of pranksters who set up unauthorized sites to detour legitimate Web traffic, make a negative statement, or just cause havoc. This is especially easy to do in social media, and the result can be a site purporting to be written by you that is making statements you would never make, statements that could be damaging to your brand and reputation.
One way to assure that people are finding the real you is to use a site such as Zoolit.com, which provides a landing page that shares all your sites: social media, Websites, blogs, and so on. Using a landing page such as Zoolit enables you to give readers a way to verify whether or not a site that purports to be from you really is yours.
Hands-On Reputation Management
I’ve talked about the networking value of recommendations on LinkedIn. Gathering online recommendations via LinkedIn is also a way to solidify your online branding and actively manage your reputation. Don’t be shy about asking former coworkers, bosses, colleagues, and clients to provide a recommendation if you had a positive working experience with them. That’s part of the LinkedIn culture. You’ll want to make sure you have plenty of recommendations for your current role, but you may want to also actively seek out recommendations for prior roles to bolster your credibility and show the depth of your expertise.
Naymz is similar in some ways to LinkedIn (extensive profile, forums, online networking), but it goes further to help you actively manage your brand and reputation. Naymz has what it calls a “RepScore Ecosystem,” in which you aren’t just asking for a recommendation from former colleagues and clients; you’re asking for them to provide anonymous feedback on your honesty and ethics. Naymz also has its own “Reputation Monitor” to provide you with yet another stream of information regarding what’s been said about you online. Naymz also lets you know when your profile has been visited, although it does not tell you who checked you out.
What happens when a negative comment is posted on a ratings site and you can’t get it removed or retracted, but it’s not serious enough to sue for defamation? One tactic is to make the comment more difficult to find by increasing the searchability of other, more positive content. The Internet favors recent and highly targeted information, rewarding it by pushing it to the top of the search results. This pushes older content off the first pages of results, and few searchers bother to go more than one or two pages deep.
How do you do this? One tactic is to ask your clients and professional friends to add ratings of their own (you don’t have to disclose the reason behind your timing for the request). You can spiff up your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) on your most relevant sites, such as your home page and your blog, assuring that they jump to the top of the search results. Or, you can hire a PR agency or reputation management firm to make positive posts on your behalf on a large enough number of sites that the sheer volume of new positive mentions pushes old copy off the first page of search results.
Use this last tactic (hired guns) with caution. Mobilizing actual clients, friends, and even family to post genuine testimonials or positive reviews is still authentic and organic, even if you reminded them to do so. (Never offer rewards in exchange for positive comments.) Hiring people to manufacture testimonials is unethical, and you’ll be found out eventually, which will send your online reputation plummeting. If you do decide to use a publicist, a better tactic would be to post a wealth of factual, positive information (such as verifiable high satisfaction ratings or award announcements) or repeat testimonials or positive reviews from legitimate clients and reviewers. Just creating a blizzard of new, positive, highly relevant, and keyword-optimized informative posts can go far to push down a negative review.
Yet another reputation management tactic involves making it difficult for anyone to create a profile or Website using your name or products by claiming them yourself. Some people make it a practice to buy up all of the domain names available for their own name or their products, such as the .biz, .tv and other domain suffixes. This keeps cyber-squatters from purchasing these domains and attempting to sell them back to you later at an inflated cost, or using them to create fake sites purporting to be from you. If you consider this tactic, remember that you’ll have to pay domain registration fees annually, so buying up dozens of URLs that you never intend to use can get expensive.
If you don’t have the time to actively monitor and manage your reputation, there are companies that will do it for you. Some of these specialize in particular industries, such as hospitality or construction, while others serve a variety of business types. Services range from monitoring and reporting to assistance in handling complaints or dealing with malicious comments. Fees vary according to the services provided. If you decide to use a monitoring and response agency, do your homework before making a commitment, and check out the reputation of the company online before hiring them to work on your behalf. Some reputation management companies have been caught using unethical strong-arm techniques against people who have posted legitimate complaints that were well within their constitutional rights. There’s a big difference between hiring someone to help you keep an eye on what’s being said and employing cyber goons to intimidate or harass consumers who have merely stated their opinions. The best way to protect your online reputation is to always deal ethically, both online and offline. Keep your word, don’t overly hype your products, and deliver what you promise. If something goes wrong, do everything you can to make the situation right. You’re far better off putting effort into delighting customers and running a clean operation than investing resources into cleaning up avoidable messes or attempting a cover-up. Nothing stays hidden for long in today’s online society. Honesty and vigilance are your best online reputation management tools.