Do you monitor and manage your company’s reputation online? If you don’t then this post is a good place to start.
Long are the days when companies were in control of their brands reputation by controling what messages their consumers are exposed to. The internet has changed all that, and today, with the internet penetrating more and more homes, the tides have turned in favour of the consumer.
Today, internet users can “virtually” go to a number of forums, blogs and social networks and speak freely about their experiences with your brand or service. In an ideal world you’d like them to speak positively about your brand but are you really in control of that? Well no. This is where reputation management plays a very important role.
So how do you go about managing your reputation? Follow these three simple step:
1) Define Scope
Before you begin monitoring your brand’s online reputation, you will need to know what you’re monitoring. I suggest you brainstorm the various areas of your business and categorise them. Examples of reputation management categories can include:
Brands/Services:
Competitors
Industry
Employees (current and ex)
2) Resaerch
There are a number of free and commercial online tools and sites available to you as a brand owner, these include:
Subscribe to the Google, Yahoo and MSN News RSS feeds for the keywords you want to monitor.
3) Manage & Engage
Once you’ve begun monitoring your brand, its time to create a strategy to counter the negative effects of bad publicity and to capitalise on the effects of positive publicity. Below are examples of ways to fend off negative publicity:
Create a company blog that allows users to interact with your brand as opposed to going elsewhere to do the same
If you provide news, make sure you’re indexed in the news section of the search engines. There is a detailed process of how to do this for Google can be found in this official guide for google news inclusion
Hopefully your brand only gets good publicity but if it doesn’t I hope the above tips are enough of an inspiration to set you off on the highly important task of manging your brands reputation. Good luck!
In a followup to its Audio Ads, Google has just launched its Print Ads programme in the US market.
In a nutshell, Google Print Ads allows companies to run advertisements in local newspapers using Google’s Adwords web interface.
Google Print Ads allows companies with little or no experience with print advertising to create, publish and manage their print ads with little to no experience.
Similar to PPC advertising, companies bid on available ad sizes, sections and dates; it’s up to publications to accept or reject the bids. Google’s technology automates the billing and payment cycles.
Google Print Ads was launched in Beta last Novembe, partnering with 50 newspapers and approximately 100 Google Adwords advertisers. The Google Print Ads service has since then expanded to more than 225 papers according to the search giant.
This is what Eric Schmidt said during the launch:
“Newspapers are an important source of information and a powerful communication tool, Google Print Ads will bring more advertisers to newspapers which will ultimately benefit readers, publishers and advertisers.”
Google claims that its Print Ads service has a reach in excess of 30 million readers in 32 of the top 35 advertising markets in the US, including New York, Washington, Seattle and Silicon Valley.
Yahoo has a competing service that includes 265 newspapers.
Up to one quarter of searches on Google are ‘new to google’ searches.
Udi Manber, Google’s VP of Search Quality at a recent conference said that “20 to 25% of the search queries Google receives every day are being seen by Google for the first time”
This is an interesting stat as it highlights the sophistcation of searchers when performing a search query on Google or any of the other search engines.
Manber also gave examples of how Google will be handling peoples queries in the search box as follows:
“How much does it cost for an exhaust system” will pull up results from “cost of an exhaust system.”
“Overhead view of bellagio pool” will pull up results from “bellagio pool pictures.”
“Fedora 5 losing network connections” will pull up results from “fedora 5 network configuration.”
The thing to take from all of this is that search is developing and developing fast. The way people are searching is also changing at a fast pace therefore optimising search (both paid and organic) need to take into consideration these satistics and include them into the overall search optimisation strategy.
A directory is a human edited list of websites that is categorised by topic. The first major directory on the internet was Yahoo!
Soon after DMOZ (founded by Netscape) became the first and largest directory edited by thousands of volunteers from all around the world.
The importance of directories:
Directories are important because they (the good ones at least) are regarded by the major search engines as authoritative, which means that a link from them to your site would be considered an authoritative link.
How do you submit your site to directories?
Very easy. Follow these steps:
Go to the directory of choice
Navigate to the best category that fits your site’s theme
click on the “suggest url” link
Read the rules of the directory
Fill in your title, description and url
press submit
Tips on submitting to directories:
The title of your listing should be your site’s name
Read the rules
Make sure not to stuff your description with keywords
Read the rules
Make sure you stick to the character limit specified by the directory
Read the rules
Note the directory editor’s style and submit listings in line with the directory editor’s style
I find it interesting that they’ve decided not to alter the logo to incorporate the various translations of “Broadcast Yourself”, instead they opted to include it only when you hover over the image.
So much for globalisation!
Watch Chad and Steve’s official Google Press Day announcement in Paris (includes a presentation on the background of YouTube):
During the recent Google press event in Paris, YouTube founders 
