It is becoming increasingly important for brands (corporations or even individuals) to monitor their web presence. With the increasing growth of social media platforms, the power is in the hands of mass and while it is a great thing to democratize the web it also brings with it some inherent drawbacks that can sting really bad.
Today most of us, whenever we get into anything new or meet someone interesting we would often Google it to find more about the person or the business. What if you see..
- You are not able to find much information about the person on web
- Google throws up a list of results including some blogs / review website / other social media pages where someone has talked trash about the company or the person.
In first case it would make your job extremely difficult to find more information about the business or person. Also you will probably give a second thought about doing any business with him given the fact that today most reputable businesses have their online presence.
In the second case you will probably never again think of doing any business with that company or individual in your life.
Truth or otherwise, every business would have some negative thinkers about them but it becomes a real problem when this negative views starts to surface in a Google search for your name. Companies realizing this have been spending tons for reputation management but here we will discuss a few easy and effective ways in which you can saturate search results for your name and do a good job at online search reputation management.
- Make sure your official website is optimized for your brand name. You would typically like this to be the first result when someone searches for your name
- If you have a blog – that’s great! Again focus on your brand, and make sure it shows up above the scroll for a brand name search. If your blog is your main website like in my case, make sure it is the first result people see when they search for your name.
- Twitter – The entire world is going ga-ga over Twitter how can you stay away ? Join the bandwagon, make sure your Twitter profile has your Company name, also from branding perspective it is advisable to have your company name as your Twitter ID. Participate regularly and you will see your Twitter profile shows up for your brand name search ( Twitter has optimized its structure and Title for that – you don’t need to do the hardwork , just participate)
If you have a really long name like me ( @rishi3211us ), Twitter might truncate it, however, if you can push a few links here and there you will still get it ranked for your name.
- FaceBook – Another extremely powerful social media platform. The same principle applies as in Twitter, participate more - Google and Facebook would take care of the rest. One thing that you would need to do is go to Settings > Privacy > Search and check the box that says “Create a public search listing for me and submit it for search engine indexing”.Take advantage of Facebook’s vanity URL policy and get a nice URL like http://www.facebook.com/Saptarshi.Roy.Chaudhury
- Linkedin – A great place to be and definitely a great help if you are planning to display a clean picture of yours in Google. Create a complete profile with all necessary details. Remember it’s a professional networking website, so make sure what you write on your profile and the way you network depicts a professional image about yourself and your company. You just need to create the profile and be active in the network Google would do the rest.
- YouTube – How about displaying a video commercial about your company in Google first page? Yes you can do that easily these days. With most major search engines adopting Universal Search model and given Google’s preference for YouTube, upload a nice infomercial about your company and put your company name in Video Title and description. Most likely the video would show up for a search on the company name.
- Press Releases – Send out a few press releases to online PR networks. Make sure you include your company name in Title and the same is sprinkled across the content generously. Once it gets picked up by some good news website, it is likely to get displayed on the first page.
- If you are an industry expert make a few guest post in some of the authority blogs in your industry. Don’t forget to mention your company name and these are also likely to show up in Google results.
- Also once you can establish your status as an industry expert and if you are doing at least some bit of networking, you might be getting some offers from other bloggers who might like to interview you. These are golden opportunities to increase your reputation and authoritative value and also when they show up in search results it adds a lot to your credibility.
- While the above 8 options are pretty helpful you can also get good help from some other websites like Flickr, Plaxo, Naymz, Pipl ( people search). Create a profiles, put in some good info, participate in the community and most likely your profile would hit the first page in Google.
While all the above points can be effective in saturating your search results and helping you to keep away any negative publicity about yourself - one of the key things that you need to keep in mind is what goes on the Internet stays there forever. So be extremely careful about what you post on your profiles or anywhere else about yourself. While it might look fun to post a lucid comment about one of your ex-colleagues, mind it that your present colleagues might not appreciate your thoughts once they find it.It is extremely important to ensure that anything published on the Internet about yourself or that relates to you is something that you really want the world to know.
While I have received a few such requests before and ran a few campaigns successfully, this days there are also niche companies that specializes in this type of online reputation management services. Recently I had a quick chat with Kaurik Raj from
http://www.weboostu.com/ whose key offering is Internet reputation management. As Kaurik pointed out, the easiest way to maintain your internet reputation is to create positive content and effectively use them to bury any negative content.
With increasing power of content creation with the people, I am sure negative reputation / reviews would be a part of life for every brand very soon and that would actually create an increasing demand for online reputation management professionals or companies like Weboostu.
Labels: Internet reputation management, Reputation Management, search reputation management, social media campaign
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