Reputation Management is one of those areas that every business owner is aware off, yet when it comes to the online world, they often don’t know where to start. A recent post on Small Business Labs highlights the need to work much smarter on your reputation management strategies.

The post highlighted some interesting statistics which include a report that 60% of those surveyed stated they would use social media to vent their feelings about a poor experience. This is where reputation management and reputation surveillance really need to be closely monitored.

Other statistics indicated that over 70% of respondents would use social media to undertake some form of research regarding reputation prior to purchasing and the recommendations of others could play an important role in their decision making. This reinforces the view that reputation management is not a task that is only undertaken after a storm.

Many novice social marketers have an approach where they expect results from their activities immediately. Possibly a sign of today’s impatient world. Social marketing, and with it your reputation management strategies, should be planned for the long term.

The most important aspect of social engagement is the development of your reputation over a period of time. Trust is a key point and by developing a trust within the community you are active in, whilst not totally insulating yourself from negative comments, you will find many defending you or your product or services. This is reputation management on auto pilot and its value cannot be counted in dollar terms.

To work smarter on your reputation management you need to gather around you, on any of the social sites, a group of individuals who have not only used your product or service, but are also happy to discuss their experiences when prompted. If you really want to protect your reputation and make your reputation management easier, you need to provide that positive experience in the first place.

Today’s article is actually inspired by an off line event that shows the unintended consequences of a single action and the effect it has had on reputation, social networking and marketing in general.

You may have heard the story on the news or in a newspaper reporting the New York landscape gardener who stumbled across a cool $140,000 in $20 notes. After giving the matter some thought, he decided to hand the money over to the police who eventually found the owner. The landscape gardener received a small reward for his efforts.

However, since handing the money over, the story together with his name and business has spread throughout New York and the rest of the US. Since then his phone has not stopped ringing. He will probably now have more work than he can cope with for many months.

What does this have to do with reputation management, social networking or social marketing? Think about it. Now that he has a reputation for being honest, if he is a halfway decent landscape gardener he could turn this into lucky strike into a viral marketing campaign that will last potentially for ever and take his business from a one man affair to a major contractor.

I am sure you can imagine this scenario. You drop around to my house and see the gardens looking magnificent. You ask me who did it and my response is, ‘that’s the guy that found all the money and handed it in - he is a good landscape gardener too - do you want his card’. Another ‘contact’ made. And so it goes and grows.

The online community is no different. If you can build a reputation for being honest, reliable and willing to help out when needed, you will find your reputation growing in a viral fashion - not rapidly, but growing. Again, I am sure you can see the scene, someone has a problem with their social marketing and the response is, “Nick is a social marketing expert, he is bound to have a solution’. Look at that, a referral and a link to boot.

Reputation management, social networking and social marketing are all closely linked. Getting a leak in one could cause a flood to spread out over the others. I wonder, can a landscape gardener deal with leaks as well.

Reputation management is not always about what you do with your site. It is not always what you don’t do either. Sometimes it is a good idea to sit back and watch what your competitors are doing. Often you can learn much either from their successes or, more importantly, their failures.

I shouldn’t just limit that statement to your competitors either. Just watching others from within your genre can be interesting.

What is more important is to listen to what is being said about your competitors. Sometimes you can find a real opportunity when you start to hear complaints about what your competitors are not doing - or perhaps, what they are doing that is upsetting customers.

Likewise, if you are a product distributor, what is being said about that product? Discovering this information early can have you well placed to answer concerns from prospective customers.

Reputation management is as much about listening as it is about doing. Spending time reviewing what is being said can save you the discomfort of unpleasant surprises; provide you with an opportunity to prepare; and perhaps even provide new opportunities.

Learn to listen, learn to watch, learn to read the reputation management social environment.

The more social networking you do, the better you must get at reputation management.

“Social networking.”

The phrase sounds so … businesslike. Let’s try another one:

“Social backbiting.”

Ooh! Might be fun to eavesdrop on THAT one! Unless, of course, YOU are the one whose back is being bitten.

If you’re active in social networking, your ideas will be attacked by other marketers. You’ll be challenged by strangers. Or customers. Or even colleagues or friends.

Someone will rail against your thinking and try to intimidate you. They’ll be rude. They will try to look good by making you look bad. It’s important to have a good reputation management plan in place for these occasions.

So what do you do when you make what you thought was a helpful comment on one of the forum communities, and in return you get hostility - someone else in the community slams you or ridicules you?

This absolutely will happen if you are an active social networker. Consider yourself fortunate. You now have an enormous opportunity to bond more closely with a lot of others in the community. Because they see that you are in a very uncomfortable situation, which is OK with them, because it should be pretty entertaining. They are watching closely to see what you do.

Your first reaction may be a kamikaze scream and attack. But remember, you are onstage, in the spotlight. You know these situations will happen, so you need a reputation management plan. Here are some choices:

1. Do nothing - which means you absolutely lose face in this group.
2. React defensively or angrily - see #1.
3. Pull the ol’ switcheroo, positioning yourself above this silly fray.

It’s like jiujitsu. When the other person attacks you, the force they use and their momentum always leave them vulnerable in some way. What would be really useful is for the whole community to picture you as your attacker’s infinitely patient mentor.

The key word here is “patient,” because along with expertise, that is what your market wants from a mentor. You will probably have the words for some clever counter-attack screaming in your ear. Resist it. When those words show up in print, they will put you right in the middle of the battle, not above it.

What words can you say to achieve “patient mentor” effect?

You might start with:

• “That’s a pretty common reaction” or
• “I forgive you” or
• “I respect your opinion. Here’s what I’ve seen …”

Then go on to very patiently explain why people often go off in this totally wrong direction. You’ve seen it a thousand times before. Maybe refer to the flawed reasoning that goes hand-in-hand with this flawed thinking. But do NOT attack your attacker. Let the community see your superior reasoning ability and your your infinite patience. Let them see that you are 100% unflappable in the face of a full-on attack.

Do you think THAT picture of you in their minds will create any new social networking opportunities for you? If you can keep that picture in the heads of community members, you will need to do very little active reputation management.

“Googling” is everywhere. We’ve all heard of employees getting fired - or applicants not hired - because of their Facebook or MySpace profile. And when you search for a potential employer, you might find a list of lawsuits, complaints and “IHateAcme.com” websites. Or you might find a list of company press releases. Either way, there’s a good chance what you find will influence your impression.

To monitor that “you” brand:

1. Set up Google Alerts for your name
2. Check Technorati regularly for your name in blogs
3. Check Google Video for your name in videos

How can you help make sure that your “YOU” brand shows up positively & accurately?

Don’t reveal everything to the world in your social networking profiles or on your blogs. Think what you would want to find in the social media if you were hiring “you”. Then create a professional profile to match for Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc.

Register “yourname.com”, if it’s available. If not, get the .net domain or .org or one of the others. Set up a blog, if you don’t have one, with this domain name. Anyone who links will probably use your name for anchor text. Your blog can link to your Facebook profile, or YouTube video, or Flickr photos, etc. You can write up a bio for your “About me” page & link to a resume.

Link from your blog to your articles posted online, and to the positive pages created about you. Be sure to go to Digg & StumbleUpon and other social bookmarking sites to bookmark these pages.

Whenever you put something online, remind yourself: “This is eternal.” Because it pretty much is.

You don’t need to do all this reputation management today. But long-range, this plan will strengthen that brand of “YOU.”

Every day you see new online gizmos and offline gadgets that put more power in the hands of consumers. A consumer can find your website this morning, subscribe, have some annoying experience which may or may not have been your fault, focus their anger in a quickie audio & video commentary, edit it, post it, bookmark it, link to it, and by tonight it could have been seen and/or read by tens of thousands of people. By tomorrow? It could go viral, and the universe will have seen it.

Today’s social networking media has created a world of Walter Cronkites. (If you’re under 30, he used to be on TV.)

What can you do to prepare for all of today’s new scrutiny? Some reputation management tips:

1. Listen to what consumers are saying. Use tools that allow you to find and recognize problems quickly, before someone uploads their investigative video. Monitor talk about your brand. Be sure to subscribe to daily newsfeeds for your brand and your keywords. A lot of sudden activity means you need to look more closely.

2. Consumer-reporters are out there 24/7 looking for material. Number one on their list is exposing bad customer service. Since it’s everywhere, bad customer service is easy to find. So improve your customer service, and let the bloodhounds sniff some other trail.

3. Make all your public communications as consumer-focused as possible. Talk about what you hear in #1 above. When people know you are listening to them, they are way less likely to attack.

They are watching you. With a few low-cost tools, anyone could be a professional spy. So guard your reputation. It’s good business sense to tweak your marketing plan to give your public the best possible experience in every area of your business. Don’t give the spies anything to talk about. Who knows? A good reputation management plan may cause some consumer/reporter to fall in love with you and upload their “good vibrations” video about your company. It does happen.

Discussion Forums give you the opportunity to place your thoughts and skills in front of a large community of people who are really, really, really dedicated to a niche. In other words, the right active niche forum could turn out to be a very, very good group of targeted prospects for your business. And for every person who is active in the forum, there are probably 10 who just lurk, reading everything, looking for the right people to connect with, never saying a word.

You have a chance to connect with ALL of that forum community. It can be a wonderful opportunity for you.

On the other hand … do you remember when Harrison Ford got tossed into the snake pit in the first “Indiana Jones” movie? He hated snakes, and he was thrown into a hole with hundreds of them. That could easily be you, if you aren’t careful about approaching a new forum.

Don’t believe me? OK. Search Google and find some active forum in your niche. Sign up and jump right in with a new post about the wondrous things you can do for everybody. Then listen to the background “hum” in your new community. Oops! That’s no hum. Those are RATTLES! Can you hear them?

The snakes are there for the same reason you are there: to find prospects and to cultivate customers. If they think you may be a prospect, they’ll be polite and helpful. But they’re still a rattlesnake. None of them wants more competition. If they see you as a competitive threat, they’ll gang up and swarm you, and you will disappear in a hurry.

So approach any discussion forum with care. Practice common-sense reputation management. If you moved into a new community, you wouldn’t stand on your rooftop and start screaming about what a great new neighbor everybody has just gotten. Don’t do it in a forum, either. Never introduce yourself by making a claim. Watch the forum for awhile, get an idea where the snakes are, and start your participation by asking for advice here and there.

Your best plan is to hang around and ask a thoughtful question or two and let the community get to know you. You can usually include a signature file with your post, linking to your website.

While you are there, keep a list of the questions other forum community members ask. What is their biggest problem? Write a report, or record an mp3 file, or a video. Solve some common problem for them. Offer the information for free to all the other community members. This time, you definitely want to include a signature file linking back to your website.

By now, you are an accepted, welcome member of the discussion forum community. You can fully participate in discussions without being flamed … so long as you know your stuff. Anytime you get too big for your britches, the snakes will come after you. So make it a point to always know and be able to prove what you are talking about.

And it never hurts to grow your own big rattle, either.

If you have profiles at MySpace, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Plaxo, Twitter, 20 different article directories, a handful of social bookmarking sites, and your local public library, you might find a use for Google’s new Social Graph API.

OK, I’m stretching it a bit with the local library jab, but this does look like a cool API. The idea is to draw connections between information that is public on many websites and from various sources about a lot of people. The way Google tells it, you’ll be able to manage your public persona more easily through one source. Is that good or bad?

Well, it’s good if you don’t want to have to visit 100 different websites to change you profile from single to married. It’s bad if you’ve got a stalker.

OK, another fun jab. Sorry, it’s a habit. At any rate, Brad Fitzpatrick has a short video that explains the Social Graph API. Watch it below:

Back on Friday we talked about a controversial post that showed up on TechCrunch this week. The author of that original post, Dan Ackerman Greenberg , has now asked TechCrunch to allow him to follow it up and how he does not endorse the actions he talked about, he was just trying to educate the world that those things happen.

Whatever the case may be, the damage to Mr. Greenberg’s reputation has been done. People will find the original post, but that does not mean they will find his follow up. He claims that he is a victim of poor editing, but from my own experiences with editing, there would have had to of been a far more extensive editing than I have ever seen to make him sound the way he did.

And that’s the lesson to be learned here: Before you do anything online, especially in a highly visible location, ask yourself if it could be taken in any sort of negative light. The Internet is a massive place, and people sometimes people think, “Oh, no one will ever find this”, and you couldn’t be more wrong. Think twice before you post ANYTHING on the web.

For the past two days we’ve discussed how to search the web for information that might damage your online reputation. Now the question is what do you do if you find something?

Has the person, or organization, made valid points? If not, ask them, nicely, to make corrections. If they do have valid points, you need to address them in a calm and professional matter. Sometimes just showing you care enough to address the situation will go a long way to calming a situation down. Most people view all companies, no matter what their size, as uncaring, unfeeling monolithic entities, the mere fact you will show concern will usually help matters.

The most essential key is to listen. No matter how right you may think you are, you can sometimes be blinded by being too close to a situation, and there may be an angle you did not think of when coming up with your policies. It never hurts to hear an outsider’s point of view when it has upset them enough to act out.

At worst, they’ll stay angry, and it will be hard for them to do more damage then they’ve already done. In most cases the person will calm down and post something thanking you for attentiveness, so even if you don’t come to a total conclusion, you will at least showed you cared enough to react.

The absolute last line of defense should be replying in your own company blog. possibly escalating the situation to where people perceive you as picking on the complainer. This can be the worst possible outcome to any situation as it could motivate more people to posting more negatives about you.

Just always remember to keep calm, though it can be difficult to do when it seems some one is attacking your company.

This is the second part of three about controlling your online reputation management. Yesterday we covered how to watch the search engines for large mentions of your company, brand, yourself, and executives, but you also need to watch the blogosphere.

Searches of Technorati, BlogPulse, Feedster and more will sometimes amaze you with what you will find about yourself, or your company. Once you have done these searches, you can also set up RSS feeds to deliver results to your favorite reader. It also wouldn’t hurt to check sites such as Keotags to see if people are tagging their blog articles with anything related to your organization.

It almost goes without saying, but you of course also need to monitor news aggregators such as Yahoo and Google news. While these sites focus mainly on major news outlets, they do also bring news from many smaller sources together. Quite often what might seem like an innocuous news story in a small time paper, can get blown up to something much bigger when a large news company gets a hold of it. So monitoring all the news streams is always helpful.

Tomorrow we will wrap up the series on reputation management with suggestions on how to handle bad publicity when it does pop up.

Something I hear a lot is “How do I keep an eye on my reputation?” There is a simple solution in the form of “alerts”.

Both Google and Yahoo provide alert systems, and while this won’t cover everything, it will certainly give you a start. For Google, simply go to their alerts page, enter the terms you want it to search for, how often you want it done, and where you want the results emailed to. Yahoo is a bit more complicated to set up, but is worth the effort.

What do you want to monitor though? You need to cover the names of any executives in your company, your company name, any brand names, and essentially any thing that may be related to your company’s name and products/services.

These of course only cover search results, and there is more to the Internet nowadays, and we’ll be covering a few of those tomorrow along with how you react to negative comments on the web.

I mentioned briefly last week over at my Local Advertising Journal that online local search was expected to grow, and in turn, spending on local ads is expected to grow by 30%.

It is important to remember that while “WWW” stands for “World Wide Web”, and it is said time and time again that we should think globally, it’s important you don’t forget to also think locally. If your business is maintaining a local office or store front, it’s important you don’t forget that there will be local people looking for you also, and not just somebody half a world away.

Why not produce a low-budget video? It is incredibly cheap to pick up a video camera nowadays, and professional editing couldn’t be easier with the numerous software packages out there. Then getting it online? YouTube, MySpace, and more couldn’t make it easier if they tried. And with YouTube, you can embed the same video on pretty much every social network out there (remember how I said you should be on as many social networks as possible?) all from the same amount of work. And with the addition of “geo tagging”, if someone searches for your area, your video will pop up quickly for them to review.

So why not do a video? Introduce your company to the local market, and remind them that the money they spend with you is staying in the community, which will do nothing but build you a stronger reputation.

Have you ever wondered why some blogs, such as this one, are updated every day, 7 days a week? It’s an easy answer really: It’s the quickest and easiest path to reputation management.

When blogs first came about, it seemed to be a niche market for John Boy to keep Ma and Pa updated on what was happening in his life. It didn’t take long for companies to realize it could also be used as a powerful marketing tool, and a way to build a rapport with their customers. However, a infrequently updated blog can be as bad as having no blog at all.

The other benefit to a blog is it can aid in increasing your search engine rankings. Not only will you be cross linking to your website, increasing the linkback ranking, but you will also be getting search engine traffic just from it’s content. For the most part, a company website stays fairly static, sometimes for weeks or months, with nothing new being added. With a blog, especially updated daily, you are constantly adding fresh content to be indexed by the search engines.

Basically, as long as you have a well maintained blog, with enough updates, it is a win-win situation for you and your company. And while blogging daily may seem like quite a task, it’s necessary, and there are always services you can hire to do it for you.

So, if you’re not savvy in the ways of blogging, or just feel you wouldn’t have the time to maintain it, why not contact us to see if we could be a help to your organization?

Reputation management is one of those things that everyone online needs to think about. Without a reputation management strategy, you may find yourself in the throes of a heated battle that gets out of hand. I’ve seen it happen to others and it could happen to you too.

When you do business online, you are bound to make enemies. In fact, even off line, enemies can hurt your business. The off line world has built-in protections, though, for slander and libel that may not be applicable online. That’s because it so easy for people to put up a website in a fake name and remain anonymous even while they slander you and ruin your good reputation.

Online, the battle over reputation management is to have more positive comments about you than negative comments. For that reason, I recommend being in as many places as you can, posting, making friends, and building your online reputation - one network, one click, and one relationship at a time. Here are some tools to help you do that:

• Social networks like LinkedIn, MySpace, and Facebook. Don’t just join one. Join as many as you can, and stay active.
• Social bookmarking. Again, use as many social bookmarking sites as you can and make sure that you bookmark other people’s web pages as well as a few choice ones of your own. Social bookmarking is another form of networking.
• Forums. Join a few forums and stay active in those as well.
• Blogging. You should own at least one blog, but don’t just rely on that. Visit a few other people’s blogs too and comment on them.
• Article marketing. Write articles and distribute them online to as many article directories as you can.
• Websites. Own some. Preferably more than one. Get your name on them so your reputation is positive.

To manage your reputation online you need to be in as many places as you can be. Often. Meet people, build relationships, and keep your commitments.