The Ultimate Guide to Online Reputation Management

Why do you require an online reputation?

If you don’t regulate your brand online, someone else will. Evaluate recent developments on the leading search engines in:

Who manages your online reputation?

Your online reputation can be seen in many ways. Whether you’re trying for some employment, selling a product, glancing for an investor, or trying to mark a date, someone is going to turn to a search engine to understand more about your brand.

The most common groups who will look after your websites online are:

 
·         Your Customers
·         Your business partners
·         Your Stockholders
·         Digital Marketers
·         Media Journalists
·         Prospective employers
·         Co-workers
·         Some Personal contacts

How can a pessimistic online reputation influence your brand?

·         The outcomes of a pessimistic online reputation may be as subtle as a user clicking on a competitor’s search result rather than yours or as violent as an industry-wide boycott of your e-commerce products and/or services. Moreover, the evident financial implications of having an organization’s credibility are called into question, there are potential legal ramifications that could affect your time and paralyze your financial sustainability, as well.

·          This will frequently solidify trusted news and legal results in the top search rankings so that even if a case is deported or resolved, your organization will be living with the effects for years to come. Things like, inferring who is credible for the pessimistic reputation, if you’ll have to move or discard certain employees, or dealing with probable losses in the workforce, add further financial growth impacts. Thus it becomes necessary for an online reputation management team to come into the play and take over the initiative of enhancing your reputation.

How do you analyze your online reputation?

Most users won’t look past the main first page or two of search results, so you only require to look at a couple of pages for each keyword on the leading search engines.

 Begin with easy searches on Google, Yahoo, and MSN for all that apply:

 
·         Your Name
·         Company
·         Brand(s)
·         Product(s)
·         High profile employees
·         Handles/usernames

Provided improvements in personalized search, results can demonstrate huge discrepancies based on your location and search history, particularly when searching for vanity terms you look at frequently. To get the most precise search results, first, log out of your account on the search engines or, if you’re searching on Google, utilize a shortcut for disabled personalized search.

The most popular reputation management issues come from :

·         Squatted usernames
·         Squatted domains
·         Doppelgangers
·         Job changes
·         Name changes
·         Negative comments
·         False information
·         Fake profiles
·         Trademark infringement
·         Bad news coverage
·         Legal documents
·         Complaint sites
·         Competitor attacks
·         Hate sites
·         Personal scandals
·         Corporate scandals
·         Industry perceptions

What should you do about those issues? Seek competent online reputation management assistance from Tritan Solutions if you don’t already have someone that can effectively rectify the situation. We’d recommend contacting Tritan Solutions for managing your online reputation.

Online Reputation Monitoring

A crucial element to building your online reputation is to regulate what is already being said. The are many tools that are designed by Tritan Solutions to help you track the significant conversations occurring around your brand digitally so that you can specify opportunities to get involved, locate people to engage, and regulate small customer service problems before they grow out of supervision.

 
Tools to Trace Your Online Reputation

Set up notifications/alerts and feeds to catch every mention of your name, firm, brand, employees, domain, etc. You want to get a notification before an issue escalates or enters the top search results. There are hundreds of tools that can assist you to supervise your online reputation, but as a small company owner or individual, the following are the most extensive and user-friendly solutions we’ve found for your brand -

Feed Reader

Google Set up a feed reader to enable you to view the custom feeds you’ll be searching for your keyword phrases. Your reader can be as modest as a gadget on your iGoogle home page or a full feed service like Google Reader.

Google Alerts

Google Set up Google Alerts for free of cost to track Web results, news, blogs, video, and groups. Subscribe to the latest developments via email or through a feed.

Yahoo Alerts

Yahoo Set up Yahoo Alerts for free of cost to track news by keyword, stocks, local news, feeds, and more. Receive notifications/alerts via email, Yahoo Messenger, or mobile.

 
Twitter Search

Twitter Previously known as Summize, Twitter Search makes it easy to search Twitter for any mentions of a specific keyword phrase. There is moreover an array of advanced search parameters that allow you to search by location, sentiment, dates, links, a specific person, and more. Do Subscribe to the feed for your search results.

Technorati

 Technorati tool is used to locate mentions of your blog or certain keywords across other blogs. Subscribe to the search results feed and get notified of new mentions of your latest blogs.

BackType

One of the most powerful comment solutions is BackType. With it, you can assert your comments on blogs, learn comments that mention a specific keyword, view all conversations from a specific post or article, and subscribe to those Important conversations.

Social Mention

Social Mention is identical to Google Alerts but particularly tailored for your brand's social media. Since Google Alerts can be a bit buggy, Social Mention enables you to catch instantaneous conversations around a certain keyword. Subscribe to the feed, get email alerts, or download the Excel file for monitoring.

BoardReader

This tool Tracks conversations across multiple forums and social message boards with BoardReader. You can refine your results by date, from a specific domain, and by applicability.

Q&A Tracking

If anyone is inquiring questions about you, your organization, or a specific keyword, you can track those on specific Q&A sites like Yahoo Answers. Do an advanced search for a specific keyword and then subscribe to the RSS feed at the bottom of the page to enable you to keep track of prospective mentions.

Track

Trackur pulls keyword mentions from numerous sources, not only Google Alerts, but its largest usage comes from the proficiency to save, sort, tag, share, and subscribe to specific feeds. It costs less than $20 a month and is excellent for small companies.

Get Involved

Now that you’ve protected your username, set up your profiles, and built ways to track your keywords, you have to deep dive into the conversation. What’s being said about you online? If there isn’t much, it’s the moment to get involved. Moreover conceiving your credibility, each of the following suggestions will enable you to bolster your rankings in the search engines.

Build your professional and personal networks. Discover your coworkers, friends, customers, and business partners. Get involved in their discussions, questions, keep them informed of your life or job, etc.

 Do this on:

·         Professional sites like LinkedIn, Naymz, and Plaxo

·         Personal sites like Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace

·         School-related sites like Classmates and Reunion

·         Corporate sites like BusinessWeek, Crunchbase, and FastCompany

·         Review sites like Yelp and Amazon

·         Media sites like Flickr, YouTube, or Vimeo

·         Resume sites like Emurse, Resume Social, and Resume

·         Bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon, Reddit, Digg, or Mixx

·         Prominent industry blogs

·         Industry-specific social networks, forums, and groups

·         Local social networks, forums, and groups

·         Particular interest or lifestyle social networks, forums, and groups

Position yourself as an authority in your own space. When you become an authority, the social community is extra likely to link to you, send you some business opportunities, suggest you to the media, etc.

Here are various ways to develop your authority:

·         Launch a group, organization, MeetUp, or TweetUp

·         Partake in Q&A sites like Yahoo Answers or ChaCha.com

·         Optimize your corporate profile on the corporation site (if applicable)

·         Build a personal Web site

·         List your company in relevant local listings

·         Make videos

·         Make podcasts

·         Build a personal blog or Tumblr

·         List your blog in relevant blog directories

·         Write guest posts on prominent industry blogs

·         Conduct meetings with industry leaders on your blog

·         Get interviewed on different’s blogs or podcasts on sites like Odeo

·         Speak at business events and/or conferences

·         Get in debates with media in local, regional, and national news

·         Donate to some charity(CSR)

·         Sponsor an event or conference

·         Receive nominations and awards

·         Facilitate news-worthy information through some press releases

Avoid Reputation Problems

As you thrive your presence online, you’ll discover that there is more to keep track of. This isn’t a terrible thing, but you do require to regulate and manage it to avoid potential difficulties. You can do this by utilizing various social media management tools, being accessible to your customers/clients, acknowledging customer service inquiries, owning your negatives, building credibility, and reacting to critiques.

Social Media Management

·         Utilize tools like HootSuite and EasyTweets to regulate multiple Twitter accounts.
·         Utilize Ping. FM to distribute tweets to numerous social profiles at once.
·         Utilize Disqus to track your comment threads.
·         Utilize Atom Keep to update numerous profiles at once.
·         And, keep a sharp  eye out for SocialStream to aggregate multiple social accounts

Be Accessible

Most reputation problems begin because the user isn’t able to effectively convey with the business or individual. Then, in frustration, they turn to “ easier ” channels like Twitter, blogs, or complaint sites. To help resist this, your brand displays detailed contact information on and off-site. If you can’t answer back within 24 hours, tell users that you will get to them within a particular time frame. Give numerous forms of contact information. Some customers will not prefer to contact you via email or the telephone. Make both choices accessible to them.

Invest in Customer Assistance

If you don’t have the budget for an expensive contact management system or call center, create a Web-based customer assistance portal on site. Utilize tools like Suggestion Box or Get Satisfaction to encourage you to do this.

Own Your Negatives

Why would you ever purchase the domain [companyname].sucks com? Because if a user is scouring for an alternative to your company or looking to convey his frustration, wouldn’t you like an opportunity to win them over? By ranking for your negatives, you provide your organization one last chance to persuade a user why they should stay with your service or give your brand product another try. You should furthermore purchase negative domains so that others can’t make a reasonable hate site and rank on your domain.

Respond to Criticism

Once you start controlling your online reputation and you find negative comments are being made, how should you answer back? If someone is truly upset, contact them and strive to resolve the problem. Don’t get protective, just apologize and provide them something identical to the situation whether it’s a promise that they’ll be treated differently in the future, a refund, or free products/ brand assistance.

Conclusion

In this brand-transparent digital world, your company is wide open to criticism and customer grievances. With an online reputation management strategy from Tritan Solutions, your brand will be safeguarded. You'll comprehend how customers feel about your brand. To help you handle a potential reputational catastrophe, call us for a free demo today!