Online Media Today's (www.onliinemediatoday.com) October Workshop featured industry veteran eVisibility (www.evisibility.com) in an educational presentation of Online Reputation Management. ORM is a relatively new industry but has been brought to the forefront of professionals’ consciousness due to the overwhelming and many times unpredictable nature of both professional journalistic content and amateur user-generated content (or UGC), the latter of which there is far more, and not the least because of the wide number websites that offer such an opportunity to visitors, typically with very low barriers to entry--often just by creating a screen name, registering one's birthday and a geographical location, and providing a valid email address to complete the account-creation process. Thus, the type of online content monitored in ORM spans professional, journalism sponsored by traditional news and media giants as well as user-created and user-generated blogs, ratings, reviews, and comments, and all manner of specialized websites about any particular subject, be it a person, group, company, business, product, event, concept, or trend.
1. using search engine optimization to strengthen your reputation Comprehensive Internet Marketing Solutions for your Online Business presented by Miguel Salcido October 22nd, 2009
2.
3.
4.
5.
6. A TYPICAL ONLINE REPUTATION MANAGEMENT CAMPAIGN CAN SOLVE ONE OF TWO PROBLEMS: Comprehensive Internet Marketing Solutions for your Online Business R E S O L U T I O N: Create as much positive content as possible and work to rank that content in the search engines. Here’s how… Prospect can NOT find enough information Online about you (or your company or your product or service) to substantiate doing business with you. Prospect finds plenty of websites BUT many of the top results have potentially damaging content making your prospect second-guess your business credibility. 1 2
7. You will want to flood the search engines with positive content about you or your company Comprehensive Internet Marketing Solutions for your Online Business
8. Comprehensive Internet Marketing Solutions for your Online Business Step 1 Make simple informational micro-sites and/or blogs Step 2 Step 3 Step 4 Step 5 Step 6 Step 7
9. Comprehensive Internet Marketing Solutions for your Online Business Step 1 Step 2 Optimize All Current Content You Have Online Step 3 Step 4 Step 5 Step 6 Step 7 http://www.company-site.com http://www . company-site .com/blog http://www.your-personal-site.com
10. Comprehensive Internet Marketing Solutions for your Online Business Step 1 Step 2 Step 3 Optimize and Create Social Networking Sites (Linked In / Digg / Facebook) Step 4 Step 5 Step 6 Step 7
11. Comprehensive Internet Marketing Solutions for your Online Business Step 1 Step 2 Step 3 Step 4 Reinforce existing positive listings in the search engine result pages Step 5 Step 6 Step 7
12. Comprehensive Internet Marketing Solutions for your Online Business Step 1 Step 2 Step 3 Step 4 Step 5 Optimize and Syndicate Video Content Step 6 Step 7
13. Comprehensive Internet Marketing Solutions for your Online Business Step 1 Step 2 Step 3 Step 4 Step 5 Step 6 Build links Step 7
14. Comprehensive Internet Marketing Solutions for your Online Business Step 1 Step 2 Step 3 Step 4 Step 5 Step 6 Step 7 Track, Measure, and Adjust campaign
Welcome everybody, thank you for coming. Let’s hear it for Piere from Submit Express, that was a great presentation. Let’s also all thank Jim Gibson and Michael Gier from Online Media Today for organizing this and providing the opportunity for me to speak, and for all of you to learn. Online Reputation Management – Who here has heard of this phrase? How many of you out there have a reputation online? I am here to educate you on online reputation management and to help you understand why you all need to be concerned about it.
Reputation is everything Online.
Reputation is everything Online. This presentation is highly relevant to all of you both on a personal and professional level.
Let’s learn some lingo! The marketing world’s best friends, acronyms!!! What exactly SERM is. The battlefield is Google, make no mistake about it. People go to Google to look up companies, brands, people, places, and more when making decisions. On a personal level, HR departments will “Google” your name before hiring you to see what dirt they may dig up. Even girlfriends and boyfriends will do the same. What shows up when you Google your self? Go home and try it tonight! On a professional level clients, prospects, vendors, co-workers and more will all Google your name and your company’s name to form opinions. This can significantly impact people’s business decisions. The worst part about this is that you may have a negative review online and not even know it. You also never know really how much business you are losing or how many jobs or even dates you have lost from it!!! The other bad thing about it is that it is easier than ever to crush someone’s reputation online. Consumer sites like Complaints.com, RipOffReport.com, and Yelp.com allow ANYBODY to ANONYMOUSLY submit negative claims against you whether they are truthful or not. And do you think that the average consumer, HR person, or friend, understands that these sites do not discern between legitimate claims and fake claims? Do you think that they know that these sites only aim to make themselves money? And guess what else? Google LOVES to rank these sites very high. Chances are that if someone submit’s a claim about you on any of these sites that it will rank just beneath your website, sometimes even higher!
Reputation is everything Online.
You can refer to your take-away docs for some ideas on this but a few might be: The .net, .org, .info, .biz, etc of your name YourdomainPROFILE.com YourdomainNEWS.com YourdomainBLOG.com Really anything with your keyword in the domain first works well. I suggest using the Wordpress blogging platform to create the sites. This is very easy to setup and use, very inexpensive to host, and the search engines LOVE to crawl them! But really any site will do. If you have the will and the resources to build full blown html or php sites with unique designs then all the better. Keyword in the domain is still a very powerful ranking factor with the search engines.
Any sites you, your friends, or your family (shoot, even a vendor’s site) that you can get a page up about you on is a good way to go. Make sure these pages are optimized for your name. At the most basic level make sure that the page’s title tag and the URL have your name in them. Setting up subdomains on your main corporate site can be a good tactic as they subdomains will often rank on page 1 along with the main domain. But do not spam. Do not create 20 subdomains. I would say 3-4 is plenty, depending on the use. To give you and idea….for eVisibility a few we could setup that would make sense might be tools.evisibility.com, jobs.evisibility.com, testimonials.evisibility.com, forum.evisibility.com.
In regards to social media, drawing a line between personal and business information can be a little tricky, but should you have to? In the world of Social Media, you must be prepared to be transparent and depending on your comfort level your ability to share information with the general public vs. your personal contacts can vary, but should it? Being transparent is a term used to describe the level of openness to share your personal information with everyone on the internet. This brings me to a very hard hitting point. If you do not act on things that you have the ability to in order to right a wrong then your reputation will never be good. Will creating a Twitter account or being active on Facebook help you “listen” and “engage”? Yes, it will. But listening alone won’t do anything to fix the core issue. And the issue is often that the product or service simply sucks. That’s what you need to fix. If a company sees a tweet about a negative experience a client has, let’s say it’s United Airlines and some lost luggage or a broken guitar, and they respond to that individual and resolve the issue that is FANTASTIC! But if they do not fix the overall issues with their luggage handling chances are that person is going to have another issue next time they fly. Right the wrongs when you can, but use the info you get from social media to make real changes to your business. All based on customer feedback of course. Its like the angry girlfriend. You mess up and to apologize you make her dinner. You can only apologize and make dinner so many times before the girlfriend realizes that you really have not changed and that you will probably be apologizing a lot instead of fixing what is wrong. The ideas we’re preaching in social media (listening, reaching out, engaging, etc) aren’t “new”. They’re not shiny or flashy and we haven’t invented anything. Social media marketing and online reputation management, for the most part, are about customer service.
Press Releases from authority sites like Reuters or Yahoo News are good. Basically any listings that are ranking for your keywords that show you in a positive or even neutral light will work. A professional search marketing company will know how to isolate these for you.
Google now puts some good emphasis on video, pictures, and other content. IF you can create videos, set yourself up a YouTube channel to house all of your videos, optimize the videos for your keywords, and also syndicate the videos across the major video portals.
Building targeted links to all of the properties you create, as well as some of the existing positive content already out there will help you get it ranking. Linking is still and always will be THE #1 Ranking factor in Google. Also interlink your social profiles. Have links to your LinkedIn profile, Twitter, Flickr, etc on your site. Link social profiles to each other when possible.