Managing your personal e-reputation is increasingly important. This brief overview outlines the steps you can take to ensure your online reputation is kept in order.
18. Visits Your Site
Checks Your
Name on Search
Engines
Checks Your
Name on Review
Sites
90% of consumers
trust the reviews
they read!
86% of consumers check out business reviews
online before making purchasing decisions.
Searches for
Product/Service
Online
Sees Your Ad (TV,
radio, mag., etc.)
Offline
Searches for
Product/Service
Visits Competitor
Contacts You
58% of searchers
visit a competitor
site after seeing
negative comments!
How Consumers Make Buying Decisions
20. How ready are you?
Not ready Somewhat
ready
Ready
Have a blog?
How many posts?
How often do you blog?
Have Twitter profile
Tweet your posts
Have LinkedIn profile
LinkedIn @ 100%
# of LinkedIn Connections
Joined LinkedIn groups
Company Facebook profile
21. How ready are you?
Not ready Somewhat
ready
Ready
Have a blog? Y Y Y
How many posts? >6 10 - 20 >50
How often do you blog? monthly weekly 2 x week
Twitter profile Y Y Y
Tweet your posts N Y Y
LinkedIn profile Y y Y
LinkedIn @ 100% N Y Y
# of LinkedIn Connections >30 30 - 60 >250
Joined LinkedIn groups N N Y
Company Facebook profile N N Y
23. 3 Steps to balance Risk Reward
23
• Step 1:
Monitoring:
– Google and Yahoo!
Alerts
– Social Mention
– Radian6
– HootSuite
– Technorati
– Addict-O-Matic
– ReputationDefender
24. What to Monitor Online
• Company/personal name or brand
• Products or services
• Marketing messages, tag lines etc
• Your competition
• Your industry, trends, technologies
• Your intellectual property
25. Where to Monitor
• Search Engines, Google Places
• Blogs, Discussion Forums
• News sites, media sharing sites
• Social networks, bookmarking sites
• Directories
• Review sites, Yelp, MeasureUp,
ConsumerReview, RateAll
• Tip: include modifiers likes “fails” “scam”
“sucks”
26. What to Measure Online
• Attention numbers: monitor over time
• Sentiment rating: mentions how favourable
• Search Rankings: social media has a massive
impact
• Incoming links: one good blog post on a social
site can be huge
• Customer engagement: how many retweets, is
anyone listening?
• Referrals or contacts or sales gained
• Only 14% are actively measuring social media
27. – Step 2: Analysis
• Healthy conversations are
both + and – in origin
• Provided you are listening
you can turn both into +
ORM
• Analyse and strategise:
–Immediate appropriate
conversations
–Strategic change
communicated too!
3 Steps to balance Risk Reward
28. 3 Steps to balance Risk Reward
• Step 3: Influencing
– When the situation is a crisis
• Traditional PR responses are being
challenged
by the Digital Age
– instant opportunity to improve the brand
– delay can only damage
• It is the opinions of customer that count
– Proactive steps can help suppress
negativity:
• If the ratio of + to – is 10 to 1, then do the
math(s)
• Take an active part in your industry blogs
for instance
29. Step 3: Influencing - How
• Select the right social
technologies:
– Segment your customers first
– Then match to the right ones
– The most popular ones,
Facebook
& Twitter may be a match but
check
– Your ‘Tone of Voice’ is
important
– Demonstrate your expertise
to enhance your reputation
30. Evaluate your position
• Search for your exact business name
• Record the details on a spreadsheet for each
entry
• Check for results on review sites and record
• Check all relevant directories and record
• Make sure you have claimed all of your listings
• Ensure they all have exactly the same contact
and company information
• Respond to any negative reviews
• Collect, Create and Publish more content
– Industry stats, helpful tips, video’s, press releases,
articles, blog posts, factoids, answer questions
32. Tools and Resources
Bit.ly: When you use a URL shortener, it’s always a smart idea
to use one that has analytics information, like Bit.ly. This will
track information like number of clicks, traffic sources, and
even at what time clicks occur - http://bit.ly
Twitter Counter: This will show the growth of followers for
your Twitter account the past week, month, 3 months and 6
months. This site will also graph the number of tweets per day
- http://www.twittercounter.com
• Social Mention: A great social media search engine, this tool
will track mentions of your company, brand or a specific
phrase and also provides feedback on overall sentiment of
those mentions - http://www.socialmention.com
33. Tools and Resources
Klout: This is the standard for influence. Look up your Klout
Report to find your influence level, user style, and content -
http://klout.com
TweetEffect: This tool draws a direct line between the tweets
that you send and the followers you gained or lost -
http://www.tweeteffect.com
Sprout Social: This social media dashboard that puts all of your
social media activity in one simple interface -
http://www.sproutsocial.com
34. Tools and Resources
Addictomatic: This is a news aggregator but can also be used
to monitor social media. You just need to put in the name of a
topic (ie: name or category of your business) and you’ll receive
the latest feeds about that certain topic-
http://addictomatic.com/
Backtype: Just type in the URL of your website or really any
URL from your Internet marketing efforts and you’ll receive
real-time information of the social impact of those sites -
http://www.backtype.com/ - (just bought by Twitter)
35. What goes online stays online
• Remember the old
adage?
– Good tell one, bad tell 10!
– Online multiply the impact
x ‘000s
• The buzz can be good or
bad
– You can’t control it
– But you can influence it
• Successful businesses
listen and act!
In this presentation we are going to look at what it takes to build your online credibility so that people who come through to your website will select you as supposed to yourcompetition.
Online credibility covers three steps.
About us which is about your company and the people.
Content marketing where you are publishing content on a regular basis and are seen as a thought leader and expert in your industry or field.
Social media where you can build your profiles so that you can support any increase your Word of mouth marketing.
Some of the main factors influencing people's decisions are a company's approach to business, general information about the company and how they do business
Ask the audience what are the questions that someone should ask a social media consultant
Write these on the flipchart
Go through them
Come up with the one question that says it all
Many people make the mistake of putting information about themselves on the homepage.
The homepage should be kept for what is in it for your visitors, why should they do business with you.
When you click through on the about us page you should take your visitor to a page that gives them information on what they are looking for
Here we show what our approach to business is and what people can expect when doing business with us.
First they are “Searching” then they are “Researching”
Check out these statistics: (read the slide)
Source: Kudzu Research Study
Get the audience to help complete this
Print the next slide and use it to guide everyone
Create spreadsheet for the workshop
Discuss these scores to get sentiment of audience
So now we know what ORM is, lets quickly examine the 3 Steps to balancing Risk and obtaining Reward from taking the time and effort to take control of your ORM:
They are * Monitoring, Analyzing and Influencing – Let’s look at Step 1 – Monitoring *
The internet is a great way to quickly find out what people think about a company, product or service:
You’ve probably done it a hundred times yourself
People are more likely to share poor experiences than good experiences (unless prompted)
And online, this effect is multiplied a thousand time over as we have already discussed
The biggest problem sometimes is… not even knowing things are being said about your brand…. good or bad!
So monitoring is absolutely vital
But that’s easier said than done, so we’re going to share here some of the tools you can use:
*1. Google and Yahoo! Alerts
Google Alerts allows you to set up keyword searches for the name of your company or competitors and receive updates in your email inbox or through an RSS feed.
*2. Social Mention
Social Mention tracks blogs, blog comments, Twitter, mainstream news, images, video and audio.
*3. Radian6
This social media monitoring tool offers integrated workflow, alerts, sentiment, monitoring across blogs, forums, news, Twitter and more.
*4. HootSuite
HootSuite is a popular tool that can be used to manage multiple accounts across Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, WordPress, Foursquare and LinkedIn.
*5. Technorati
This is one of the largest blog search engine directories that can also be searched for keywords related to your brand (or those of your competition).
*6. Addict-O-Matic
This tool has a consolidated page with search matches across sites like Twitter, Flickr and more.
*7. ReputationDefender
Reputation Defender offers a robust monitoring service that will help you keep track of your brand. A feature called MyEdge helps you deal with the results that Google serves up about you.
*8. Finally, WSI ReachCast – Although we left it out of the white paper so as not to promote our own product, I may be a little biast but I think it’s one of the best!
It does much more than just monitor negative & positive mentioned about your business or brand, it also allows you to cast positive comments across all your pages, build your fan base and drive more positive reviews
* Step 2: Analysis
Both positive and negative feedback can be healthy for your business*……, provided that is:
You know about it and
You react to it quickly and appropriately
Remember United Airlines:
If they had quickly responded to the YouTube video –
Apologised, dealt with the valid claim and perhaps made a genuine heart felt public apology (via a musical YouTube video)
Do you think their share value would have fallen by $180m dollars and they’d only have a 2 star rating?*…………
* And, if they’d thought strategically, to change processes, to make sure this wouldn’t happen again (* and communicated that fact)
… well, it’s always been true that if you handle a complaint well, you’ve probably got a customer for life
* … online you have to monitor closely, so you can quickly analyze the impact and react appropriately a.s.a.p.
Why – because whilst the reward for doing so is so great, the risk of not doing so is perhaps even greater
*Step 3: Influencing
* When a crisis situation arises (more in a minute)*
The traditional PR response to craft a carefully worded press release is just too slow*
When bad news travels as fast as it does, in the online ‘viral world’ then you need to react differently*
Delay can only damage, but respond quickly, sensitively and taking care of your customer’s opinions*
…then you can strengthen your brand’s image and turn potential disaster into PR victory
It’s the opinions of your customers that count and we need to be responsive to them and be seen to care*
But why wait for a crisis, you can influence your reputation positively in so many ways
If there are already 10 positive comments out there about you and your brand, indexed by the search engines
Then one disproportionate negative comment will not show – however that doesn’t mean you should ignore it, but
It does mean you should proactively engage in activities that promote your brand reputation, in a planned way
Let’s look at that in a bit more detail*
We all know that for Search Engines ‘Content is King’ – we need to make sure it’s the right type of content that the search engines are indexing and ranking
So how do you do that?
* You need to select the right Social Technologies:
You need to do more than just reply to comments*
If you are going to proactively communicate as well, you need to segment your customer base to see where to be heard*
Make sure you’re where your customers are, and engage in two way conversations*- you may even collect your customers preferences, but if not, then use the available demographic data to inform your choices*
Just as in all relationships, the ‘Tone of voice’ you adopt should match your brand persona- in customer facing blogs, you might have several contributors who are seen as subject matter experts or look after particular products, services or functions
When joining in conversation on industry blogs or discussion groups, comment to add value not ‘noise’, as the latter will have the opposite impact
* Demonstrate your expertise by going ‘narrow and deep’
*Remember the old adage…
If you have a good experience you’ll perhaps tell one person,* but if you have a bad one, you’ll probably tell at least 10 people!
Well that WAS true in an offline world, but in an online world, where you don’t have to go out of your way to tell people, post one bad experience you’ve had on Facebook or Twitter and it’s not just 10 people who’ll hear the story, it could be thousands!*
* The buzz could be good or bad – and one things for sure, * you can’t control it….., *but you CAN influence it *
In an online world, where ten’s of thousands of people are connected though Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, and where all the conversations can be indexed by Google * then….
Successful businesses * not only listen but also take action.