Online Reputation Management For Businesses

The increasingly socially-responsive Web has made it more important to continually monitor your business or brand's reputation online. As your customers, potential customers and the media increasing use the web to talk about and learn more about your business, you need to be proactive in monitoring what's being said. Knowing how your brand or business is perceived is critical in improving your product/service and customer relations. On the Web, there are a number of great tools available that can help webmasters gain a view of who's out there linking to and talking about their website and brand.

What You Can Expect to Find
Most of the time, businesses are shocked to see the frequency and types of places that there brand name appears. Expect to find bloggers, customer review websites and press releases that mention your brand. While you won't be able to find anywhere near every occurrence and mention of your business, you will get a taster of what's out there.

What You'll Learn:
* If you're trying to get the buzz out about your brand or a new product, you'll get a feel for how successful your campaigns have been by seeing who's talking about it based on how many places Google finds it.
* If you're monitoring customer reaction toward a new product, you may see reviews and blog posts written about it.
* If you find no mention of your brand or products, you may want to consider a stronger online marketing campaign.

Using Google Alerts for Reputation Management
As you may already know, the Google search bots are constantly running around the internet in search of information to index. You can use this to your advantage by having Google notify you every time it finds something related to your brand or business. The easiest way to do this is to setup a Google Alert. This can be done by creating a free account with Google and clicking on Alerts'.

With Google Alerts, you can setup automated notifications to be sent to your inbox each time Google comes across any given keyword phrase, such as your business name or product(s). When you receive a notification, you'll also receive a link to the location where your keyword phrase was found. Once you set this up, you'll receive immediate, daily or weekly notifications which make it easy to review instances where other websites talk about you.

Using Technorati for Reputation Management
In short, Technorati is a blog search engine. Technorati indexes content from over 1 million blogs in real time. It's probably the best resource to use when trying to track global blogger conversations. You can use Technorati's massive database and tools to your advantage by tracking conversation related to your business or industry in just a few simple steps.

Once you've started a Technorati account (it's free), search for your brand name or a specific industry term using the search box provided. Take a look at the results that are returned. Are these results relevant for your business? That is, does Technorati return sample blog posts that people wrote about your company or industry? If not, try searching for your brand name using quotation marks. For example, we would search that agency. Other search options allow you to determine where to search and what levels of authority results have to have.

Next, you can subscribe to receive an RSS update each time something new about your company comes across Technorati. When subscribing to the RSS feed, you'll have a choice of several options for receiving the feed. Once you've set this up, all you need to do is periodically check your RSS feed for updates. As updates come through, you'll receive a link that will give you information on the blog posting content about you so you can check it out. Hopefully, most of the updates that you get will be relevant to whatever you're trying to monitor. Of course, there will always be a little noise' in the results.

Using Twitter as a Reputation Management Tool
Twitter is an interesting social networking platform that allows individuals to communicate short thoughts about activities they are participating in at any given moment. The appeal for most users is that Twitter provides a good way for friends to keep each other up to date with what everyone in the group is doing at any one time. In a way, Twitter is like a mini-blog post, no more than 140 characters in length.

A typical Tweet (what you call it when a user posts to Twitter) may say something like, On my way to work, or At the dentist, can't wait to get cavities filled. Of course, the Twitter platform is used many other ways, but this is the basic purpose.

Because Twitter has become such an important medium of communication for real people, you can expect to find all types of conversations. You may even notice that Twitter users utilize the platform to talk about consumer issues like restaurants they've been to, products they are using, likes and dislikes, etc. For this reason, Twitter is a good resource to monitor what real people are saying about your brand.

Using the Twitter search tool, execute a search for your brand name. The search tool will bring back instances where Twitter users have mentioned your brand name. The advanced search tool will also let you search by location. Once you've fine tuned your search, again, you can sign up to receive an RSS feed of the results. This is another example of reputation management delivered to your doorstep.

No matter which tools you use, monitoring online conversations related to your brand or business can help you improve in ways not possible before the social web. Take a few minutes today and give it a try.