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Yesterday I published a post on the Search Engine People site titled 50+ Sites to Help You Bury Negative Posts About You or Your Company!.

While the tactics mentioned may be enough to push some negative online mentions of you or your business to the second page of the search results or lower, in other cases they will not. The question then becomes; what else can you do when the initial tactics themselves aren’t enough, and you’ve got a negative piece about you ranking in the search results for an important phrase. Burying your head in the sand and hoping it goes away isn’t really a viable option. The answer … LOTS can be done!

Lets start with our goals … they’re progressive.

Progressive Goals:
Goal #1: First … bump the listing below the fold asap
then
Goal #2: Bump the listing off the first page of the search results for the given term(s)

With goals in hand, we can now consider tactics.

Tactics:
To Achieve Goal #1:

a. select the strongest 3-5 of those 50+ sites, where strong is a subjective assessment based on many factors. My personal assessment would be:

1. Digg
2. Twitter
3. Stumbleupon
4. MyBlogLog
5. Linkedin

b. establish a profile on each, where the profile name is the term/phrase the negative piece ranks for
c. get lots of friends on each of those sites … the more the better. It works best if you take an active role and participate. Each friend will result in an internal link back to your profile on that site, making it stronger.
d. within each site, you can see which profiles are the strongest in the offending engines’ eyes … the search engines themselves with rank them in order of importance given a simple search query (eg. site:twitter.com). Try to secure links from the strongest profiles first … they pass the most value.
e. join groups where possible too … often these will pass link power to your profile as well.
f. possibly create a social profiles menu on your site(s), and link to each of these profiles.

To Achieve Goal #2:

a. determine how far down you actually wish to push the piece. Beyond the first page will take a great deal of time and energy.
b. assuming you’ve already bumped the offending post below the fold, you need to select the number of sites you will need to use from the 50 + listed in the 50+ Sites to Help You Bury Negative Posts About You or Your Company! article.
c. follow the steps outlined above for each
d. within each (where possible) include links to all your other profiles on the other sites

Following these steps should be enough to push most negative mentions to the second page. If not, or if you don’t have the time and energy, do engage the services of a professional with experience in the space. Aside from the obvious value … its not a bad idea to take out profiles under your name anyway, just as a pre-emptive measure.

Please note … these tactics are by no means comprehensive or advanced. They’re just a relatively quick and efficient means for burying negative online mentions. Much more advanced tactics exist, which I will not delve into here.

Other great reference posts about reputation management include:
Glen Allsopp - What Is Online Reputation Management
Andy Beal - Free Online Reputation Management Beginner’s Guide
Todd Malicoat - Reputation Management Emancipation PRoclamation - 10 Ways to Own Yourself Online
Lee Odden - Basics of Online Reputation Management
Marty Weintraub - 9 Essential Tactics for Reputation Management in Social Media
Andy Beal - Buzz Monitoring: 26 Free Buzz Tracking Tools
David Wallace - Using Social Media to Help Manage Online Reputation

Short term financial success in social media can be a multi-layered enigma, ranging somewhere between daunting and infuriating. As the socialized Internet explodes it has become increasingly difficult for companies to ignore the ramifications of not tuning in to deal with SMO vernacular & channels.

We all hear buzz words like "reputation management," "social news," "blogs," and "Wikis" but exactly WHAT the heck does all this mean to a business? How do I convince my boss or client that forays into the social media universe will actually pay cash-money any time soon? How DO we engage visitors? Where’s the revenue?

In Part One we discussed ideas for Facebook social PPC, the PR tactic of pinging sales prospects with outbound links, increasing landing page conversion by mashing in "evidence of human life" and touched on the Tao of one-on-one conversational marketing.

In this installment, we’ll talk about using blog comment threads to create uber-targeted micro-topical email lists, a tactic which can easily result in short term sales and cash. ("Thread" simply means the ongoing exchange of comments in a blog type CMS structure.)

At base, a blog is an open source (free) content management system (CMS) with built in goodies like RSS feeds, automatic content archives, easy WYSIWYG publishing and many other friendly features designed to engage visitors. A staggering percentage of websites incorporate blog-type software for some purpose. What’s important to understand is that blogs are much more than the stereotypical perception thereof.

Everyone knows email marketing works. I’m not talking about the junk-spammy kind, rather nice clean opt-in lists that companies build over time. Responsible and compliant email marketing is a component of many a corporations’ array of marketing tactics and proving ROI is not difficult. Email just works. Benefits include great "open" and conversion rates, customer loyalty, predictable results, low costs and repeat sales.

It’s true that payday loan email blasts are not going to convert at the same level as $1.50 bagged cereal coupons but it’s all good. Email is a timeless and undeniable SEM tactic. That said, building great targeted lists takes time and ingenuity. Conversations that take place using blogging software like WordPress are an excellent source for harvesting incredibly focused segmented lists quickly by inviting user interaction, mining the data, and using the thread’s mini-list to send email blasts now and later.

Blogs and Email: Anatomy of a Comments Thread
When a site visitor comments in a blog, they automatically subscribe by email to the conversation if you’ve set it up properly. Then with each new comment, including yours, every previous visitor magically receives the new comment by email. Think about it. The pot of gold at the end of successfully engaging users in blog-type comments-dialog is the ability to email all of the conversation’s participants simply by commenting yourself. As with all of social media, there is profitable power in marketing to micro-targeted highly specific demographics.

Perhaps you’ll return comments by answering users’ questions, refuting incorrect assertions, clarifying a situation, explaining a product, or just indulging in a little ol’ fashioned meet & greet. Bottom line: get users to converse with each other in a blog and you’ll have the entire group at your fingertips to exploit just by commenting again yourself and pressing submit. Everyone who has participated in the thread to-date gets an email! It’s so easy.

Now that you understand the theory, the obvious question is "how DO we engage users in comments-thread conversations?" The answer is only limited by your team’s creativity. Since every product is different somehow, there is no "one size fits all." However here’s a couple of examples from clients aimClear works with to provide insight into the "market think" required to start conversations like a pro. These are all real examples of opportunity turned into creative comments-thread solutions for engaging users for micro-email list building purposes.

1. Opportunity: Your company publishes service manuals for devices you sell. In the existing website hosts about 4000 daily visitors search for and access .pdf product manuals spread across 57 previous and current products.

   Solution: Install the ability for customers to comment or ask specific questions in a publicly posted thread prominently featured just to the left (and outlined in red) of the .pdf download. New visitors see prior questions and have the ability to directly engage previous commentors.

   Seed the interaction by encouraging visitors to post questions for the product’s design team with a promised response time of 24 hours. Respond by…you guessed it…commenting. Over time hundreds or thousands of users will engage as they likely own or are considering purchasing the device. Just about anyone looking for a product manual has some kind of question they need answers for. NOW you have a very targeted micro-list of those interested in specific devices. The list is worth it’s weight in gold. The next time you announce an add-on, upgrade, or other news about the device, all you have to do is comment. Everyone who has previously participated gets an email until they opt-out of the thread.

2. Opportunity: Say the regional niche’ music production school you market has a staff of experts in their respective fields. Organic traffic brings tons of unique visitors for searches directly related to the academic offerings. The success metric is information-requests from qualified prospective students. The site harvests organic leads each day at a nice conversion rate from which any sale could be worth tens of thousands of dollars. Out of the organic visitors who do not convert, over half come back within 90 days. That’s a lot of potential customers just waiting to be engaged. There are millions of dollars on the table.

   Solution: Set a cookie for every organic visitor based on the incoming query and only delete the cookie if they convert. The next time the visitor shows up, read the cookie and direct them to a landing page which has headlines from thread featuring teacher-experts discussing topics specifically related to the user’s original search query. Invite the return visitor to ask a question themselves, in public, and promise a response. You guessed it! Everyone who has previously engaged gets an email with the visitor’s question and your response.

   The next time the college announces a new program, wants to highlight a student’s success, or announces a famous instructor, all you have to do is comment and everyone gets an email. (BTW, this tactic is called SMO post-search retargeting.)

When discussing possible social media plays with bosses and/or clients, the first question is often "how can we make money with this effort." Setting short and mid-term financial goals for social media efforts straight away can help smooth the pitch and bring in much needed cash to justify the investment.

Blog comment threads are a great way to harvest highly targeted micro-email lists which can earn money in a relatively short amount of time. Developing strategy and tactics to exploit the turnkey capabilities of free blogging software is only limited by the creativity of the SEM team. An excellent approach is to analyze site traffic that already exists, engage users, track behavior over time, and continually serve up opportunities to interact until they just can’t resist. Such is the power of social media.

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Here is a summary of the observations [...]

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For example, one core concept is search is the [...]

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From the SEW Blog:

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One of the interesting areas we discussed was ways that search [...]

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Okay incentivized search is not new, but it usually was a bugus engine asking people to click and share some minor income. The newly launched engine iRazoo seems to be a different model (not unique), though it has some initial detractors over at Digg.
The engine is human-powered. As the site explains:
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Optimizing so that traffic importanceKeyword Use in Title TagThe absolutely absolute position to put your Keywords into. Put your keyphrases in your title tag, and remember to optimize each page individually (Ex.. don’t overstuff your title tag, and have certain title tags since each page that reflect the content of that particular page - otherwise, [...]