Coverage of the Online Reputation Management session at Search Fest 2009
Speaking on this panel is Todd Friesen, Tony Adam – Yahoo, Marty Weintraub – aimClear and moderating is Anne Kennedy – Beyond Ink.
Tony Adam: Where to monitor your reputation
Check out the RipOffReport – this is one of the irst places to check out any negative mentions o your website or brand.
Using the “intitle:” command allows you to see if people have mentioned your brand in a negative way.
The Conversation is Everywhere – discover where people are talking about your brand and then watch!
Social media isn’t just on myspace or facebook, yahoo groups has a ton of groups that may be discussing your brand.
Paypal example – how can you begin to interact with user to make a negative situation a positive one?
Protect your personal brand – check out checkusernames.com which shows you 50+ sites where your brand name may or may not be registered. This is great a great preemptive reputation management strategy.
Give people a chance to give feedback to you or your company.
Be transparent, if you make a mistake, come out and admit it and be genuine.
Place content on social media sites that show up in the search results, like wikipedia. Clean up social media proiles where people have taken over your brand, work with them and share content for that proile.
Listen and monitor the audience.
Marty Weintraub – How to build a reputation monitoring dashboard product
You can build an igoogle dashboard that integrates feed data. Clients should monitor their brand search and keywords.
Steps
1. Create a Google account
2. Start a list: Brand, products, company names and executives, buzz words, (consider misspellings too). (MSN Keyword mutation tool) Use stream of consciousness to develop other words to monitor. Look through your Google analytics data; paid and non-paid keywords for more ideas.
4. Set up a products tab, and other tabs for each area that you want to monitor.
5. Category Segmentation – personnel, competition, industry phrases and events. Try using google’s adwords keyword tool – sort by highest search volumes and look for categorical keywords. Look for keywords that can help give you an edge and stay informed. Customer Centricity Queries – full phrases, misspellings, this is where you will find keywords to track!
6. Set up your Google alerts and set up alerts as a feed (not an email alert).
7. Add the feed to your google home page, you will see a gadget with your feed.
Extra tips – Twitter can be used simply by grabbing the “feed for this query” (simply add to your igoogle). Technorati also has a feed that can be pulled into your igoogle dashboard. BoardReader – “walled content” can be discovered using this site.
Interpretation tips – Don’t click on every link, hover-over links to get the general idea.
Todd Fiesen – Reputation Management from a Historical Perspective
Consider looking at only content that is ranking within the search engines, this should be your priority.
Building the argument for Reputation Management
1. Customer Review, this is huge! There’s a ton of sites that give consumer the tools that they need inorder to voice their opinion. Research has shown that 90% of consumers trust a 3rd party review. Many major companies will experience a negative event within the next few years that could impact share price.
Industry Stats to be aware of:
58% of searchers will visit a website after seeing a negative review.
81% of consumers research online before making an off-line purchase.
31% leave feedback online, and most of them are negative.
87% of people believe a CEOs reputation reflects the companies culture and trust (Zappos CEO example)
78% of executive recruiters “Google You” before they hire you.
35% of those executive recruiters have rejected a candidate based on what they find online.
So what can you do: Subdomains are a quick solution, consider boosting links for other positive sites.
Q&A –
What do you think about Yahoo! Pipes vs. iGoogle?
Marty: It’s iGoogle is easier to use and train people on. It’s super simple. Yahoo! pipes is much deeper, so it’s not a “do it yourself” solution and can require a lot of development.
Crisis Situations – has anything come up at Paypal?
We did an analysis and found out that we were loosing $4M per month based on the negative results in Google. Built pages such as MySpace and other SMM related sites that weren’t being crawled, so we boosted links to these sites.
Todd: Social media sites are really powerful, checkusernames.com is a great place to start!
How can I use subdomains (in more detail)?
Todd: an example includes a company that took all sub-sections of a site’s content and added subdomains for major areas. It’s possible to have 3-4 subdomains show up in the top 10 results if you have strong in-bound links to each.
What do you think about products like “Naymez”?
Todd: These sites work to a certain extent, and there are probably better areas to start, like Twitter. Stephan Spencer from NetConcepts has great content on this topic. LinkedIn is a great tool to use.
Marty: “Powerful internal links is your bounty for participation.”
Has anyone really actually paid RipOff Report to remove listings?
The panel confirms that there are many examples where this has occured. Yelp also is allowing people to “sponsor” positive results.
Live Blogging by Scott Fish, Director of Search Engine Optimization at EngineWorks in Portland, Oregon.
Announcement type posts of this type are made by the board collectively, and you can see who the current board members are here.
Thanks for the overview. Good post.
Owning your personal brand is just as important as being proactive in creating, modifying and managing the brand of your company. Make sure that you have control of a significant amount of content appearing in search results for your name.
Seems like it was a great panel!