In a very interesting blog post, Barry Hurd equates a person’s–or indeed, a company’s–online reputation “score” to a credit score. There are so many factors that can hurt and help your online reputation, that it’s a “wild wild west” of potential pitfalls and unknowns. I agree. It is the “wild wild west” and it’s full of gunslingers and mudslingers.
A gunslinger will tell you to hire a firm to manage your online reputation. As one of these gun-slinging outfits, we agree that most established companies with any kind of history online do need help with this task–its just too vast for a “here-and-there” or “when-I-have-some-free-time” type of effort. But for start-ups, sole proprietorships, or companies simply too tight in the budget to afford outside help, here are a few pointers to mange your own online reputation. Managing it effectively starts with the No. 1 most important–and easy–daily task. If you do one thing to manage your company’s online reputation, do this:
MONITOR
There are many ways to do this on the cheap or for flat-out free. The easiest way to get a very general snapshot is to set up a Google News feed for your company keywords. This will include: company name, CEO/President/Owner name, and proprietary products or services. If there are any other proprietary or personal names associated with your business, monitor those too.
Setting up an alert is a snap. If you have a Google or Yahoo account, you already have an RSS feed reader built into your account. Just go to Google News and do a search on your keywords one by one. At the bottom of the page for each search there is an RSS button, click on it and select your reader (Yahoo, Google or another one).
Here are some other great tools and sources you can use to monitor your company’s mentions and comments for free:
Google Alerts: A simple way to set up an email alert or feed on a keyword, with various options for how often you’d like your alerts.
Social Mention: Like Google Alerts but for social media. Receive free daily email alerts of your brand, company, CEO, marketing campaign, a competitor, or anything else relevant to your business.
Addictomatic: Create a topic (your business) “dashboard” to view all discussions, mentions and search results from sites like Yahoo, Bing, Twitter, Friendfeed, Google Blogs, YouTube, Digg and more.
BoardReader: A search tool for forums. It will monitor forum topics and discussions on your brand, your products, your competition.
HowSociable: A very, very cool tool that measures a brand’s visibility across the web. It will look at your brand’s presence on all major social media and social bookmarking sites and assign it a visibility score. The score makes it handy to compare how visible you are over your competition. It’s also one way to see if your social media efforts are improving your visibility.
These are my favorites, but the list is certainly not exhaustive. If you have favorites you want to mention, post in a comment.
