Reputation Management in a Web 2.0 World
This is a Web 2.0 world and whoever is going to deal with you is going to check out your reputation on the Internet. They want to know about your background, activities, past history and other things about you. They do it by searching for your name and brand names and checking out the top few results. What do they say about you? Are your sites coming up in the first few results (at least top 10, may be top 20)?
Time for reputation management.
How do you cover your bases and make sure that the first 10 or 20 results are all positive mentions of your name and brand? There may be some negative reviews and that’s not good news. How do you get this changed? Most of the times, you will find that you cannot get these reviews changed to favorable notes. The only way out of this is to push these down by bringing up positive reviews. Here are some quick tips to do so:
- Your main website is a prime candidate for a top 10 ranking on your name and brand. In fact, you can get this at #1 most of the time with simple SEO.
- Your company blog is another important candidate for a place in the top 10. You can get an indented listing or an independent listing if it is on another domain.
- You can also get your personal blog in the top 10 list because you will be repeatedly mentioning your brands here.
- Your Twitter profile can also get in the top 10 ranking if you link to it a bit liberally and set your profile properly.
- Your page on social sites like Squidoo, Hubpages is also a good candidate. Again you need to set your profile and get a few incoming links.
- Your profile pages on popular forums can also get in the top rankings. Focus on your profile at the forums where you are active.
- A testimonial on a vendor’s page or the sales page of a product you like and recommend can also take up a place.
- You can issue a few press releases on popular sites like PRWEB.com and link to these releases from a few places. These pages are very powerful and help you direct some visitors to your sales pages from links in the releases.
You can easily apply these techniques yourself. However you can ask us to help with your reputation management if you are short on time and would rather spend the limited time on hand on other marketing avenues or customer service.