Online Reputation Management 101
December 15, 2009The internet is a large, powerful tool and managing your online reputation can seem daunting. With the advent of social networking site such as Facebook and Twitter, clients now have a vast forum to post about their experiences with your company. This can be a good thing. It allows you to get to know your client base better and allows others to recommend businesses to their friends with a single click. However, these wonderful new social networking tools can easily work against you if customers post about negative experiences on blogs and social networking sites. Suddenly, a Google search for your company name can bring up a scathing blog post in the #1 position. Online Reputation Management (ORM) is a combination of Search Engine Marketing (SEO) and Public Relations. With millions of blogs, forums and websites, how can you track what people are saying about you? Here are a few tools for managing your online reputation:
Google Alerts
Set up a Google Alerts account with your company name. Any time your company names shows up in a blog post or an article, Google will send the link to your email. You can control how often emails are sent. You can get an email once a day, once a week or as it happens.
Backtype
This tool monitors blogs AND comments. You can set up an alert function that emails you when a certain search term is mentioned.
Monitter
Monitter, as the name suggests, monitors real time tweets. You can monitor up to 3 search terms using this site.
Twitter Search
Search Twitter for trending topics and mentions. Not only can you track what people are saying about you, but you can also connect with your clients and other companies.
BackTweets
You can use this tool to search for specific links that were tweeted.
WhoLinksToMe
Search for your website to find out who is linking to your site.
Stay tuned for the next blog post on how to handle negative publicity on the internet!