The Venture Skills Blog

Whether your an individual a company or a marketing/SEO company reputation management will become part of your business and business strategy, knowing what’s being said about you and your clients is not only important but in many business paramount.

Having decided that this is the case your question is how to best to keep and analyse your reputation and brand, you could

• Hire a reputation management company (that would be us right )
• Employ a full time specialist
• Do it or get some one to do it yourself

Do It yourself reputation management tools

I’m taking a slightly wild guess and saying your not keen on the first two and would like to at least in the beginning focus on the later, I therefore present some tools to help you monitor reputation and brand awareness online.

Basics of reputation management is simple,

• know what is being said about you
• Know if its credible
• Respond appropriately

Quite rightly most reputation management focuses on finding out what is being said, of course the nice thing is that what ever you can do for yourself you can do for your competitors, part of reputation management is knowing what is and isn’t being said by your competitors and aimed at your competitors. Depending on your business responding to criticism levelled at competitors before the can act can be a major coup, even better if they didn’t even know the criticism was there in the first place.

So what tools can we use, lets start with the real basics and work our way up

Old School – Email

Google

Search engines are the obvious choice, how many times have you typed your name into Google to see what comes up, when I do it I get an evil “water colourist” instead of my pretty mug which still sits happily at number 2. A company or business should be dominating the SERPs both for the company name but also major members of staff, while its beyond the scope of this post to discuss this think simple stuff, employee home pages etc.

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Quick Tip What ever tools you use, set aside 1 minute each month to Google your Company name and major members of staff, look at rankings but also look out for competitors within the first 50 pages, this can be a sign of trouble brewing, the ultimate problem is when you rank lower then your competitor for your company name, and it does happen.

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Quick Tip 2 When making your searches try including http://www.google.com/ncr this prevents redirects based on location, though remember its always worth looking at regional SERPs as well.

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Google Alerts

The next really simple tool is Google Alerts which simply tells you when new information has been added to various sources based on a user query, this alert arrives in your inbox. Its not very complicated and uses standard search engine logic, this helps us to easily define queries for example

“Tim Nash”

Would return a query with updated or new threads pertaining to Tim Nash, notice the “” marks if you don’t include them then you will get a lot of irrelevant results, so lets look at some good query strings to use and why.

“Company Name” Comprehensive | Weekly
“Competitor Name” Comprehensive | Weekly
“Company Name” + “Competitor Name” Comprehensive | As it Happens

“Company Name” OR “Management Name” Blog | As it Happens
“Company Name” + sucks OR crap OR failed Comprehensive | As it Happens

You can see what we are doing here, each week we would receive a list of sites that has mentioned ourselves or our competitor. While Direct comparisons or negative comments are piked up on quickly. Finally Blogging is all about the moment to capitalise on any blog post about the company you need to respond quickly, also its worth monitoring whats being said about your competitor as well.

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Quick TipYou can use the link:sitename in Google Alerts to tell you when new links have been added to a site, and also the site: which is useful for mining your competitors site and knowing when new information has been crawled.

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Every thing we have done here for Google Alerts can of course be done using Yahoo alerts, as well so now we have emails coming in telling us about a variety of subjects which is fine

Going Social

Today if your cool your viral and if your viral throw your reputation management system out of the window and enjoy the ride, however often before things go “viral” they can be found in the social networks these sites are designed to spread information fast and are great way to get a brand noticed and lots of traffic to a site, monitoring these resources needs something a bit more up to date then email lets go to dinner with feeds.

Feeds are various xml files that provide either full content or teasers to pages on sites, made popular by blog’s feeds and in particular RSS feeds provide a method of reading content from a site without visiting the site itself.

Feed Readers are a subject to themselves but if you haven’t used one before I would suggest Google Reader as a reliable (though sometimes slow), when choosing your reader make sure it can import OPML files , these files are lists of other files (in our case feeds) most feed readers support this function.
To import an OPML file in Google Reader

Settings -> Import/Export -> Browse to the file location and click ok

So how do we fill your RSS reader?
We can get a basis by using a tool called Monitor This

Monitor This

This great tool creates an OPML file based around results from pre defined searches, now its only a basis and needs constant updating but provides a great way to find out what’s currently out there. It allows you to place your keywords and then searches 22 engines pulling results which can be called by feeds. Simply place your terms in the search box and hit go.

It does have a couple of problems, its logic in terms of query strings is limited not by it but the sites its accessing and so there is little control and second it can produce a vast quantity of results many of which might not be desirable. However its a great tool for creating your initial list, as more sites discuss you or your competitors its worth adding there feed (where they have one) to your reader. Try to set aside once a day to go through your feeds, you will only need to skim them to know if they are relevant or not. a good time to do this is always the morning I find, but it might be different for you.

This first part has been about hands on getting the information part 2 will discuss tools that monitor and automate the above processes, we will look at the pro’s and con’s not to mention the cost.
Until then enjoy watching your reputation and remember there is no shame in Googling your name!

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