Why You Can’t Believe Everything You Don’t Read Online
Company reputations are built and destroyed based on what appears online, often before an initial customer interaction. This makes Rhea Drysdale’s recently launched venture, OutspokenMedia.com, an especially intriguing field of search marketing.
At a recent Search Engine Marketing New England (SEMNE) seminar, the Online Reputation Management diva quickly dealt with the ethically gray implications of her craft. ORM involves what you see in search engine results – and what you don’t.
“Does anyone have a problem with that?” Rhea, co-founder of Outspoken Media, asked the group of 50 online marketers gathered at the Connecticut Convention Center, most of whom shook their heads definitively.
To be clear, Rhea advocates white hat SEO – not paying to remove negative reviews or posting false comments about a product or service. Still, there is a sense that you’re playing God with search engine results by intentionally suppressing less than favorable results. This, of course, is the point.
But what if that restaurant being slammed on yelp really is a veritable pu pu platter of health code violations? Doesn’t the virtual populace have a right to know?
Rhea explains that she handles this potential challenge by working only with clients that she investigates in advance. She’s rejected a client that claimed to suffer from reviews of an evil doppelganger. Turned out those reviews were for the client itself and that the client had done nothing to clean up its act.
Not every ORM company can be expected to adhere to the same code of ethics, placing the onus more firmly on the consumer to do some actual – in addition to online – vetting.
To get started on your own Online Reputation Management, consider these tips:
1.) Be proactive – Buy domain names now as a preventive practice. [YourName].com, [YourCompanyName].com and – though you probably can’t imagine needing either such as [YourName]Sucks.com and [YourCompanyName]Sucks.com. If you’re wondering why, just ask Rachael Ray. Or visit what used to be a site devoted to bashing the celebrity chef, RRsux.com, for a sense of how the Internet is a magnet for vocal people with too much time on their hands.
2.) Be vigilant – Take advantage of all of the tools to monitor your online brand. From Twitter to Backtrack to OMGILI to Social Mention, there are plenty of free ways to keep tabs on what the blogosphere is saying about you and your company. Paid tools for the advanced ORM include Reputation Defender, Distilled.co.uk, and Radian 6.
3.) Determine when to act – Decide whether that blog about your lousy customer service is worth just silently monitoring or reaching out to the dissatisfied customer. Comcast has been tremendously successful at putting a face with their outreach through Comcast Cares. In the extreme case, you may want to consider legal action to remove the offensive content.
4.) Be an early adopter – Register your name or company name with social media sites as soon as possible to scoop up the choicest handles. There are new ones popping up daily, so keep track of them. Some to watch include CrunchBase, eHow, and Knol.Google.com.
5.) Soak up that link juice – While some social media sites have “no followed” their links, meaning that your own site doesn’t get credit for the incoming link, there are still some good opportunities to improve your chances of being found for what is important to you.
For example, LinkedIn allows you to include any three links that you choose. Naymz lets you include as many links as you want and you can choose the anchor text – the text that describes the link and helps search engines ascribe value to your site.
6.) Create your own positive buzz – A complete online marketing strategy involves knowing how you want to be found as well as how you don’t. The broader overall marketing strategy encompasses taking steps, online and offline, to build enough genuine fans so that the good results far outweigh any negative results.
Written by: Louisa Handle
Email the author: louisah@fathom.net
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