Musings and things that amuse us

Do you know what people are saying about your company, your product, you, online?

With the power of today’s Internet, and the huge growth in user generated content, your brand can turn up in all nooks and crannies of the Web (forums, social networking sites, blogs, etc.).

When the comments are favorable, all is good. But, what about those irate customers, disenchanted employees, and competitors, who, with a few quick and nasty words, can cause serious problems for your online reputation?

While your first reaction to bad press might be to get angry and send off an e-mail, don’t do it until you’ve calmed down. Emotive letters sometimes end up on the Web too, and this will only fuel the fire.

The best defense is a good offence. Monitor your online reputation, incorporate a few SEO tweaks, and consider beginning a company blog if you don’t have one already.

Monitor your brand

Google Alerts makes it easy for you to stay up to date with what is being said about you online by sending you an e-mail every time your designated keywords appear in Google product.

Set alerts for your name, your company name, your product name; anything that you want to keep track of, then tell Google how often you want an e-mail. Simple.

Although Yahoo and Microsoft have alerts, the alerts are for what they think you should read (CNN, Fox Sports, Stocks, etc.) rather than what you want to read. The best way to see if you are turning up in their results is to type your keywords into the search engines themselves.

If you are tracking this way, the other useful place to check (assuming people are tagging your keywords) is Technorati; currently tracking 112.8 million blogs.

Is your site indexed by search engines?

I’ve talked about what the Googlebot sees when it visits your site in an earlier post, but before it can see your site, you first need to ensure that your site has been indexed. If it hasn’t been indexed, find out why and fix it. This is important because when people search for your brand, you need to be found easily. If you have created a reputable online presence, anyone writing negative remarks about your brand turns up below you in search results – rather than above you.

To find out if Google is indexing your site, go to Site Status

To find out if Yahoo is indexing your site go to Site Explorer

To find out if Live is indexing your site, go to Live type “site:your URL” (e.g. site:blog-well.com )and click search.

To find out if Ask has visited your site, check your server logs. Specifically, you should be looking for the following user-agent string: User-Agent: Mozilla/2.0 (compatible; Ask Jeeves/Teoma)

If you are not being indexed by the search engines, the best thing to do is create a sitemap and get links to your site.

How does your site fare in different search products?

Search engines offer users the ability to search through various products such as images, video, blogs, books, news, etc. While most companies are too busy to worry about including their brand in the various product categories, some are realizing the importance of turning up under their keywords/phrases, especially since Google’s Universal Search was launched.

Go ahead, try it out. Go to Google Images and type in your company name and see what happens. Then try search for it under blogs, video, news and books. If your brand is turning up, but is not associated with you, it’s time to put your thinking cap on and come up with ideas on how to get noticed under these products.

Additionally, if you are on the receiving end of negative publicity, you can use these search products to push down some of the bad results by adding and optimizing your own images, video, blogs etc, ensuring your content appears above the bad press.

How to optimize your images from Dosh Dosh

How to optimize your blog from ProBlogger

How to optimize your video information from Google

With news and books however, it’s a little different. For you to turn up under news, you need to be mentioned in the mainstream media; to turn up under books you need to have authored one. Both of these products should not negatively impact your brand; however, they are a great way to promote your brand online. So, if you’ve done something newsworthy, write a press release, if you’ve written a book, let Google Books know about it.

The importance of blogs for business

Blogging is a low cost tool that can pay off in a big way if you do it right. You can use it to promote your company, foster loyalty, get feedback, develop a community, and directly promote your product/service. While most small companies are still hesitant to blog, others are realizing its massive potential.

The other nice thing about blogs is that search engines love them. Because the content is updated more often than on a standard Web site (and search engines love frequently updated content), each post has the potential to appear in search results. This means if someone is attacking your credibility online, you have the ability to quickly push the results down.

Although technology has now given even the most non techie person the opportunity to run their own site, don’t do it just for the sake of getting into search results. Your posts need to be thought out and useful to your customers, and you need to love the subject if you’re going to be writing about it regularly – which – if you want your blog to be successful, you’ll need to do.

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