Guarding Your Reputation In The Online Age

Online reputation management has become an important social media element for business.  The positive side of this is that social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, harken back to the most basic – and probably the most effective – form of marketing, word-of-mouth.  You can share content with your online “friends” and they can share content with their “friends,” becoming brand builders, enhancing your reputation.

On the negative side, because of social media, the Internet has become a huge complaint box.  As many a company has learned, agitated customers can turn mistakes and misunderstandings, real and imagined, into viral criticism, damaging your reputation.

In a recent article in Adweek, Robert Klara pointed out that such criticism can be a nightmare.  He had numbers to prove his point:

“According to research from GroupM, 58 percent of consumers begin their purchasing journeys with a Web search, and nearly a third of them report that what they hear about a brand on social media is enough to make them eliminate it from consideration.  A separate study conducted by Oxford Metrica found that 90 percent of consumers trust what others have to say about a brand, and that 83 percent of brands will face some kind of image crisis in the next five years.”

To avoid an image crisis, you must monitor social media, listening to what people have to say about you, your products or services.  Monitoring social media conversations provides an early warning system for reputation management.  You can react quickly to rebut erroneous information or fix a problem before it becomes a crisis.

Some companies are paying serious money for online monitoring services, but you can do it economically, using a variety of free monitoring resources.  For example, you can scan Facebook for mentions of your company, brand names, products, etc. on http://www.openbook.org.  To scan Twitter tweets, you can use http://www.monitter.com.

There are a number of free tracking sites that scan multiple online sources, including http://www.socialmention.org; http://www.whostalkin.com; http://addictomatic.com.  Additionally, you can use “Google Alerts,” http://alerts.google.com, to get mentions emailed to you in real time with a link to the original post.

By allowing you to see what’s being said about you online, these sites not only can give you early warnings of problems, they protect you against those seeking to harm your reputation — an unhappy customer, a disgruntled former employee and, yes, even a competitor.

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