Category Archives: reputation management

Business Myopia-The Need To Realign Hope And Reality With Your Social Business

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A lot of companies are going to transition to becoming a social business and fail horribly at it. It’s not entirely their fault. You might be sitting there and asking why not. Look no further than their website. It starts there. Here’s a real world example. 3 days ago I was on the phone with a prospective client, before I got on the phone I did a little research. First I wanted to look at their source code. I wanted to see what they thought of themselves. Regardless of who built the site, the meta tags that lie underneath can tell you a lot about what a company thinks they are, of how they view themselves.

I know, in the grand scheme of things meta tags don’t matter, but ahhhh, they do. It let’s people like me get a quick understanding of whether a client or company gets the rudimentary element of knowing who they are and how they want to be perceived online. you know why? Metas matter but not in the sense that we were all told or taught years ago. Metas matter because they drive the creation of content, the creation of bios, and the creation of hyperlinks from Tumblr and Twitter to YouTube and Pinterest. Metas are your descriptors of you and your company.

If you can’t tell me who you are with hyperlinks, geo specific hyperlinks,160 characters in a Twitter bio,25 characters for an adwords title, and or 70 characters for ad text, then how are you going to do it for your customers? The point being that search will continue to love social but before you even get to the point of cranking valuable content about you and your business. You have to have your act together structurally, internally and digitally.

Go look at all of your digital touch points and see if they pass the smell test. Are you painting the right picture of how search views all of your current content. Understand that part of being a social business is that, regardless of whatever social channel your choose-the digital content that you will create, has to align perfectly with what you do offline and what you currently have online.

When customers or prospects do a search, the results that they get back tell more of a story about you and your business then you may be aware of, and sadly the results may contain content that you had no control of. By the time you see it, or become aware of it-it’s too late, it’s been indexed and it’s virtually impervious to reputation management fixes.

Don’t wait for that to happen, go check your digital house and see if it’s in order. Align reality with perception and make sure that as a social business you understand that you are now searchable and accountable for content everywhere, starting with something as simple as your source code. Metas might not matter in search, but in reality, they can tell us what you think your business is.

Monitoring The Tiger Woods Brand

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If you did not notice Tiger Woods has been in the news a lot lately. How much? Lets take a look at some visual representations utilizing some of the exact tools that you would use to monitor your brand. Then I’m going to ask you a very simple question at the end of this post.

First we’re going to use the Trend search from Blog Pulse to create a graph that plots “buzz” about Tiger Woods in the blogosphere. We’re going to look at a 6 month window.

How about some search analytics from Compete? Notice an uptick?

Icerocket also tracks blog mentions and real time search trends, look at it’s graph and check out the numbers below the graph.

One of the most impressive and visually appealing of the tools that I used was from Trendrr which allowed us to track qualitative, quantitative, real-time, sentiment, and competitive trends. For the purpose of this post, we looked at Google results, tweets from Twitter and blog posts on Google..

Driving the point home, we now look at Google Trends.

So your team Tiger or your the brand manager for your company and you see these kinds of results. What are you going to do to repair this? What is your first step? How would a large organization manage its reputation after taking a hit like this? What does Tiger do now? What will repair a reputation damaged to this degree? What does Nike do?

A lesson in reputation managment

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Fly

Social media has allowed us all to be comedians. Some of us are not that funny. Context is the fly that you cannot quite pin down nor kill sometimes. But when something is printed on hard copy, the ramifications are just as significant as if it had occurred online.

The good thing, if there is such a thing, in being slandered online is you can “do” something about it. There are ways to combat it. But what do you do if it happens in print? and what do you do if it was your 11 year old daughter who did it? Ask her to print a retraction?

Let me set the scene and you decide.

Her teacher had a class project in which everyone wrote 2 recipes. A “how to” if you will, but geared more towards life lessons or something offbeat. Tinged with a hint of sarcasm and frivolity, all of the “recipes” were pretty cute. Nicely bound, it was a collectors item for parents to cherish when they were old and gray. Unless you are my wife and I.

The title of her one recipe was “How to amass a huge gum collection”. The other, “How to get away with not cleaning your room”. Both pretty good topics until you start reading them. I will boil it down to a couple of choice sentences: “Be sure to make the lie good for your gullible parents”..and the other “your unsuspecting parents will think you listened to them..”

There were a couple of other choice nuggest in both stories that I can’t recall but there it was. Now her class consists of 30 kids, and if their parents did what we did, they read each students recipes as well. Woohoo!!! Great.. Now the other parents will think my wife and are gullible idiots..Classic!

I know, I know, they won’t. Some might, but most won’t. Even though perception is not reality, we now have that cute bound book to partly remind us of her 5th grade year. I’m over it, but do you see how important reputation management is both online and offline? And this a simple relatively harmless situation.

Obviously we’re in an offline world situation here but there it is. The big elephant will be in the room every time we go to a school function.”Oh look, here come those 2 idiot buffoon parents..”

SO.. I had to give my 11 year old daughter an abject lesson in reputation management last night. Essentially explaining how she better be sure that what she is writing won’t piss someone off. It doesn’t matter if she were trying to be funny or not. Once it’s printed hard or soft copy, its out there for someone to see or find, the digital footprint.