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What Should Tiger Woods Have Done to Manage His Online Reputation

The recent Tiger Woods scandal gives us an excellent opportunity to look at a real-life situation where a single event can collapse a brand in on itself. Within days of Woods’ accident, millions of searches were being performed for the famous golfer, and unfortunately the majority of first page searches were uncontrolled by his Public Relations department, leading to negative spin that in the end cost him many lucrative endorsements. So what could Woods have done to better manage his online reputation, to minimize the damage done to his brand in the weeks and months following his accident and revelations of infidelity?

With Google syndicating real-time content near the top of search results for many famous brands, controlling the news feed should have been an important part of damage control for Woods’ brand. While of course one cannot (for the most part) simply write stories oneself, the same principles of burying can still be utilized. In this case, a strong PR move would have been to take the opportunity to push new leads on media outlets sympathetic to the golfer. For example, only a few days after the event, an AP poll naming Woods Athlete of the Decade was written up in a number of stories, bumping the scandal off of the news feed temporarily. Promoting even more alternate news angles would have been a strong way to keep the scandal buried, at least in the first page of searches.

Looking at top Google AdWords promoters also would have been a strong play. More and more media outlets use AdWords to promote individual stories using topical keywords. In this case a number of online media outlets were running stories about Woods and promoting them on Google. There are two main strategies to deal with this: either purchasing competing AdWords for those phrases, and directing them to a spin control page, or contacting the media outlets positioning themselves with the phrase, and offering something like an interview or some other alternative to a negative spin story.

With a brand like Woods’, purchasing AdWords and pushing news stories to key outlets would have been a very pricey affair, with millions of searches for his name each month. To help control the organic rankings he may have also wanted to invest in professional online reputation management -- creating new sites and landing pages for his name. Since the scandal had legs that lasted weeks, and to some extent months, these organic rankings could have had time to take root. The combination of all of these tactics would have cost considerably more than most campaigns for a single brand, as the competition is stiff from media outlets and the traffic volume is incredibly high. Even with a price tag of a few million dollars, however, stronger online reputation management could very well have managed to keep his name slightly less tarnished, and may have saved him an endorsement or two, more than paying for the campaign in the long run.

Real-Time Search and Its Implications

In late 2009 Google announced that it was integrating real-time data into its searches, featuring news stories, tweets, and other sources of extremely fresh information at the top of searches. In late February, 2010, Google announced a further integration with Facebook, adding data from publicly-shared feeds as well. The implications of this for online reputation management are staggering, and although the full implications are not yet entirely understood, we can look at some main points.

You Must Own Your Identities

Now, more than ever, it is imperative that you own your brand identities on major real-time platforms like Twitter and Facebook. With information coming from those services now available to the larger search audience, the negative consequences of having a competitor or random person controlling a name associated with your brand have increased exponentially. Even if you don’t ultimately leverage those properties to spread the word about your brand, even squatting them for the time being will stop others from using what may be perceived as your voice.

You Must Track the Conversation

If you’ve been shrugging aside Twitter and Facebook as just a small segment of your possible market, and so haven’t been paying attention to what’s being said about you, now is the time for that to change. If your brand becomes part of a trend that Google picks up on for its real-time feed, literally millions of people a day could be seeing information related to your company. You need to be appraised of what is being said about you at all times, so that you can respond or spin as necessary.

You Must Watch Out for Sabotage

Perhaps the biggest implication of real-time search is just how easy it is for your competitors to manipulate. Because of the way the search works, any information related to an active trend will be syndicated on the real-time feed. That means that a competitor could choose to take advantage of a hot topic in order to disparage your brand, spreading rumors among millions of people with virtually no work at all. By using Google Trends a competitor could find a hot topic, and then start tweeting using that key phrase, associating it with your brand name in a pejorative way. By tracking activity related to your brand, you can be aware of these slights as they occur, and can respond or take action as needed.

You Must Watch Your Employee Buzz

The real-time integration of Facebook updates is perhaps one of the most frightening aspects of this for larger brands. It means that the possibility of an employee damaging the brand inadvertently has suddenly become much greater. Any employee who’s had a bad day at work, or a bad interaction with a boss, could easily post a status update painting the brand name in a negative light, which will then be syndicated into real-time search and made available to millions of people. Carefully monitoring employee use of social media platforms is the first line of defense in managing any negative updates before they become problems.

Monitoring Employees’ Social Media Activity

With the growing importance of social media activity to a brand’s online reputation, it is becoming more and more imperative, especially for larger businesses, to watch what your employees are doing on Twitter, Facebook, and other channels of public communication. Of course, this is not to suggest that you should spy on your employees, or watch their private correspondence – all that needs be watched are those communications that are publicly available, as these are the messages that can be syndicated in real-time search and find their way out into the world in a way that can damage your brand.

Social media has become such an integral part of many people’s daily lives that they hardly even think about what they’re posting. Status updates complaining about something a boss did, tweets about a new product launch that hasn’t yet been announced, or venting about a product that isn’t working and is running behind schedule can all cause serious damage to your brand, with no malicious intent on the part of your employees. 

Having a Social Networking Agreement for your employees to sign is a good first step to managing your messaging. In it, spell out exactly what is and is not acceptable behavior in terms of discussing their work and your brand. If there are any gray areas, delineate these carefully, and set aside someone in your organization who employees can contact to check with to make sure something is appropriate. This simple step can help employees be more conscious of how they discuss their work online, and can save you a lot of grief down the line.

To protect yourself more carefully, it’s a good idea to monitor major streams of communication, such as Facebook updates and Twitter, for your brand or phrases related to your brand. This is a good idea generally, to see the buzz that’s out there, but it will also catch comments employees might make, which you can more directly deal with. Many businesses set up special RSS feeds to track their employees’ public updates, so that they can scan them throughout the day and make sure nothing critical is getting out, or hire specialized reputation monitoring professionals to insure that they know who and what is being said about their brand.

Integrated software, such as Social Sentry, will automate the process of following employees and tracking their updates for anything relating to your brand. This helps filter through the white noise, and makes it less of a direct invasion of your employee privacy, only notifying you when a status update has raised a flag according to pre-determined conditions. In addition to statements directly about your brand, many businesses also find it useful to monitor their public employees, to ensure that their behavior in social networks reflect well on their business. The last thing a good brand needs is for a VP of marketing to release a series of drunken ramblings on Twitter days before meeting with an important client. By taking a proactive approach in screening your employees’ activity, you put yourself in a position to intervene quickly and mitigate any damage that might be done by casual tweets or updates.

Is Online Reputation Management Ethical?

One question many people run into when they first start using online reputation management is whether or not it’s an ethical approach to business. After all, people have a right to express their opinions on the internet, and reputation management can be looked at as a way of limiting that freedom. Many people have criticized online reputation management as a way of distorting a brand message through SEO techniques, rather than letting the strength of the brand speak for itself.

Of course, this fails to take into account what reputation management is: simple messaging. Businesses both online and offline have a responsibility to try to best control their messaging to show their brand clearly, and that often means interfering with competitors or others who are trying to cast the brand in a negative light. It has long been a technique in offline business to buy up ad time in markets where a competitor is attempting to engage in negative messaging, and online reputation management is a simple extension of that practice.

In fact, online reputation management services and tools are some of the most ethical forms of online marketing available to companies and individuals who want to improve their brands. Reputation management does not even directly oppose competitors – it doesn’t involve trying to snatch up choice keywords and phrases from a crowded marketplace. All a company is trying to do is simply manage their own reputation – to gain control over the thing they own most in the world, their brand. By pushing down negative results that show up in searches for their brand name, a business is ensuring that the end consumer has access to the best information available on the business itself. Online reputation management is, in fact, an ethical response to often unethical competitor behavior that aims to discredit or weaken the core brand.

Using Online Review Sites to Garner Positive Feedback

One of the hallmarks of the modern web is the ability for users from every walk of life to review just about anything, from products to services to contractors. Consumers are becoming increasingly dependent on these services as their first stop when looking at buying a new product, going to a new restaurant, or hiring an independent consultant. One of the most productive things you can do for your personal brand is to build a reservoir of positive feedback on these sites, as they have high search relevance and are trusted by consumers.

At first it can be difficult for people to accept the idea of opening themselves up to critique from anyone who wants to leave a review – after all, if someone is capable of giving you positive feedback, they’re also capable of giving you negative feedback. The thing is, just because you don’t actively pursue these review sites doesn’t mean you won’t appear on them, it just means you will have much less influence in who is reviewing you. Anyone can create a profile for you to review your service, whether you want them to or not. By taking a proactive stance you stand a much better chance of generating positive feedback, as well as managing negative feedback when it does inevitably crop up.

Make It Easy for your Customers to Post Positive Reviews

Once you have a profile on the major review sites, make it as easy as possible for your customers to post positive reviews for you. Try to avoid actively soliciting their reviews, though, as this will generally not work, and may frustrate clients. Just do your best to have very visible links from your sites to the most important review sites, and consider including a “Review me on Yelp!” or similar note on business cards or other bits of media.

Don't Take it Personal, Remember It's Easy to Complain

The main reason for this has to do with how much energy people are willing to expend for positive and negative reviews. The threshold of what people have to spend to make a positive review is quite low. Since they generally feel very little reward from it, if they have to look for more than a minute or two they will likely not review you positively. And many people don’t even think about posting a positive review of a service provider – unless you remind them. Negative reviewers, on the other hand, are willing to spend a great deal of energy badmouthing you and your business. They’ll go out of their way to post a negative review, since there is a very direct feedback – they are able to vent their frustration. Since this imbalance is fundamental, it’s up to you to try to displace negative reviews by creating positive reviews.

If and when you do get negative reviews, don’t panic. Most review sites have tools to contact negative reviewers privately, and you can approach them calmly and without being overly defensive, to see if you can resolve the situation. On the other hand if you find yourself unable to deal with the negative reviews by yourself, you might want to use one of LookupPage's reputation management profiles or professional services to improve your online reputation.

Keeping Up On Your Brand Reputation with Firefox Extensions

Tracking your brand reputation on search engines, Twitter, Facebook, and other sites is an integral part of good reputation management. To be truly effective, however, you’ll want to check in regularly to see what’s changed, and how you can best get everything back on track. This can be greatly expedited through a liberal use of appropriate Firefox Extensions, which can speed up mundane tasks, and give you data that otherwise would take a great deal more time to work out on your own. These extensions are some of the most useful and affordable tools to help you build your online presence and manage your reputation effectively. 

Of course, one of the best Firefox Extensions for managing your reputation is the simple search widget included with Firefox – you can use it to search not only Google, but almost any site you might find yourself referenced on, without having to directly visit the site and find the search, saving you a step or two each time you search.

UpdateScanner

This is a convenient, free, and easy-to-use Firefox Extension that helps you track when updates are made to a webpage. While some sites have RSS feeds that can do this task for you, many do not. If one of these sites mentions you regularly, or if you anticipate data about you being changed there, you can use UpdateScanner to be immediately informed when the information changes.

coComment

Perhaps one of the most useful reputation management tools available, coComment is a way to track all of your various online discussions in one convenient place. The Firefox Extension keeps track of every site you post a comment on. When people respond to your comments, you are immediately informed. You can choose to be informed via the extension, by RSS feed, by a Google Gadget, or by email alerts. This makes it much easier to remain on top of hundreds of diverse conversations, ensuring you respond in a timely manner to anything that needs your attention, improving your online reputation and helping to interconnect you with large communities. The extension works with virtually any site, including all of the major blog platforms, YouTube, Flickr, the NYTimes, and many others.

EchoFon

There are a myriad of Twitter Firefox Extensions, but EchoFon is one of the most robust and least intrusive. It sits as a small icon on your bottom bar, and when you receive a new message or are referenced in a Tweet a small box appears and tells you what was said. You can also use EchoFon to post new updates, to save yourself from moving out of your browser. EchoFon pops up a chat-like display when you click its icon, giving you full Twitter functionality.

Facebook Toolbar

The Facebook Toolbar extension is exactly what it sounds like: an extension that adds Facebook functionality to any open Firefox tab. You can post updates, as well as see Friend activity. This will let you seamlessly stay integrated in conversations with your follower base, without having to constantly be checking Facebook to check for new updates.

Manage Your Social Media Reputation

As you become more involved in managing your reputation via social media sites, you may find yourself overwhelmed by the sheer amount of time spent going from site to site every time you want to make an update. It is in your best interest to have the highest visibility you can by being present on as many sites as possible, but with each one adding another few minutes of update time, that might not seem viable. You may find yourself wondering how so many successful internet businesspeople are able to post updates to fifty or a hundred sites every few hours. The answer is simple: ping.fm.

Ping is a tool that allows you to send a single update to dozens of sites where you want to establish an online presence. This includes major sites like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Flickr, Blogger, WordPress, TypePad, and Delicious, as well as lesser-known presences like Koornk, Diigo, Ning, FriendFeed, Brightkite, Posterous, hi5, and Xanga. To use Ping, you simply make a free account, and go through and add each service you want to be updated through Ping. It takes less than a minute to add each site, and you’ll only need to do it once.

Once you have the sites added, you’ll have a dashboard that allows you to update your various profiles all at once. And this isn’t good only for status updates – you can add pictures, songs, and links as well. You can choose which sites you want updated, or can just update them all at once. Ping also allows you to make updates via virtually any mode of transport you can image, from your cell phone to email to various IM clients to Skype. With a robust application development community, Ping is always adding new features and plugins as well, all designed to make it easier for you to manage your online identity in whatever ways the new web demands.

Using Twitter Searches To Improve Your Brand

Twitter is a powerful tool for businesses to control their message and stay in touch with their customers, but in order to be properly leveraged it’s important you stay connected to every conversation that touches on your brand – not just the ones that reach out to you. In order to do that, it’s important to have some tools in place to be steadily tracking Twitter for keywords and phrases related to your brand, so that if a conversation does involve your brand, you can intervene when necessary, to let your customers know you care, to build a larger following, and to address potential problems before they devolve.

Use Twitter Search @

The simplest way to track your brand on Twitter is to use the built in search for @brandname. This will show any tweets that have utilized your brand as a special keyword or phrase. Of course, many conversations in Twitter fail to use the @ nomenclature, so you’ll need to take it a step further to make sure you don’t miss out.

Create a RSS Feed with Keywords

The main Twitter search can also filter for keywords, and one feature you may not know about is the ability to seamlessly create an RSS feed out of these search results. By building an RSS feed comprised of a suite of keywords and phrases relating to your brand – not simply the brand name itself, but product lines and other unique descriptors people might use when discussing your brand – you will receive up-to-the-minute notifications whenever your brand comes up.

Twitter Applications

For those that don’t use an RSS feeder already, a number of Twitter applications exist that offer similar capabilities. TweetDeck is probably the most widely used, allowing you to build robust search panels utilizing a number of keywords, and to filter these searches in many different ways. TweetDeck can then be left running in the background, and may be set to provide you with regular notifications when new conversations around your brand appear.

Strengthen Your Link Reputation and Brand

Inbound links, or links that direct people to your site from other sites, are one of the cornerstones of a strong online brand. Not only do they drive traffic directly, they also influence how much weight your site carries with search engines, helping to bolster your online reputation. Many people take a passive approach to inbound links – if they appear, great, if they don’t, they don’t worry. Others work hard at getting new links, but are only aware of the links they directly solicit.

Build Your Link Reputation

Most people don’t realize that by failing to monitor inbound links, you’re actually missing a great opportunity to reach out to supporters, increase traffic to your site and build your Google CV. The internet is built on a model of reciprocity, and many people regularly check their outbound links to see if the link is reciprocated. If it isn’t, they may cull those links to make more room for people who will link back to them. Knowing when a site links to you allows you to decide whether it is a link you want to pursue keeping, and gives you the chance to take the steps necessary to keep it. Knowing when new links come in also gives you the opportunity to reach out to those people and, if necessary, ask them to improve the link text to best help your search engine relevance.

Collect Data About Your Links

There are two main classes of inbound link monitors: standalone software and web services. Both has their merits and flaws, but as both have costs associated with them, most people choose to opt for free web services. Using a web service gives you portability, and ensure you will never have downtime – rather than having to remember to open a program to check your links, it is done for you every day and you receive an email giving you an overview of new links gained and lost.

Develop a Linking Strategy

You can then use this data to develop a weekly strategy. Look at the new links you’ve gained, and visit the sites they came from. Decide whether you think that site has search engine relevance or traffic relevance for you, and if so how valuable it is. Find the context in which your link appears, and see if you think there is anything that could be improved – maybe it should go to a different page on your site, or have different link text. Then find contact information for the site operator and write them an email thanking them for the link to your site, informing them you have put up a reciprocal link (if you felt it was worth it), and if necessary asking them politely if they would mind updating your link information slightly.

You will also be informed when links to your site have disappeared. In these cases, if the inbound link was from a source you cared about, you’ll want to send an email and ask why they removed the link to your site, and whether there is anything you could do to reconcile the situation. If they decide to leave your link removed, you may wish to remove any outbound links you have to their site, as these one-way links may negatively impact your search engine rankings.

Use LookupPage Services

At some point, you may want to hire a team of professionals to manage your link reputation. LookupPage has a team of advanced SEO and linking professionals who know exactly which content to promote and how, greatly improving your link reputation. LookupPage also helps individauls and businesses get first page rankings on major search engines, under unique domain names.To start benefiting from our expertise, upgrade to our plan for professionals and follow these simple steps:

1. Sign into your account (or create a new one).
2. Click the "My Account" tab.
3. Click the "Upgrade / Renew your subscription" link.
4. Chose the "Pro" package and purchase.

We look forward to helping you manage your online image and reputation to ensure a safer and fully enriched online future.

Top Blog Monitoring Services

One of the most important parts of online reputation management is the ability to know when and where a conversation is occurring that relates to your brand – and ideally to know it right away, so you can positively engage in the conversation. With many next-generation tools, such as Twitter, this process is made seamless and simple through search services offered by the tools themselves. Blogs, however, are another matter entirely. Although blogs are often interconnected, and some reside on central services, for the most part they are independent entities, so there is no integrated search feature.

Luckily, a number of services have arisen to fill this niche. These services allow you to monitor the vast majority of blogs online for any buzz about your personal brand or keywords related to your brand. This way you can pop in to comment on a new post, pull positive quotes to use in your own materials, or arrange link trades to help boost your visibility.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts is one of the most popular ways to keep up on your personal brand, not only in blogs but also in news items, general web searches, Google Groups, and videos. The search allows you to decide which areas you want searched for your terms, how often you want them searched, and how many results you want displayed. You then enter an email address and Google Alerts will send you regular updates telling you where your brand has been discussed on the internet.

Technorati

Technorati is arguably the most used, and most powerful way to search blogs and receive updates on key phrases in new blog posts. The service indexes hundreds of thousands of blogs, as well as keeping up on news clippings. This enormous database can then be quickly searched for appearances of your brand name. From that search you can generate an RSS feed, which will give you immediate updates when a new blog post appears anywhere in the blogosphere that mentions your brand.

WatchThatPage

If you’re interested in watching only a select few blogs, rather than the entire blogosphere, a service like WatchThatPage may prove to be more useful. This site allows you to create a list of pages that you want to monitor. You can then receive updates whenever the page is updated, or only when specific changes have been made to the change. For example, you could compile a list of your competitors’ blogs and business pages, and set it to alert you whenever your brand is mentioned on any of those pages, to keep appraised of negative spin they may be attempting to generate.

Rollyo

An alternative to WatchThatPage, Rollyo lets you create a dynamic search based on a search string that checks anything from the entire internet to specified list of sites. This search can then be turned into an RSS feed to give you regular updates. Although newer than WatchThatPage, Rollyo offers a number of additional tools, including a Firefox extension and other widgets to help keep you up to date more seamlessly.

Now LookupPage Users Can Add Their Business Address Details To Their Personal LookupPage For Free

We at LookupPage are delighted to announce the latest upgrades available for LookupPage users.

Personal users can now enjoy the added benefit of being free to promote their business address details and a Google map on the same page at no charge.

In one simple step, by logging in and clicking on the update button next to “My Business Details” you are invited to add important information for potential clients. This service has been eagerly awaited by many of our customers and we feel sure that this will provide added value to your site.

In order to fully promote your business it is recommended to upgrade to our Pro package whereby you are able to edit your profile freely, adding a logo, business information and links at will. To upgrade simply follow these 4 easy steps:

1. Sign into your account.
2. Click the "My Account" tab.
3. Click the "Upgrade / Renew your subscription" link.
4. Choose the "Pro" package and purchase.

We hope to see you take advantage of this new and improved service and will be bringing you more news on online image management soon.

How to Deal with a Bad Review

With the growing importance of consumer-based reviews, it has never been more important to have the proper toolkit to manage your reputation online. Sites like Yelp!, UrbanSpoon, and Epinions all give users an immense power over your brand. When potential customers do a search for your brand, they may read some of the positive reviews – but primarily they will be looking out for the negative reviews. As a result, when a bad review is written, you absolutely need to deal with it one way or another.

Let’s consider a pretty typical negative review, and look at how a company might address it. The reviewer of a coffee shop says, “Perhaps I just came here on the wrong day. I found the staff to be rude and slow in preparing my coffee. The decor is cute but this coffee shop was slightly on the small side for me. Not a place I would frequent during peak hours.”

A review like this (a two-star out of five review on Yelp!) shows some unhappiness, but the problems seem relatively superficial and not too damaging. The reviewer seems like a rational person, and mostly just seems dissatisfied with their experience.

The first step should therefore be to reach out to the customer and try to resolve the issue. Many review sites now allow businesses to respond directly to the customer, either publicly or privately. In this case, responding publicly would be the best option. Most people writing negative reviews are mostly just frustrated, and even receiving a bit of personal attention can fix the entire problem for them. At the same time, potential customers browsing the reviews will see your response and know that your business is one that reaches out to customers to try to fix problems that arise, which will increase their trust immensely.

A response might look something like, “I’m sorry to hear you were dissatisfied with your experience! We pride ourselves on our friendly staff, so it may just be that the staff member in question was having a particularly bad day. If you’d like to stop in again for a complementary cup of coffee, we’d appreciate the opportunity to show you the excellent quality and service that have made us so popular.”

If the person does take you up on your offer, they will be predisposed to have a positive experience, and hopefully will. In that case, they can post a follow-up review to mitigate their original negative review. If they don’t, you will still have done your part in showing how caring your company is, and you can take the further step of trying to bury the review.

Both review sites and search engines have a strong preference for fresher content – and for good reason. A four year old review doesn’t do much to tell people what sort of experience they can expect from a business in the present. As a result, one strategy for dealing with bad reviews, if reconciliation fails, is to simply create enough new material that the bad review is buried deep in search results. In the case of a review site, this will mean soliciting positive reviews from patrons, which will both increase the overall average rating for your business, and put the negative review on a deeper page. In the case of search engines that may scour review sites, this means providing a number of alternate pages for your brand, which will come up earlier in search results than the negative review.