LookupPage Blog | Professional Web Presence and Visibility

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.

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.

Low Cost Link Building Techniques

Keyword management, strong title selection, and good semantic tagging will only get your site so far in

terms of search engine results. Ultimately, the cornerstone of any good search engine strategy is link building – strong and topical inbound links to your site from other high-relevance sites will do wonders for your search engine placement across all of your keywords. There are many different ways to gain inbound links, and many of the most effective are actually free or cost very little. These are a few of the easiest, and most effective, way to build your links.

Commenting on Other Blogs and Forums

One of the easiest ways to garner links without spending a penny is to simply become active on other blogs and forums that are topical to your subject. Whenever you leave a comment on a blog you should have the option to include a URL, which will point to your site from every comment you leave. In forum posting you will be able to include a signature, which can feature a link to your site. In both of these cases, take care not to be seen as a spammer – make topical responses to the posts or threads, and don’t actively promote your site, just let the link sit there.

Registering for Pages

There are countless sites out there which allow you to create a profile that can include a link to your site. Many of these sites, such as Facebook, Flickr, or LinkedIn, are free, and also have high search engine relevance. Others, such as LookupPage, are built specifically to improve your search engine ranking. These pages act not only as a source of inbound links to your page, but also as reputation management pages, allowing you to create another node in search engine results with content about your brand that you control. 

Including a Blogroll

Other blogs can be a great source of inbound links, as they can be highly topical, and often hold quite a bit of sway with search engines like Google. A blogroll, which generally sits in the sidebar of your blog, allows you to link to blogs you like or have a relationship with. These blogs, in turn, will link back to your site. There are services available which can help put you in touch with good blog matches, or you can simply contact the operators of blogs you think would be a good fit and offer to trade links on one another’s blogrolls.

Writing Guest Posts

One excellent way to get an inbound link from a higher-profile blog or informational site is to contribute a feature to that site. This will give you the opportunity to write in your area of expertise, demonstrating to their readers why they might want to visit your site, but will also give you a valuable inbound link. Even once your feature is off of the front page and buried deep in the archives, the inbound link will remain, and continue to help with your search engine relevance.

Will Users Forgive Google for Exposing Their Identities?

Image by Getty Images 

One of the most influential companies in the world is the search-engine and information technology giant, Google. Although users around the world love Google for the many tools it offers to make their lives easier, recently Google has rolled out a number of services which people see as violations of privacy. These technologies include Google Buzz, Google Streetview, Google Mail, and even the core search engine.

When Google Buzz rolled out in February, Google Buzz users had their Gmail contact history revealed on their public Google profile. Every email sent and chat message exchange was available for the public to see. A boss could see an employee emailing competitors, a partner could see their significant other emailing an ex, and any number of other revealing situations.

Since many people did not know how, or did not realize that they need to opt out of this Google Buzz feature, it has led to cries that Google is showing sensitive information without explicit user consent. A related concern is with the mobile version of Google Buzz, which by default reveals the exact location a person was at when they made a post.

In response to a recent outcry over privacy concerns, Google CEO Eric Schmidt was quoted in The Register saying, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” This cavalier attitude towards privacy has led some Google users to question whether they can simply forgive Google pushing Google isto an ever growing  reputation management crisis.

Analyzing The Crisis Response

However, Google, for its part, has been quick to respond to their reputation management crisis. The company has integrated features allowing users to turn off updates about their location, and to stop information about their contacts from being shared by default. While many people feel this is too little too late – and indeed, that the fact they made these changes is tantamount to admitting wrongdoing – others believe the company is making a genuine effort to correct an error in judgment.

Whether the public ultimately accepts Google’s attempts at reconciliation remains to be seen, but in similar cases in the past the company has shown themselves to be adept at addressing concerns, explaining their logic, and making amends for any damage that was done.

Three High Ranking Online Reputation Management Tools

While there are many different tools one can use to manage their online reputation, there are a handful that stand head-and-shoulders above the rest. These three, particularly, have a great deal of clout, and can be used in almost any situation to improve an online brand.

WordPress Website

WordPress is the premiere blogging platform used in the world, with more than 200 million blogs running on the software. It is built with user interaction in mind, and features an incredibly-intuitive backend that anyone can learn to use in a short period of time. Running a blog on Wordpress is one of the best ways to be featured near the top of search results, because the very nature of blogs lends itself quite well to having a great deal of search engine relevant content

Search engines are occupied with many things, but one of the most important factors in determining relevance is the freshness of content. Because blogs encourage their users to update frequently, search engines such as Google look at them regularly to see that the content has changed. And tools like WordPress actually include built in features that let a number of different websites and services know whenever new content is posted, so that each new post is echoed around the web, offering many hooks for search engines to pick up your content.

LookupPage

LookupPage is an incredibly high-ranking business directory that gives members an inside view of who exactly is viewing their profile on the web. Businesses and personalities can use LookupPage to quickly establish a presence on the web with no hassle at all. When members sign up with sign up with LookupPage they create a basic profile for themselves, putting down important information about their business, uploading a logo, and generally creating a business-card style presence on the web.

The reason LookupPage is powerful is that 95% of LookupPage Pro users are featured on Google’s first page. This gives a business or personality a place for information that they input and have total control over, presented in a professional manner. The LookupPage pro offering has no ads, and keeps close track of who is viewing the profile, so that businesses can analyze who is landing there, what they searched for to arrive there, and other key data.

Twitter

Because of Twitter’s very strong web presence, a Twitter username will very often show up in the first page of search results for that term. As a result, setting up a free Twitter account using a personal name or a business name can be an easy, quick, and effective way to establish a first page listing. Twitter allows information to be personalized, a custom icon to be uploaded, which may be a photograph or company logo, and the background to be customized.

Additionally, a Twitter account can be used to publish occasional updates promoting positive aspect of one’s business. These updates will then be displayed on the highly-ranked profile page. This is a great way to manage one’s brand and reach out to potential and existing customers for free, and with very little time investment.

The Google Buzz Backlash - How to Make Sure Your Backlash Isn't Larger Than Your Buzz

Last week when Google released its new social networking feature, Google Buzz, to compete with other popular social networking and micro-blogging services like Twitter and Facebook, the media giant set up their new social network to automatically enroll tens of millions of Gmail users. While having millions of new users instantly is a competitive advantage the only online giants like Google can enjoy, the company's unilateral actions have resulted in a large and vocal Google Buzz backlash.

As angry users have noted online, automatically opting-in people and intimately connecting them with their email contacts oversteps the social boundaries that many users have worked to create online. Today people have multiple identities online that they manage through distinct avenues--they know that they must carefully craft each of their online reputations depending on what social network or online community they are a part of. For example, many people use facebook to connect with their friends and LinkedIn for establish relationships with professional contacts. When Google Buzz stepped in and suddenly, without much of a pre-buzz, intimately connected users with their distant and disorganized email contacts, users responded by giving Google buzz a reputation management problem that they’ve been scrambling to correct ever since.

What’s to be Learned from Google’s Buzz Backlash?

As internet companies continue to provide powerful technology and communication solutions for businesses and individuals, they must keep a balance between meeting their users needs and their needs. It’s also very important, as Google’s users noted, to understand the social distinctions between different types of media--social bookmarks are clearly less intimate than social networks, and social networks far less intimate than email. Each type of media has different social norms that companies must recognize and attempt to blend slowly. Coercing millions upon millions of users to allow their private information to be used by a new technology that breaks the current online social norms is bound to result in a backlash bigger than your new products buzz.

How To Prevent Buzz Backlash

If you want to prevent buzz backlash or are looking to manage your own online crisis, LookupPage can be one of the best places to find highly effective online reputation management strategies, brand reputation tips and crisis management tools.

Building a Brand Using Free Social Media Tools

Traditional online email accounts are getting less traffic than in previous years. The reason for that is simple, people are emailing their friends directly from their social networks so they do not need to enter Gmail as often as they used to. Social networks are becoming stronger and are no longer used by a specific age group. 

Although there is an argument among different search engines on what is the most searched word of 2009, we feel that the most explosive and important word for 2009 is Twitter. Apparently, we are not the only ones who think this way. Only recently, Google unveiled its real time search option that will incorporate status updates from popular social networks among other real time results.

If you need any further proof on how seriously Google is taking twitter accounts create a fictitious account on twitter and conduct a Google search for that name 48 hours later. Odds are that this none - existing person will rank on the first page of Google thanks to that twitter account. Because of the fact that social media profiles usually receive indexation by Google and other search engines, creating a brand using free social media tools is certainly achievable.

Facebook

companies such as Coca Cola, Pizza Hut and U.S based restaurant Chain  T.G.I Friday’s have achieved considerable success by creating a Facebook Fan page. This can be achieved on a smaller scale by getting your friends and clients to become fans of your service. 

A solid Facebook fan page needs to be able to provide information about the business and possibly provide an added value to the fans of the brand. The Pizza Hut fan page is currently offering a 20% discount on all orders made with the Pizza Hut iPhone application as well as other coupons. 

Twitter

As written above, Twitter is currently enjoying the respect of major search engines. Although getting a large following on twitter takes time and effort, it is certainly achievable. Ranking well on Google for a twitter account is certainly easier if the account is active and tweets on a regular basis. The CEO of Zappos , an online shoe retailer  is using Twitter in order to engage and be reachable by Zappos customers. By being readily available, he is strengthening the brand of his company as being attentive to what the customer wants    

LookupPage.com - while it is not a social network, creating a LookupPage for a business or a professional can have tremendous return on investment (ROI). LookupPage enjoys excellent indexation by Google and creating a profile can help you establish additional positive results that often rank extremely well and contribute greatly to one’s Google Resume.  For example, you can check out Oxford Car Service which created a LookupPage for their business and their LookupPage is ranking extremely high on organic search. 

Online Tracking and Monitoring Tools – A Review

An important element of establishing a strong online brand is tracking of what is being mentioned about it across the web at all times. Tracking and monitoring of a brand has many benefits. It could provide valuable feedback about one’s product or service, and this type of feedback can point to what a business is doing wrong and help in making adjustments in an attempt to build a stronger customer base. It is also important to monitor any mentions of a brand online as some of them may become negative at one point resulting in an online reputation problem.

We have often highlighted the advantages of Google Alerts, with the most obvious advantages being that the service is free and simple to set up. A number of premium services out there offer meticulous monitoring services that offer quite a bit of features that Google Alerts does not cover. The question is whether these services are worth the money spent, and how they are different from one another. We decided to review 2 online monitoring services: Trackur and BrandsEye.

Trackur   

Tarckur is the first tool that we examined. One important feature that it offers that Google Alerts does not have is filtering., This enables the user to exclude specific domains from the online search it conducts for tracked terms. This is a valuable feature since it allows the person conducting the search the exclusion of websites that are controlled by that business, essentially reducing the results that he or she would have to go through. The user can also filter out certain keyword. For example, an alert can be set up for “Michael Jordan” that has to include the term “shoes” and exclude the term “Golf” allowing for a more specific tracking of what is being said online. This feature would help a large company that has a number of different products and wishes to track only mentions of the brand within a specific context.

BrandsEye  

BrandsEye, another online monitoring and tracking service, offers three packages each allowing the user to track a certain amount of phrases and receive updates in specified increments of time. Their tracking system does a lot of the filtering for the client as it automatically removes duplicate content and spam from its findings.

The BrandsEye system allows its users to “educate” the tracking system on what is important to them. It enables the user to customize the tracking so that each mention could have a different ranking on significance based on author’s name, origin, credibility and sentiment of the over all mention. These are all advanced features that would most likely only be useful for large companies. 

Both BrandsEye and Trackur are solid tools that offer more than Google Alerts does. While we agree that a professional or a business should be proactive in monitoring what is being said about him, her or it online, we feel that Google Alerts is a solid tool that is effective enough to monitor a personal brand or a small company. A large company that has a number of products and generates hundreds of mentions each day online could benefit from premium monitoring of its brand.   

Best Selling Toy Needs Online Reputation Management

With the holiday season approaching fast, a best selling toy is facing a serious online reputation problem. A San Francisco based consumer lab named GoodGuide tested the Go Go Hamster, a furry hamster toy manufactured in China by Zhu Zhu and reached troubling results. The findings that GoodGuide reached was that one of the models of the toy contained a high level of Antimony on the toy's nose and hair, which may be linked to cancer, lung and heart problems.

The Go Go Hamster, a small hamster toy that squeaks and runs across the floor became a hit this holiday season partly because of its low price in a difficult economic period. It had already been marked as one of this season’s hottest toys. A speaker for Character Options the distributor of the toy in the UK said only a week ago that the company is expecting to sell north of 600,000 hamsters before the end of the year. The toy that became a hit partly because of its low retail price of £10 was picked up by speculators who assumed the toy would sell out and would fetch a higher price on eBay or Amazon.

Russ Hornsby, chief executive of the firm Cepia, said in a statement "We want to assure everyone already enjoying Mr. Squiggles or other Zhu Zhu Pets, and those planning to purchase Mr Squiggles or another Zhu Zhu Pet this holiday season, that the toy is 100% safe and in compliance with all US and European toy safety standards.” This statement on behalf of Zhu Zhu is a good start but the fact is that the Google Resume for the term Go Go Hamster is currently very negative

What can a business do if it is finds itself in an online reputation crisis?

Zhu Zhu would be smart to address the concerns of its customers in the most direct way possible. It would be of sound strategy to occupy themselves with the people who have already entrusted their children’s health with the company. By addressing the customer, the company is not only showing that it stands behind its product but also that it is thinking long-term and not only about short term sales for this coming holiday season. The company should follow what Comcast and Domino’s Pizza have done in the past and establish a twitter account so that people could contact the company directly and receive answers for their question. This would show the company is tackling the issue heads on and is not trying to bury the story.

 

Has Tiger Woods’ Reputation Been Tarnished?

 
One of the world’s most famous athletes is under media scrutiny after a late night single car accident outside his Florida home. Woods hit a fire hydrant and a tree leaving him bruised and unable to participate in a Golf tournament scheduled to take place in California later this week. Details are still unclear as to what led to this accident but what is known is that Woods crashed his SUV and that a phone call from a neighbors’ house to the police stated that he was unconscious. His wife later told the police that she had used a golf club to break the windows of the car in an attempt to get him out of the vehicle.

The fact that the rear window as well as the front window was smashed raises several questions about the event. This accident is being closely examined after a report in last week The National Enquirer stated that Woods who is married and has a child has been seeing a New York nightclub hostess named Rachel Uchitel and even spent time with her in Australia when he competed in the Australian Masters tournament. The fact that Uchitel has hired a high profile lawyer after the story broke out only increases the speculation that the rumors are true. 

Woods is reportedly the first athlete to earn more than a billion Dollars in his career and his main income is from advertisements. Golf is considered an upscale sport and some of the brands Woods has been paid to promote can be very sensitive to any negative press. For the time being, major sponsors such as Nike and Gatorade have stated that they will stand by Tiger Woods during this difficult time. Woods has only addressed the issue of the accident in a short statement on his website asking for privacy for himself and his family.

The fact that Woods is choosing to keep silent about what has led to this accident could damage his reputation. Although he is a great athlete, part of the success that the Tiger Woods brand has enjoyed is based on the positive image he had for many years. Because more people than ever before are voicing their opinions online via blogs or twitter, thelonger he waits, the more difficult it would be to maintain a positive online reputation.

Interview with Gareth Lloyd - Director of Product and Digital Development for Workthing+

Workthing+  is an online service that gives jobseekers everything they need to manage their career in one place. It provides essential tools and advice that previously were only available to senior executives.

The Digital Development Director for Trinity Mirror's E-Recruitment businesses and a digital media expert, Gareth Lloyd talks with us on what makes Workthing+ so unique and how web visibility can affect a job seeker’s chances of landing a job.

What differentiates Workthing+ from other recruitment web sites in the Trinity Mirror Digital Recruitment group? 

Workthing+ is much more than a recruitment website. It’s a comprehensive service for jobseekers, offering the kind of structured career search support that until now have been prohibitively expensive to unemployed people looking for work. We are not paid by recruiters advertising vacancies – our clients are the candidates themselves, so candidates are our sole focus.
Of course, we’ve also got over 50 job boards in the Trinity Mirror Digital Recruitment portfolio with over 4m registered candidates and 500,000 applications per month. Overall, we have a substantial presence in the market.

Workthing+ was launched approximately 5 months ago, how do you feel the job market has changed during this time?

The job market seems to have stratified to two extremes. There are an increasing number of people who have been out of work for many months – long-term unemployment is a real concern. And then there are other areas where candidates are really in short supply, and good candidates are being picked up really quickly. 

We’ve seen candidates who claim to have done thousands of applications, and then wonder why these are not resulting in interviews. Workthing+ is all about helping smarter candidates get ahead of the game – helping them understand that being a jobseeker is a job in itself, and that job probably requires a very different set of skills to those they would use in their normal job. The challenge for jobseekers is accelerating their jobsearch – and that means quality, focus and structure – rather than ‘spray and pray’. 

One of the biggest changes over the past 5 months is that jobseekers are starting to realize that they can’t always succeed on their own, and that generic advice and support from the Job Centre is just not enough to make a difference.

In what way would you say Workthing+ clients are different from clients of other online recruitment services?

Firstly, our clients are the jobseekers not the recruiters – so our responsibility is to help the jobseeker in whatever way we can.  There is no doubt it takes time and effort to find a job, and we are open and honest about that: Workthing+ members have to put a lot in, and if they do, they get a lot out. It’s the opposite of those job boards that allow candidates to do an easy ‘1 click’ application – as though that’s all it takes to get a job. So, we appeal to the more serious jobseeker, someone who is willing to invest in their job search and career.

Are you guys happy with the rate in which subscribers are finding new jobs?

All the indication from our exit polls and other data indicate we have got a good strike rate. Now, there’s a grey area where we can’t be certain if a person got a job because they were a Workthing+ member, or whether they would have got the job anyway. Our members like and continue to use the service – we have a 70%+ renewal rate each month – and the feedback in terms of success rates is good.

What would you say is the biggest issue that job applicants struggle with when searching for a new job?

Candidates simply are not experts in the recruitment market – hopefully they don’t make a career out of looking for a job! Even if they are expert in their own field, they don’t understand how the process works and how recruitment consultants, HR departments and employers operate. So they don’t know what to expect and how to take control of the process.

How important do you think it is for a job applicant to have positive results come up on a Google search for their name?

Extremely. Any misrepresentation of your name or other negative results could be the difference between being offered a job or being passed over for someone else. Not only do these results need to be positive, they need to be accurate. Having some positive professional results is a good validation for a future employer that you are who you say you are, and you know what your CV claims – it’s virtual reference-checking.

Will having no results on Google ever become a deterring factor for an employer?

Most substantial employers would expect professional hires to have a relevant online presence, and would be confused if you had no web presence. Everyone who’s ever been online has a digital footprint – whether they realize it or not. The way I like to look at it is there’s no excuse for ignoring your online presence any more than ignoring what you wear to an interview. There’s a lot that can be done for free, requiring minimum time and effort. And for the more senior professional, services like the premium LookupPage offering are a valuable way to take control of your online presence. 

 

Gareth Lloyd

Digital Development Director, Trinity Mirror

Gareth is the Digital Development Director for Trinity Mirror's E-Recruitment businesses, managing over 50 recruitment websites. His career includes company directorships and C-suite roles in listed companies, fast-growing owner-managed businesses and as a director in a leading global consultancy firm. He has spent half his media and advertising career in Sydney and half in London, and has specialised in e-recruitment and digital media for the past 6 years.