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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.

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.

How To Manage Your Google CV

As nearly everyone knows by now, Google is one of the most powerful search engines and providers of online tools. When people are interested to know about you or your business, one of the first things they do is search Google. That’s right, your Google CV is the first impression people have of you, so it’s important to know how to manage your reputation in Google effectively. Here are a few tips to get you started:

Know What’s Crawled Before You Sign Up 

Every day dozens of websites ask visitors to register with their names, create a username, and establish identities in online communities. While it’s illegal to share your email with third parties, many websites and social networks have no problem sharing your name or username with Google and you can be sure that many of these websites will be some of the first results on your Google CV.

Before you sign up to a website, check to see if the website is crawled on Google. See what kind of content is showing up and then determine if you should register to the site and what information you can list there.

Keep Track of Where You’re Registered

As people register to more and more websites everyday, it can get challenging to keep track of all the separate accounts and identities that you or your business may have online. If you have a Google Account you can easily sign up for Google Docs and use a spreadsheet to keep track of all your usernames and passwords. This is a highly effective way to make sure that as you establish more online identities, that you’ll be able to update them with you or your businesses’ information easily and not leave any old information on your Google CV.

Register to Websites that Improve Your Google CV

Most people and businesses have an idea of the image they would like to portray online or an image that they’d like customers to associate with their brand. The best way to craft your Google CV is to register to high ranking websites that will improve your online image. Today there are thousands of niche social networks that rank high on Google and can improve your online identity. Some social networks, like LookupPage, rank especially high on Google and are built for helping users create a positive image online. 

Take a Pen Name

While in some social networks, like Facebook and LinkedIn, is it expected that you will use your real name, many websites give you the option to use a nick name or pen name. You should only register your real name to social networks and websites that improve your online image and brand. For other websites, take a pen name or nickname so that you don’t risk having the website connected to you or your company’s Goolge CV. 

Sign Up for Google Alerts

If you have an account with Google, you can register for Google Alerts and get an email every time Google indexes a new page with your name or your business. Setting up Google Alerts is easy, and helps you to know immediately as your reputation is being built online. One tip: Make sure that you place quotations around your name when you are searching or setting up your Google Alert, this way you’ll get very targeted results.

The Difference between Crisis Management and Reputation Management

One of the most famous cases of crisis management occurred in 1982 when Johnson and Johnson were forced to recall its popular pain reliever – Tylenol. The reason they had to do so was that someone was tampering with bottles of Tylenol in the stores and inserting Cyanide into them, resulting in seven deaths within a short period. 

Johnson and Johnson in retrospect saved their brand by pulling the product off the shelves and informing the American people of what had transpired. The fact that they chose to lose 100 million dollars by destroying 30 million pills and avoid additional poisonings, established Johnson and Johnson as a company that cares about the well-being of their customers – a title the company enjoys even thirty years later. The Tylenol poisonings essentially introduced the temper proof packaging for food and drugs in the U.S..

Crisis management has changed quite a bit with the advancement of technology. Major companies used to depend on journalists and newspapers in order to remain in contact with their customers. Businesses both large and small are now using popular social networks such as Youtube and Twitter in order to reach their customers both in on a day-to-day basis and in cases of “brand emergency”. Earlier in the year, Domino’s Pizza used Twitter and Youtube to express their concern and answer the public’s questions as a response to disturbing videos former employees had made in a Dominos store in North Carolina.  

The practice of reputation management (both online and offline) is something that most companies engage in on a day-to-day basis as opposed to times of crisis. Large companies spend a considerable amount of time and money monitoring what the public thinks of their brand and they are ready to spend even more resources if they feel that positive public perception is the missing ingredient that could lead to additional revenue down the line.

In online reputation management, sheer presence can make quite a bit of difference. Owning your own domain name and establishing a strong Google CV is critical so that people who search for a business or a professional could actually find who they are looking for as opposed to someone with ill intentions that is looking to take advantage of a company name that he or she has nothing to do with.