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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.

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.

Online Reputation Management - What Can You Do With a Negative Review?

In mid December Google was ready to pay $500 Million for the user review website Yelp.com. The site has been around since 2004 and it is based on user-generated content in the form of online reviews of different services such as restaurants and mechanics located across the US and the United Kingdom. Yelp is also a social network; it allows users to interact with one another.

Yelp along with TripAdvisor.com and Ripoff Report are just three (out of many) examples of sites that have become extremely successful because of how valuable dynamic content (i.e. the user reviews) have become. The fact that both services allow readers to follow and rank previous reviews of every commentator adds an additional element of credibility to each review. Search engines have noted this credibility as well, reviews of a hotel that were submitted to TripAdvisor often rank highly within the Google Resume of that hotel. 

Option 1 – Respond to the Negative Review

Now that it is easier to establish that specific users within these social network / review sites are somewhat “experienced” critics and do not have a specific vendetta against a specific establishment  we can discuss  the consequences of replying to a bad review online.

There is certainly an upside to monitoring what is being said about you online. Feedback of this kind should be taken into consideration, as customers do not always express their dissatisfaction with a product or a service immediately. The above mentioned review websites allow the business that is being reviewed to respond.  A general rule that we believe to be true is that most customers who feel that they have been wronged, are primarily looking to vent their anger.  

The fact that a business takes the time to respond to a negative review online is something that is looked upon favorably in the eyes of potential customers. Simply showing concern that a customer was dissatisfied is already a step in the right direction.

Reaching out to such a customer and apologizing could often mean the difference between a negative review online and a neural one. It is also important to remember that the same customer could always post a follow up comment to his or her review and state that he or she tried the service again and were satisfied.

Option 2 – Try to push down the ranking of the negative review

Search engines are in constant competition with each other for presenting the most up to date and relevant content on the web for every query.  Creating additional positive results for a business name could essentially burry a negative review of that business. Google has a history of preferring diverse and unique content.This means that creating a Youtube video, a profile on a social network and uploading a PowerPoint presentation to Slidshare all for a single business name, may reach better web visibility than creating three new results of the same kind. 

While it is imperative for a business to try to keep clients happy and be responsive to comments and reviews, unhappy customers or negative reviews are bound to emerge at some point. A mix of new and positive results along with positive reviews by clients who are happy with the service should be able to overcome negative results that may emerge.  

The Importance of Marketing Yourself Online While Job Searching

With the grim economical news coming from Dubai, the job market continues to be a difficult one. The latest collapse of what seemed to be a thriving economy would undoubtedly result in significant job loss, as corporate restructuring will go into affect.

Maintaining a strong Google CV is not only important for one’s online reputation but it can also be a helpful tool when applying for a new job. It has become considerably easier and faster for employees to “Google” someone than to pick up a phone and ask for recommendations.Professionals who maintain a positive business image online would have an easier time impressing prospective employers than people who do not have any web presence at all.

A recent survey by Harris Interactive for CareerBuilder.com shows that researching of potential candidates on social networks by managers and human resource staff, has doubled in the past year alone. A social network such as LinkedIn or a guaranteed visibility online tool such as LookupPage can rank extremely well on search engines and provide an additional positive result when a job applicant is being searched online by an employer.

Creating a LookupPage that highlights the attributes of a candidate as well as provides links to online reports, pictures and recommendation letters can make the difference between being called back for an interview and being looked over. Another advantage of creating an online resume is that it can be accessed at any time of day and from just about anywhere. Finally, LookupPage Pro users receive a unique domain name as well as comprehensive user statistics about who has been searching for them online. This is without a doubt a great online tool for job seekers!

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. 

Can Google Suggest be Modified?

Google search is constantly changing. It seems this time around, Google does not share the information with the end user in the same fashion as it did in the past. Let us start with the obvious, conducting a search for the term “Tony Blair” on Google.co.uk and on Google.com yields different Google Suggest results. That is actually understandable but one thing that is slowly being phased out is letting the user know just how many results there are for every suggested term. Searching on Google.co.uk will still inform you how many results there are for each suggestion, but Google.com only lists the top ten suggestions without sharing any metrics.

Why is it an issue if Google does not share the metrics with the users? 

Analyzing metrics can often lead to improved performance. If people knew how many indexed pages on Google have a chance of “earning” a Google Suggest spot, than they would try to manipulate these results for personal gain. Google is trying to avoid that but by doing so is eliminating an informative metric from ordinary users. The fact that this metric was available and might not be in the future reduces the quality of the search that people can conduct using Google.

How does Google Suggest affect online reputation?

When searching the term “Tony Blair “Google Suggest picks ten options it deems relevant for the time. Once again, there is no real way to know how Google decides what is relevant at any point in time. It is likely that recent queries as well as trending topics on major blogs and news services have an influence on what is suggested. but the bottom line is only Google knows what exactly dictates what is included in Google Suggest and what does not. Recent searches that we have conducted on both Google.co.uk and Google.com for “Tony Blair” brought negative suggestions along with positive ones. A negative suggestion that appeared on both was the word “antichrist”.

If a high school student is researching the former Prime Minister of the UK for a school report and clicks on Google Suggested results for “Tony Blair the antichrist” there is a chance that these results would rank even higher on future searches, this can have a negative effect on Blair’s online reputation. Blair is certainly not alone in this predicament; Google suggestions for Tiger Woods  are mostly negative nowadays as well. 

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.   

Celebrity Twitter of the Month – Lance Armstrong

 Seven time Tour De France winner Lance Armstrong is a unique athlete. Not only is he the only person to win the Tour De France more than five times, he is the only person to have won the tour seven consecutive times after recovering from advanced stage cancer. When Armstrong was 26 years old, he was diagnosed with testicular cancer that at that point had already spread to his lungs, abdomen and brain. He underwent several operations and opted for alternative form of Chemotherapy and that led to the remission of the cancer in his body.

By 1998 Armstrong was already deep into a training regiment that would spark his return to the Tour De France, The fact that Armstrong won seven tours in a row starting in 1999 and participated in yet another race in 2009 marks him as one of the greatest athletes of our time.

Lance Armstrong describes himself in the short Twitter Bio as “7-time Tour de France winner, full time cancer fighter “. Armstrong is tweeting on a regular basis about his daily life, travel, cycling and of course, the Lance Armstrong foundation, LiveStrong, a non profit organization which strives to inspire and empower those who have been affected by cancer. Armstrong has over 2.3 million followers on Twitter. He is using Twitter to engage his fans about topics that are important to him and to promote his organization via the micro blog.    

Lance Armstrong is an exceptional athlete that could get the attention of the world media in many ways. The Fact that he chose to have an ongoing relationship with his followers via Twitter is a complement to the technology and the recognition of how ground breaking it really is. Businesses and professionals are choosing to use Twitter as a part of their marketing effort because it is currently enjoying solid web visibility from search engines, meaning that a Twitter account could often rank highly within the Google CV of a professional or a business. Please Follow LookupPage on Twitter to learn more about online visibility social media optimization and online reputation management. 

What Can be Learned From the Tiger Woods Scandal?

Since the tales of infidelity have started to circle around Tiger Woods, large sponsors such as Accenture have cut ties with the athlete. Accenture who has been a sponsor of Tiger Woods in the past 6 years, using his image for campaigns in print, television and airport advertising in 27 countries around the world has terminated the sponsorship deal all together. Other companies such as Gillette, Tag Heuer and AT&T have all decreased the use of Tiger’s image in their campaigns but have not ended their relationship with the athlete. 

Pepsi who named a Gatorade energy drink after Tiger Woods, decided to pull the plug on the drink shortly before the news of Tiger’s car accident made headway. They too decided to scale back the relationship with the pro golfer as opposed to ending it. Golf is considered an upscale sport and some of the products that Woods was promoting are high scale as well. Some of the potential customers for these products are conservative and others would simply feel that Woods no longer represents elegance and luxury. To put in basic terms, Woods is suffering from a negative online image that brands do not want associated with their products.

The fact that it is much harder to build a reputation than to destroy it could not be any truer in this case. Most of us are not celebrities and will never be known to millions of people around the world. We all go about our business and live our lives without the issue of public perception having an effect on the choices we make. Since we are not paid to be a brand we can afford to do what is best in our opinion at any given point provided it is acceptable by our family and friends. 

It was not long ago that comedian David Letterman confessed on national television that he had not been faithful to his wife. Letterman opted to be the one who breaks the news to his fans as opposed to the media. While it is fair to assume that had Tiger Woods announced that he was leaving his wife and new born a few months back his reputation would take a hit, it would certainly not be as bad as things have become for him as of late. However, there are still things that can be done to protect the brand of Tiger Woods brand – but this is an issue for a different post…

 
 

 

Tips to Establish an Online Presence – Wordpress

 If you follow several blogs or even read a blog post every now and then there is a good chance that Wordpress was used in the process of publishing the content you are reading. Wordpress is an open source blog publishing application that is being used on more than 202 million websites around the world. People love to voice their opinions and one way to do that online is by blogging. When it comes to establishing an online presence, a sure fire way to get a Google ranking for your name would be to keep a blog.

The main reason people are drawn to use Wordpress for their blog is the simplicity of use that it offers. Another element that is taken into consideration with Wordpress is how big and popular it has become. Bloggers are interested in improved SEO – search engine optimization for their content. More traffic could mean money in their pocket from the sales of ads or simply the satisfaction of knowing that more people in cyberspace are connecting with what you have to say. 

Google bots are not in the business of missing new and fresh content so Google will not overlook a platform used by millions of users provided unique content is added to each blog on a regular basis. In other words, when people create a web site out of thin air they are often required to submit the site to Google for indexing. This is not necessary when creating a new blog on Wordpress. Google bots will index a new Wordpress blog because it was created on Wordpress and will continue to do so as long as new content is posted frequently. 

Google strives to find the most relevant content possible for every search. This also means that the search engine bots are looking for different types of content. We all receive video and image results for our queries for a reason, people actually clicking on them; otherwise Google would not be presenting them at all. Because Google is looking for anything relevant, it is taking into consideration just about any type of file in cyberspace as long as it relevant to the search query. Blogs in general are very relevant. They are often personal and are updated on a regular basis. A WordPress blog has the potential of ranking extremely high in a person’s Google CV  provided the blog is updated frequently.

Who Needs Online Reputation Management ? Carrie Prejean Knows

Unless you have been living under a rock for the past few months, you will be only too aware of the controversy surrounding former Miss California USA, Carrie Prejean. Still, in order to fully understand what's been going on, here are the simple facts in black and white.

Carrie Prejean came under fire at the 2009 Miss USA Pageant when she answered that she believes marriage should be between a man and a woman, after Perez Hilton asked for her opinion of gay marriage. "We live in a land where you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage. And you know what, I think in my country, in my family, I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman. No offense to anybody out there, but that's how I was raised."

Hilton publicly vilified her for her lack of political awareness but there was also some speculation in the media that her response was valid because she answered honestly as opposed to giving the politically correct answer just to win the title.

Of course that’s not the end of the story. Just two months after winning her title, topless photos of Carrie started to do the rounds on the internet and pageant officials began to question whether Prejean was an appropriate candidate to represent the state of California. Donald Trump, owner of the Miss World beauty pageant, ruled in her favor and decided to allow her to complete her year in office. However, Prejean was officially fired in June 2009 for alleged "breach of contract".

There is no question that during this whole fiasco, Carrie Prejean's reputation has come under fire, which brings us back to the question in hand: who needs online reputation management?  In today's world of advanced online technology there are countless ways to ensure damage control and one can only hope that Carrie's team of advisors and public relation officers will do their best in ensuring that her reputation is restored as soon as possible.

Whichever side of the fence you are on when it comes to the hot topic of gay marriage, one thing is for sure: should you ever find yourself in hot water for expressing your opinions, remember this name – LookupPage.com – the place where you can control  information found  on the internet and professionally manage your online reputation.

45% of Employers are Using Social Networks to Screen Job Candidates

A recent survey by Harris Interactive for CareerBuilder.com shows that researching of potential candidates on social networks by managers and human resource staff, has doubled in the past year alone. Two thousand six hundred sixty seven managers and human resource employees took part in the survey and were asked whether the information they found on social networks regarding the candidate had an affect on their decision. More than a third of the participants said that what they had found on social networks influenced their decision to pass on a candidate.

The websites employers were searching through included facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Myspace and the number one factor that deterred employees was provocative photos followed by references of alcohol and drug use. Other negative elements potential employers were looking for were bad mouthing of previous employers and poor online communication skills. Employers do realize that people lead private lives. At the same time, they also prefer to hire people who are responsible enough in order to maintain a somewhat professional online reputation. Being careless at managing your own image online does not portray a job applicant as someone who would improve the image of his or her employer. 

  What can people do to maintain a positive online reputation?

1. Create top positive search engines results that you can control. LookupPage allows professionals to create a positive result that ranks high on major search engines and includes additional information regarding the job applicant as well as provide links to reports, images and recommendation letters. Other forms of content that can project positively on a potential candidate include blogging or twitting about a topic that has to do with the position one is trying to obtain.
2. Keep private profiles private. Social networks (including Twitter) offer various privacy settings that allow users to be visible only to friends and family who obtained the approval of the user.
3. Consider who your Facebook friends are. Facebook is a great tool to keep in touch with friends and loved ones. Adding people from your office as your friends on facebook means they can have access to most of your conduct on the social network. This has often backfired when people forgot their boss is also their facebook friend.
4. Keep track of your Google image CV. Removing negative images from search results is a tedious task but is often well worth the effort.