Every single moment, someone or the other is talking about you, your product, your services, your business, your competitors or your industry. They may be complimenting about a particular aspect of your business, appreciating certain things or generating hype for your business. There are also people who do not think too high about your service. They are cribbing, complaining or criticizing about your service or your product.
Let us say a much-hyped movie is on the verge of release. A lot of money, time and efforts have been spent in creating the magnum opus, and an equal amount of money has been spent on publicity. Can you imagine how much it can hurt both the distributors and creative team when the pre-release hype is countered by negative posts and scathing amount of criticism. A lot of people who read negative posts and information are bound to stay away from the movie affecting its business.
Not just a movie, but every conceivable product or service has its online reputation at stake thanks to the open platform offered by the web 2.O tradition. A blog post or a couple of comments posted online can either be a windfall for your business or topple it down like a pack of cards. There is also a term for this phenomenon-it is called customer generated media or CGM. To tackle the negativity generated by the consumer generated media, you need to take resort of online reputation management.
Online reputation management involves the method of tracking or monitoring every hour. Make sure you track everything that involves your product or service, right from product lines and employees to marketing strategies and competitors. You can go to morever.com; a website gives information on your industry and the latest developments and news in your industry.
You can collate all possible keywords that a user usually searches on in terms of your product or service. You can then set up ‘alerts’ (Google Alerts or Yahoo Alerts) for all of these keywords so that you are alerted when something about your company is posted online with the listed keywords in the ‘alerts’. You can also go to monitorthis.com which helps you keep track of a single keyword across different search engine feeds simultaneously.
Based on your keyword searches, you can make custom RSS fees from places like Technorati.com, Topblogging, Google News, Yahoo News and such others sites. It is even better to maintain all feeds into one RSS Reader like Google Reader, My Yahoo, Netvibes, Pageflakes, Bloglines, Newsgator etc. Find out some of the different forum sites or message boards that talk about your product or service and then closely track whatever is being written about. Similarly you can also track message groups like Yahoo Groups, Google Groups, MSN groups, AOL groups etc.
For online reputation management, you can also keep a track on some of the web pages through tools like watchthat.com and websitewatcher.com. You have to make sure you monitor every keyword and every page of the website that has anything even remote written about you. Monitoring and keeping a close watch of anything associated with your business is the one of the most important steps in online reputation management.
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