Managing Your Digital Reputation
Having to watch and manage your online reputation is sometimes thought of as the dark side of Web 2.0. Reputation monitoring and management have become a way of life for celebrities, public officials, major companies and all sorts of web related businesses.
Bad news just plain travels faster than good news. A bad online reputation can negatively affect sales, customer relations, brand names, employee retention, friendships and even families. With over 70% of the population online today and well over 90% of businesses making use of the Internet, a good online reputation is crucial for business.
Today, reputation management is becoming important to even the average person. 40% of the companies responding to a survey replied that they always or sometimes used Google or another search engine to research or learn more about a prospective hire. This means managing your own digital reputation is becoming increasingly important for those seeking key positions.
Managing your online reputation has 3 levels. Hopefully, you won’t need to move beyond the first level.
- Monitoring the blogosphere: Set-up tracking systems to notify as soon as a posting is made anywhere about yourself, your company or your brand name. If you were going to use only a single tool, then Google Alerts word be the most comprehensive. See more monitoring tools.
- Responding to criticism - damage control: Once you detect a problem. It is important to determine the best response (if any) to minimize the damage or perhaps turn around some one who is a foe into an advocate. See more on responding to criticism.
- Reputation repair: Once damage is done there is a process you need to follow to repair and restore your reputation. Since you can’t remove what was written (in some cases it is possible) you have to use a campaign of positive PR that focuses on your targeted keyword (usually your name) to dilute and push the negative comments deeper into the search results. (This is the subject of my next posting).