Do you monitor and manage  your company’s reputation online?  If you don’t then this post is a good place to start. 

Long are the days when companies were in control of their brands reputation by controling what messages their consumers are exposed  to.  The internet has changed all that, and today, with the internet penetrating more and more homes,  the tides have turned in favour of the consumer.

Today, internet users can  “virtually” go to a number of forums, blogs and social networks and speak freely about their experiences with your brand or service.  In an ideal world you’d like them to speak positively about your brand but are you really in control of that? Well no.  This is where reputation management plays a very important role.

So how do you go about managing your reputation?  Follow these three simple step:

1) Define Scope

Before you begin monitoring your brand’s online reputation, you will need to know what you’re monitoring.  I suggest you brainstorm the various areas of your business and categorise them.  Examples of reputation management categories can include:

• Brands/Services:

• Competitors

• Industry

• Employees (current and ex)

2) Research

There are a number of free and commercial online tools and sites available to you as a brand owner, these include:

• technorati

• blogpulse

• Subscribe to the Google, Yahoo and MSN News RSS feeds for the keywords you want to monitor.

• Create Yahoo Pipes using keywords you want to monitor

3) Manage & Engage

Once you’ve begun monitoring your brand, its time to create a strategy to counter the negative effects of bad publicity and to capitalise on the effects of positive publicity.   Below are examples of ways to fend off negative publicity:

• Create a company blog that allows users to interact with your brand as opposed to going elsewhere to do the same

• If you provide news, make sure you’re indexed in the news section of the search engines.  There is a detailed process of how to do this for Google can be found in this official guide for google news inclusion

Hopefully your brand only gets good publicity but if it doesn’t I hope the above tips are enough of an inspiration to set you off on the highly important task of manging your brands reputation. Good luck!

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