Omar Kattan

Archive for the ‘Online Reputation Management’ Category

Cybersquatting has been a threat to businesses from the inception of the internet. 

The term refers to individuals who buy domain names associated with big brands and sit on them for future profit or gain.

Legislation has since been passed to protect brands against cyber squatting and many companies have successfully managed to claim their URLs back.  However, this phenomena has reincarnated itself in the form of Social Media Cyber Squatting which is more tricky to combat.

If you’ve ever tried to register a YouTube, Facebook or more recently, a Twitter profile, you’ll know what I’m talking about.  It’s nearly impossible these days to register with your brand name as someone else has most likely taken it!

Many brands have been adversely affected by social media Cybersquatting including Exxon who recently discovered that a random person has registered a Twitter account in their name and falsely impersonated them.  Other brands have suffered similar fates.

The solution… make it a priority to register your brand in all major social media sites and use tools such as checkusernames.com to make the process less painful. 

More importantly, invest in an online reputation management service (ORM) to be one step ahead of these pesky cybersquatters as well as others trying to harm your brand.

Want to monitor and manage your online reputation but don’t have the budget for it? 

Here’s a list of some of the top Online Reputation Management Tools on the Net that can help you keep track of your online reputation across a spectrum of sites, blogs, forums and social media.  

In order to manage your reputation, you would need a database that stores the data.  A fantastic open source tool that does just that is BuzzMonitor, an open source initiative led by the World Bank. 

BuzzMonitor, which is powered by Drupal, is an open source CMS and has been modified to act like an ORM cms.  BuzzMonitor uses feeds to keep track of reputation across the internet and can be programmed to update as often as every 15 minutes.

Without further ado, a list of sites that provide feeds in various site types…

• Board Reader -  Monitors forums across the internet and provides feeds based on specific queries.

• Omgili: Also a forum scraper that provides feeds based on search queries. 

• Technorati: Tracks discussion across the blogosphere and provides a feed which can be filtered by date and/or authority.

• Google Blog Search: Monitors Blogs indexed by Google.  You can subscribe to the feed by clicking on the icon on the left nav bar.  Google does not allow the scraping of its results so this is a great way to get search data out of Google!

• Google News: Similar to Blog search but with news and press releases.

• YouTube’s Search Api: A bit more complicated to use but not overly.

• Twitter Search: Becoming increasingly important to monitor and can provide you with very valuable data about new blogs/blog posts that have yet to be indexed by Google or Technorati.

• Yahoo Pipes: Yahoo provides a plethora of RSS ”PIPES” that you can use to monior almost anything! The best way to use PIPES is to browse through existing ones and clone the one you like then use its feed. For more info on this check out my blog post on how to create a Yahoo PIPE.

There are many more sources you can tap into but the above will get you started on a very good footing.  Good luck! 

Google provides an alert service for monitoring various keywords in it’s search index as well as news, blogs and other properties it owns. This can be very useful for monitoring online reputation.  Here are 10 easy steps to create a Mega Google alerts RSS feed using Yahoo PIPES.

1. Sign up or Login to Yahoo! pipes

2. Click on “create a pipe”

3. Open the sources drop down on the left and select the “fetch feed” block and drag it to your work area. Click the “plus” button in this block and add all the Google alerts URLs. You can get these from your Google alerts account by selecting the RSS option.

4. Open the operators drop down tab on the left and select a “filter” block and drag it onto the workspace.

5. Add some pattern matching rules. For example, if you want to filter out press releases you can create a rule with a negative text match on “press release” in both content and/or title.

6. Connect the blocks by clicking and holding the little dot in the feeds block and drag it to the filter block. Then click the filter block dot and drag that to the “pipe output” block that will have been auto-created.

7. Save your Yahoo PIPE and give it a name.

8. Double-click the “output” block to get your output at the bottom of the screen. From there you can tweak your filter settings to help filter content.

9. Finally, go back to “My Pipes” where you can get the combined RSS URL for your Mega Google alert which can be found in the top right hand corner of the output block.

10. Plug the newly created Mega Google Alerts feed in your favourite RSS reader and enjoy!

That’s it folks, easy peasy, a great way to monitor multiple Google alerts in one RSS feed using the fantastic Yahoo PIPES application!

With more and more people using search engines to research brands and products, it is becoming increasingly important to ensure that your brand has a positive reputation online.  

The internet has become a vehicle for disgruntled customers/clients/employees to air their views about negative experiences they’ve had with a brand. While this is a good thing for the democratisation of e-commerce, it can be a very dangerous weapon in the hands of internet users with bad experiences with or even intentions towards your brand.

Online reputation management or ORM as its otherwise called is an art and a science in the sense that you have to be creative in how you improve your image online as well as have the optimisation skills to ensure that this startegy is executed in the most efficient manner.

So how do you go about managing your reputation online?  Here are a few basic steps to follow:

1. Conduct a search for you brand term in Google (other search engines have less of an effect as Google has the lion share of searches)

2. Analyse the top 10 results and take note of the general sentiment surrounding your brand.

3. Devise a strategy to address/supress negative publicity and maximise positive publicity.

4. Most likely the number one position on Google for your brand name is your own site (if its not then you have bigger challenges to address and should check to see if your site is banned by Google)

5. The second, third, fourth etc. results are crucial.  Look who’s ranking for your brand name in these results.  If you’re a big brand you would probably see a mixture of resutls such as Wikipedia, news results, YouTube

Point #3 is really crucial.   How do you go about supressing negative publicity?  There are a few steps you can take to address negative publicity, some quick wins, other not so quick but require a more strategic solution that is more long term.  

1. Create subdomains.  Subdomains are considered as semi-stand alone sites by Search engines and therefore if you have sufficient content to place under a subdomain (eg news.brand.com) then that subdomain will have a very high probability of ranking for your brand name (below your main site) 

2. Create Social Media Profiles and link to them.  Examples of social media sites that rank highly in search results include Facebook, Twitter, Technorati, Linkedin, and Flickr.  Creating these social network profiles not only allows your brand to get closer to today’s consumer but also has the secondary benefit increasing the probability that one of “your digital assets” appear in the top 10 results of search engines.

3. Participate in Forums, Blogs, and online discussions. This is a sensitive one.  It is more difficult for bigger brands to directly participate in online discussions but its not entirely out of the question. An example of a big brand that does participate in discussion is Google who are often seen participating in Webmaster communities across the net including WebmasterWorld and SEOMz.

4. Take legal action.  If you spot forum/blog posts that are flat out spreading lies and rumours about you brand, send a strongly worded email to the owner and ask them to remove this libellous information (seize and desist).  If they don’t you can follow it with legal  action.

5. Optimise your News Releases.  Make sure that your press release are optimised for your brand name and/or other industry keywords you’re targeting (brand generic).

6. Optimise non-text based content such as images, videos, pdf’s etc.  Search engine results pages no longer only serve traditional text-based results but also serve images, videos, pdfs, news releases, blog posts, etc.  Therefore optimising all your digital assets has become paramount.

7. Brief you PR agency to produce press releases that address the negative sentiment about your brand.   This is a no-brainer and a good way of addressing negative pr without actually participating in discussions.  If you find a recurring negative PR theme, brief your PR agency and ask them to adress it in future press releases.

The above are basic steps.  There is much more to ORM but the above steps are a good place to start if you’ve not thought about your Brand’s Online reputation.  

Do you subscribe to Google alerts?  If you do then you’ll be happy to know that Google has now begun offering the option to recive them via RSS!.  Yes thats right RSS!

Benefits of reciveing Google alerts via rss as opposed to to email include the ability to include them in your favourite reader, or even importing them into a adatabase including your cms for reputation management and collaboration.

To get the alerts, you need to create a Google alerts account and once you’ve created the search query, you will have the option to subscribe via email or rss.  Also make sure you select the “comprehensive” alerts.  You can even go one step further and create a Yahoo pipe of various alerts  as instructed by trillianjedi in this webmaster world thread

What does this development mean?  Well, recently there has been some buzz about Google developing its reputation management offering and this seems like a logical step towards achieving this goal.  Rumours have it that Google will soon be offering its search results in RSS format (it currently offers news search result s in both XML and Atom).

I’m personally extatic at his news at it allows me to stay on top of my clients’ online reputation and in these difficult times we’re living in, this is crucial!  THANKS Google!