Want to Protect Your Online Reputation?

You need to know what people are saying about you - if you sign up for a Google Alerts you can be notified whenever your company name or products are mentioned, allowing you to respond quickly and appropriately.

Google will then send you emails at the interval of your choosing – as it happens, once a day or once a week - with snippets of content it has found containing mentions of the terms you designate as it last crawled and discovered them on the Web. The alerts contain links to the pages where the mentions were found.

Beyond this, you could also use the Twitter search, or the Social Mention tool.

You will, hopefully, also find some positive sentiment about your business. This might include things like news stories, articles, blog posts, forum comments, tweets and reviews. Whenever possible, try to contact those responsible for the good content and thank them. A short comment on their blog or a thank you email will suffice, but don't overlook the possibility of establishing a relationship with them that could lead to additional positive publicity about your business in the future. You will likely discover a few new places to include on your press release list, a couple of blogs and/or forums you should be reading regularly and commenting on, a few new Web sites where you can submit articles, photos and videos, plus some interesting tweeters to follow and engage.

Unfortunately, you are also likely to find content that reflects negative sentiment about your business in the same sorts of places that positive content can be found. This is what we are really looking for because, if we are not aware of it, it can hurt both our online reputation and our business's bottom line.

Tags: google / reputation

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