Managing Your Online Reputation
"It takes many good deeds to build a good reputation
, and only one bad one to lose it." - Benjamin FranklinFor the first time in the history of communications, 1.8 billion people have the ability to access information and communicate with each other for free; that access equals power
From simply expanding the reach of your organization to promoting your personal expertise in a field, social technology is a vital tool, which if managed properly, can enhance your personal and your organization's online reputation and latent potential like never before- literally with the push of a few buttons!
For corporations, online reputations are steadily becoming absolutely critical, as they will soon dictate how much you can sell, the level of employee you can recruit, and will even impact your ability to attract investors. It is absolutely crucial that you begin managing your online reputation- and you must begin now.
Your online reputation fits into one of three categories: The Good, The Bad, and The Invisible.
Good
If your online reputation is good, put a smile on your face because you are popular.
You have online relevancy because you have learned how to utilize sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and blogs to connect to as many consumers as is physically possible.
It also means you are producing a lot of information; updating those micro-blogs with regular, fast-paced, and interesting content to keep your customers engaged, cheering along, and sharing with others.
If your online reputation is good, it means that others are saying good things about you on their blogs, microblogs, and other Social Networking sites.
Bad
A bad reputation will result in people easily being able to discern that hiring you or doing business with your company is a big risk. It will be very hard to overcome this and will impact you economically.
Consumers are realizing the powerful fact that with the push of a button their stories of poor costumer service will be heard and even watched by millions across the world. These stories are both easily searchable and permanent.
Invisible
If your online reputation is invisible, it simply means this: you have no online connections, presence, or relevancy.
Having no online reputation is only a small step better than having a bad one.
These days, even home-based businesses are realizing the importance of joining the Social Networking community in order to make their brand visible.
Once you have successfully moved your brand from invisible or bad to good, the next step is managing and maintaining a positive online reputation
Guidelines for you and your organization to manage online reputation
In this social technology-run era, a good reputation is everything. Your sincerity and common sense will go far in maintaining that positive online presence
Here are some guidelines for you and your organization to manage online reputation. You must learn to - Listen, Engage, and Measure.
Listen
Develop a Listening Process. This must include multiple methods for listening to what people might be saying about you online.
For a person promoting his or her reputation or brand, listening programs should include the use of multiple tools and alerts such as alerts.com, socialmention.com alerts, Google alerts, and Yotify (promoted as Google alerts on "steroids")
For an organization, you can consider more sophisticated tools like Radian6 and Viralheat which perform real-time monitoring and access data on all kinds of micro-blogging platforms and millions of websites, and will deliver the results directly to your desktop.
Engage
You must establish an Engagement Policy, which defines how you will respond to the positive and negative things said about you and your brand.
You must determine who will respond, when they will respond, and how they will respond. This is critical because you want to minimize negative mentions or get people to retract them because you reached out. And, you want to see positive mentions as possible connections and sales opportunities.
The most profound tool for establishing an engagement policy is to actually engage! Be present within the community of your fans and consumers by posting on their sites, interacting on microblogs and your website, and by developing an open-dialogue. This type of community building will do a lot towards keeping a positive online reputation.
Measure
You must implement a Measurement System that gauges how much people are talking about you and whether the sentiment is positive or negative.
Your Measurement System Strategy needs to tell you how many times you were mentioned a month, what the sentiment ratio was positive to negative, and your effectiveness in customer service (getting people to delete negative mentions or ratings).
For corporations, tools like Klout.com and Addictomatic.com, can be utilized to create a sort of standardized scoring systems,which will be used as another way to measure a person's or an organizations value to the business world.
The bottom line is this: it is no longer viable for an organization or even a person to exist without a solid online presence. However, the key is balance. You and your business have a legitimate desire for privacy, which is healthy and necessary. Yet, at the same time, you must establish an online reputation if you want to get noticed.
Managing Your Online Reputation
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