April 24, 2013

Using social media to enhance your brand’s reputation

Maintain your social profiles for better search results

Guest post by Cara Aley

With your company focused on its business goals and set up on social channels, it’s critically important that your online business reputation be one that is polished and positive. As you’re likely to be in the market for new customers, clients, partners or investors, it’s important that when they run a Google search on your business or startup, not only are you properly search engine optimized but that meaningful and positive results appear.

Social media as a marketing strategy is an important method for ensuring that this happens, and should be prioritized as much as or more than any other marketing strategy. I’ll explain why.

Understand SEO

Social media profiles are critical for search engine optimization (SEO). You know what SEO is. (See Socialmedia.biz’s series on online reputation.) Now it’s time to start building those social media profiles in order to improve your SEO. Continue reading →

September 26, 2012

Why you need to buy all your domain names now

If you’re interested in protecting and controlling your own online reputation, one of the easiest things in the world you can do is register as many domain names as are available and try to back-order all the rest.

Expensive? Don’t tell me how expensive that’ll be, because it’ll surely end up being a lot cheaper than options B, C, etc. — where option B is the thousands of dollars you’ll need to spend if someone else gets your domains first and is willing to sell them back to you and option C is when, instead of selling your domain name back to you, they create an attack site where mis-info is the special of the day.

Continue reading →

September 24, 2012

Win the online reputation land war

Online reputation management tries to replace negative results with positive & neutral entries

While I concur with Vizzini, the Sicilian from the movie The Princess Bride, that one should “never get involved in a land war in Asia,” sometimes there’s no escape — and taking on Google’s search index, algorithmic prowess, and the natural results of organic search itself is, indeed, akin to getting involved in a land war in Asia. Most folks know only of the fierce fighting associated with organic search engine optimization (SEO), a process by which we write copy, optimize architecture, use keywords, add hyperlinks, and interlink sites in order to associate a keyword phrase with our particular brand, product, service, and site; another, larger battle is online reputation management, or ORM. Continue reading →

August 29, 2012

Remove those regrettable online reputation tattoos

The way you feel now about all those photos of you at the beach, in your suit, body-proud, tanned and drinking — liberation and joy — may end up making you feel completely different in your near future — trapped and ashamed. No matter how young you may be, reading these words, you need to start thinking long-game when it comes to your online reputation.

You’re at the mercy of the Panopticon: networked cameras are almost ubiquitous

Your online reputation on Google Search is a culmination of all your separate, discrete (or indiscreet) choices — sort of like tattoos — and it’s always easier to not get inked in the first place than it is live with the consequences or go through the pain and expense of having all of your tribal, prison, lower-back, ankle, neck, and face tattoos removed. Continue reading →

August 15, 2012

For online reputation, the best defense is a good offense

You can’t ignore the power that search holds for your business

If you’re a serious business person whose business isn’t digital, you’re probably too busy making money to fool around on social media. Social media’s stupid, right? Just baby pictures, workout check-ins, adorable kittens and the self-indulgent ramblings of under-employed folks too far to either the left or the right to amount to much.

Just because you’re old-fashioned doesn’t mean what you’re doing isn’t working.

Big business has adopted many of the tools of the digital age, but it hasn’t gone native — because it doesn’t need to. Big money doesn’t need digital to do big business. It’s just cream — an additional channel for additional revenue.

There’s a lot of business being done and a lot of money being made using ’50s-era technology: phone calls, meetings, conference calls, lunches, dinners and hours at the club or the golf course. The Internet has not usurped the traditional, it has merely enriched it; however, there’s also no barrier to entry so this party isn’t exclusive but it’s super-saturated with powerful influencers and new media gods. So, please beware. Continue reading →