We are creatures of habit and tend to not worry about anything until it becomes a problem. Social media enables anyone to say anything, and online reputation monitoring is critical to your business. Filters aren’t always required, and barometers of truth and integrity don’t reside in obvious arenas. That said, we need to monitor what is being said. Review sites enable customers to comment on your services without your consent, and don’t always allow you to respond.
Frequent updates are received quickly by search engines. It is quite possible for your business to appear in a negative review before your website appears on a search result.
You can use several tools to monitor your online reputation. These tools offer an opportunity to automate the monitoring process so that you receive alerts whenever anything is said and can be proactive in remedying the situation. Some of these tools are relevant to your personal online reputation while others include your business reputation.
Online Reputation Management Tools
Me on the Web
Google offers a tool within the Google Dashboard, which can help you understand and manage what people see when they search for you on Google. You can choose to be notified when your personal data appears on the web and also get tips on removing content from Google’s search results.
Naymz
Naymz offers online brand management and calculates your influence across LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. It also offers rewards for members with strong reputation scores.
Reputation
This website offers personal and business monitoring through a dashboard that quickly offers you insight into your online reputation. While their personal monitoring is free, their other services are not.
Another way you can monitor what is being said is through a social media dashboard. Tools like Hootsuite and Tweetdeck offer a “mention” column which will let you know if your Twitter profile has been mentioned online.
There are also some resources in our Resource Directory that you might be interested in.
Other Online Reputation Management tools that can be used include:
Create a recipe that creates a trigger. In other words, “I’m tagged in a photo on Facebook” then send the photo to Dropbox. Here is a link to an article with several IFTTT recipes.
A free tool that offers a search engine that scours social networks for mentions of your business name, offering detailed results, with a breakdown of the sources and users, a measure of how positive or negative the conversation is, and its overall reach.
Digital Sherpa offers a white paper on this topic which goes in depth on why online reputation management is important for your business.