Online reputation management
Thu, Mar 27 2008

By Jonathan Oxer, IVT Technical Director

The recent media exposure about my RFID implant has resulted in some people writing rather, err, "interesting" things about me online. There are blog posts where I'm referred to as an indicator of the coming of Judgement Day, and people saying that I'm now carrying the Mark of the Beast. I've even seen websites that claim I have a "mainframe computer" running my house! Doing a search for my name can uncover all sorts of unusual things.

What do people find if they search for your name? Or your company's name? Or your product names or brands?

The internet is being used now as a first port of call for information on everything from the weather to the work history of potential employees, the business dealings of suppliers, and customer reviews of products. It's critical that you keep track of what people are saying about your company online and act proactively to maintain the sort of image you'll be happy to look back on years from now - something that is commonly overlooked is that once you've said something on the internet, you've always said it. Words on a web page or in a discussion forum don't fade away with time. Even if they're removed by the site owner they'll often live on indefinitely in search engine caches and in projects like The Internet Archive, which maintains searchable snapshots of most of the internet indexed by time so you can effectively hit "rewind" and view websites as they were at various dates in the past. Things that you and your customers say online right now will probably still be visible in some form in 10, 20, or 30 years to anyone who wants to do a quick search.

A very useful little exercise is to periodically go "ego surfing": use a search engine to look for references to your company name, your products and trademarks, and even your own name. Imagine you're a potential customer trying to find information about your company and go looking for any references you can find, good or bad.

Start with a general search engine such as Google and run searches on your company name and products. To find exact matches you can put your name in double quotes when you do the search. For example, because the words "internet", "vision", and "technologies" as individual words are common English words doing a search for them will find any site that includes those three words in any combination. To make the search more specific they can be searched as a complete phrase by searching for "Internet Vision Technologies" (including the quotes!) in Google, thereby excluding sites that include those words in some other combination.

Because a lot of influential online content is now found in blogs it's also useful to use specialist blog search engines such as Technorati to see if anyone is blogging about you or your company. You may find there are whole conversations going on among your customers and potential customers and you're not even aware of it: the internet gives everyone the power to communicate directly, and people have an innate understanding that impartial opinions from other customers are far more credible than anything a company may have to say about itself.

Putting yourself in the shoes of a potential customer and searching for your own company can be a very enlightening experience. Once you've spent some time chasing up random external references though you'll notice that a lot of the content is quite old and there's no point attempting to engage with people about it: if someone wrote a derogatory blog post about your company 3 years ago it's probably too late to post a comment or contact them to try to resolve any issues they may have. It's still worth a try if you have spare time but the really critical thing is to stay on top of what people are saying right *now*, both good and bad, and become part of the conversation immediately. If people write nice things about your company, thank them. If they write bad things, try to figure out how you can fix the problem and make them happy. People who complain about a bad experience with your company can in fact turn into some of your best allies: the fact that they are being vocal shows they care, and if you can demonstrate a willingness to help solve their problem it will show other prospective customers that you in turn care about them.

Finding recent content is not just a matter of doing regular searches though. After a while you'll lose track of which online references you've followed up and which you haven't, and you won't be able to do it frequently enough to be useful. You really need to know within 24 hours or so if someone has posted something online about you so that you can respond immediately.

The solution to the problem is a free service called Google Alerts.

Because Google is continuously trawling the internet for new content to include in their index they very quickly discover any new pages that appear, and with Google Alerts you can have them set up red flags on specific keywords so that they will notify you as soon as they find new pages containing those keywords. It's a very simple but extremely powerful tool that every single business owner should be using to keep a watchful eye on the internet to any references to themselves.

To get started just point your browser at www.google.com/alerts. You can then define the search terms to use, which parts of the internet to watch (such as just blogs, or just the web, or just news, or everything), how often to batch up matches and notify you, and what email address to use for notifications.

As an absolute minimum you should create a Google Alert for your company name, but I also highly recommend that you create additional alerts for your product names and brands. That way you'll know immediately if anyone starts talking about you online.

You could even create alerts for your competitors' names: Google Alerts is an invaluable tool for finding opportunities to contact potential clients who may not even know about your company yet but are talking about your competitors.

In my opinion Google Alerts are one of the most powerful yet underutilized tools available today to online marketers.

PS: My latest book, "Quickstart Guide to Google AdWords", has just hit the streets: see www.adwords-quickstart.com.