Online Reputation Management

Still at MediaCamp London. Have been reading SEO chicks a bit over the past few months so came along to finally hear Judith Lewis talking her thang, live.

Why monitor?

• You need to be aware of the kind of things your customers may be reading about you
• refine your messages, take it as feedback, find out what people are thinking and interested in hearing about you
• Judith shows the Google results for “Starbucks” which I also recently showed to an agency as well as Landrover Discovery
• In summary, it’s all about search (I just spotted Brendan Cooper’s post ‘own your Google page‘ this morning discussing this)

What to monitor?

• Everything related to the company
• Industry news

How to monitor?

• Google & Yahoo search (inc Alerts)
• RSS feeds
• Professional firms or paid for services [disclaimer: I work with social media monitoring service Attentio]

Press Releases & PR

• Good for search
• Paid for and free press wire services – don’t use them all! Pick one or two for distribution
• newswire today is a useful free service
• Write the content you put on your corporate website different to what your official press release (varying content)
• Be careful, don’t spam journalists or the free press wires. Think through your distribution strategy

Corporate blogging

• Authentic voice (check out my previous post on is ghost blogging wrong which achieved a bit of feedback)
• Make personal connections, even if you’re a big business, people love it so personalise your posts in a way which is appropriate to yourself and your company
• Engage outside of your own blog e.g. Twitter, leaving comments

Over all? When stuff goes wrong, change it.

I’m at MediaCamp today and this will be easiest blog post I’ll ever write. If you want to know what went down I won’t have to tell you, the community will do that for me (which seems fair since I arrived here at 9am to find out it didn’t start till 10). The Social Media Mafia are blogging (via SpinVox) posting to Flickr and updating the Wiki throughout today.

In the first 5 mins I’ve already heard about something new, Swarm, which no doubt I’ll be hearing more about as lots of ‘the family’ seem to be using it.

Thanks to our venue SAE (even if we couldn’t even find our way up the stairs without a guided tour).

[Can you tell I'm a little bit sleepy today?]