A few years ago, people used blogging mostly as personal journals and news reporting tools, but it has grown to one of the most popular means of getting your message out on the web. Here’s a couple of reasons why you should use blogging in your Online Reputation Management strategy.

Blogging for online reputation management

Ping: Once a new blog post is published it alerts the major search engines and various blog aggregators to crawl your new content. New content on your website can take days to be indexed and seen by the search engines. Depending on the setup, with a blog it can happen in a few minutes.  The big value in having your personal or business blog crawled quickly is in the linked keyword text (anchor text) that will lead the search engines back to the core website pages for sooner indexing and providing relevance to the keywords you use on your website.

If you are running a blog together with your website, search engine recognition can happen faster for your content. Because your blog pings the search engines every time you post a new blog post, the search engines are alerted and both the blog and the website pages that are linked from the post are given search weight. Often it takes only a couple of minutes for the new blog post to be discovered by Google.

It is the same as fishing and hunting. With fishing (your website) you have to wait for the fish to grab the hook and depending on your strategy and method, can take a long time before you catch something. Why wait? With hunting, it can happen instantly – I know I’ll get flack for this statement.

Fast to develop: You can set up and develop your blog in a couple of minutes. This will allow your company to respond quickly to a crisis. Your blog can also be used to expand your corporate message. While building or repairing your online reputation, control is always the keyword to make it happen.

Engaging: An interactive environment is provided in the heart and soul of your blog. If your company is open to receive comments and feedback on your blog posts, you can start engaging with interested viewers immediately. This doesn’t mean that you should open the floodgates and let everyone post comments without your moderation, your blog can be setup so that all comments needs to be moderated first before they are made public.

The control factor is critical in maintaining open communication with your visitors. Irrelevant information can be blocked while valuable information can be shared.

Responding to comments: With most corporate websites, often an organization is unable to quickly respond to a crisis through their website due to all the layers of technical people needed to make changes. A blog can be maintained and moderated with very little training. If you are only going to use blogging for Online Reputation Management, your content should be carefully screened before it is posted to your blog.

The more often you are posting new content on your blog, the more alerts can be sent to the search engines. This will help your blog and profile to be frequently crawled by the search engines.  This can be a good advantages in delivering your message countering all the negative comments and to build your online presence

Usually the content of your social media marketing strategy is what will get you to connect with the audience you are after. Whether the content is about information, assistance, inducements or entertainment, the content you present online should be promoted effectively across multiple social media channels.

Creating multiple social media profiles will help you expand your digital footprint while you are promoting your content. When using multiple channels when you are promoting your content, ensure that the content you publish is relevant to the audience you are targeting on the selected channel.

There are thousands of social media channels available and each one should be treated in a different way. Here’s a couple of tips related to the types of social media channels you will find.

Social networking

The biggest and most popular social media channel is Facebook, but there are many others that should be treated with equal importance such as Google+, YouTube, and LinkedIn. The multimedia features such as video and photo sharing on these channels are irresistible for many users. Members of these channels like to share, promote and comment on interesting multi media content. Most of these channels includes group and forum features that allows you to engage in relevant topic discussions, which is very effective for connecting to the right audience you are after.

Blogging

When people want to share the latest news and events of their daily lives, all they have to do is post in on their blog or micro blog. There are many channels to choose from for blogging and micro blogging purposes such as Twitter, Tumblr, Squidoo, Blogger and WordPress. People will visit your blog if they find your content engaging and relevant and if other people have shared and recommended it to them.

If people find your content valuable they can help spread your content to their own network without you having to do anything. Always add sharing options on your content to make it easy for your readers to share it.

RSS

Once you publish a new blog post, you can automatically connect it to various social media channels to let people know that you have made a new post. It is easy and very convenient so that you will not have the hassle of manually updating each of your channels every time. You can find various Twitter and Facebook applications that can post your content automatically to these channels.

Promoting the content of your social media marketing campaign can ensure your content spread and doesn’t just hang in the cloud.

Many people use the search engines when they are looking for information. When they do a search for your company product or any service you provide, you will want positive information about you to be displayed on the top positions of the search engine result pages (SERP’s).

Online Reputation Management (ORM) is a combination of various PR, marketing, social media and digital marketing efforts. High keyword positions and visibility are the main goals for good publicity. You can facilitate positive information to appear on the search engines pushing down all the negative reviews out of the SERP’s. This doesn’t solve the problem about the negative comments about you or your organization, but it can push down the negative comments to not be visible anymore.

Positive and correct information online

One of the main goals with Online Reputation Management is to make search engines rank and index all the positive and correct information about you online.  It can also result in the increase of your online presence.

Here’s a couple of tips on what you should monitor online and how you can do it.

Online Reputation Monitoring tips

• Setup Google Alerts to be notified immediately when Google finds any mentions regarding your company or any of your brand names.
• Use blog aggregation services such as Technorati to watch for your brand and company names in blogs.
• Monitor industry related websites, blogs, and social networks for any mention of your company name.

When you start with a ORM strategy for you business, check and analyze the websites that you control. These websites include your company website, any of your product websites, your blog, your employees blogs, partner or affiliate websites and any of your own articles, news and press releases.

ORM is becoming very important with the way the web is growing everyday. Start integrating various ORM processes into your company so that you are not caught of guard with that one negative comment that can ruin your reputation online.

The secret to social media marketing success is focus. It is very important to look at your business objectives and see how you can integrate social media into your business to help those objectives meet their goals. Not all of your website visitors will buy a product or service from you. So instead of making “website traffic” your main goal, with social media you can create your own community and audience that are interested in what you offer and what you say. This can automatically drive “website traffic”.

Social media marketing campaign

Before you start with any social media marketing campaign, it is very important that you understand the characteristics of social media, its strengths and weaknesses. This will help you determine which social media channels you will be targeting and to what extent you should engage with people on the various channels to build a following. There are thousands of social media channels available. If your aim is to generate sales leads, LinkedIn may prove more beneficial to you than sites such as Digg or Flickr.

Earn trust and credibility with your campaign

Another important element of SMM is earning trust and credibility on all the profiles you are going to use. This means that you must deliver exactly the service or product your promised. If  you are using a blog to promote your services, an optimized title and description of your blog post must be supported by informative and useful content. Readers will not read what you are saying if you have poor content stuffed with irrelevant keywords and links.

Social media marketing is an excellent way for businesses to start engaging with their target audience online and to build credibility and trust.

If you want to get the most out of this process and create effective sources that will pay off, you need to pay attention to all the detail and spend a good amount of time on each of the profiles you create online. Once they are created, optimized, and you are engaging with your network online, you will need to continually monitor your profile online over time.

Anyone can post negative comments

It is very easy for anyone to post a negative comment online that could harm your online reputation. This can be done in 140 characters or less. When people are searching for you or anything your company relates to on the search engines, it is always good if you can own the first page results with positive feedback about your brand or company.

Most digital marketing experts will agree that results cannot be guaranteed, especially if you are in a competitive market. On average you must wait a few months before you are going to see any changes on the search engine result pages. Even though I have seen a good influence on the search engines within a couple of weeks, it is common sense to accept that this is rarely the case. Creating an online presence for an individual or your organization, relies on various social media and digital marketing techniques.

Monitor search engine results

Maintaining an active campaign of monitoring search engine results in relation to your organization/brand name is absolute must in today’s technology driven lifestyle. It really takes time and a long-term commitment. If you don’t have the time, consider outsourcing or hiring an expert with experience that can do this for you.

The only question many people have is how to make money from your campaign and how you are going to use all the available social media channels to integrate ways of communicating and selling to your network. To begin you may want to focus on only a few of your marketing goals such as building brand authority, lead generation, customer retention, or just increasing brand awareness. Depending on your goals, you may want to choose different social media channels that will best suit your purpose like using facebook for business.

When you are finished with your strategy, communicate it to your entire organization and involve everyone. To help you with your strategy, get everyone onboard and actively participate in tweeting, blogging and engaging with consumers on your chosen social media channels.

Research, research, research

It is always important to invest some time on research to find out where the audience you want to target spends their time online. There’s an increase in users across all age demographics from social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and even Foursquare.

When you have identified the social media channels that your audience spends their time on, it is very important to start a listening process to find out what kind of conversations that particular audience are having about your brand or anything relating to your business. There are many free tools available online that can help you with this such as Google Alerts and Social Mention.
These services let you listen in on the conversation by using the search integrated on their platform.

Listening with your social media strategy

By analyzing and listening to these conversations you will be able to learn and identify if your brand perception is as good as that of your competitors. This will also help you identify where you can grow and improve your brand perception. By listening to your customers and being critical in your analysis of the conversations going on, you can give your organization an immediate advantage because you can leverage the positive communications and work on what your consumers perceive to be the negatives of your brand.

By researching the conversations about your brand will definitely help you identify detractors and evangelists and see how influential they are based on their reader base.

In addition to creating and distributing engaging content, make sure that your website is also optimized so that the search engines can find and index your content. This can help so that your content is displayed on the search engine result pages when someone is searching for your brand or services. The content on your website should also easily be share able on popular social bookmarking channels. This can help your content travel.

The more you empower your website audience to consume your website content in the way that they want, the more options you will have to expand the reach of your content beyond the borders of your website and your Web 2.0 profiles. Here’s a couple of ideas on you can can promote a positive brand image.

Promoting your brand image

Whitepapers:  The purpose of whitepapers should always be to educate or entertain the reader. The content should be relevant to your work and brand, and the primary focus should always be on presenting engaging content. When you publish a whitepaper, make sure to place it also on your website so that your website visitors can share it with their own network, and comment on it.

Press releases: For every newsworthy event a press release should also be created. Submitting a press release to various press release syndication websites will allow positive information regarding your brand to be distributed to a number of channels quickly. The search engines tend to index press releases found on these sites very quickly and it will help you bolster your visibility online.

Video: Use video channels such as YouTube to upload any videos you might have regarding your company. You can get very creative on these channels and produce video content that can have the ability to spread virally. This can greatly expand the reach and popularity of your brand.

Photo sharing: Publish the images you have the rights to from your traditional marketing campaign and upload these to photo sharing channels such as Picassa and Flickr. For every image you upload, you can create a unique title and description with your company name.

Social networking: A cost effective way to build your brand awareness using highly popular social networking channels is to create profiles on the top channels and to start engaging with your network of followers.

Traditional marketing methods such as news releases, sales materials, advertising brochures, emails, and even your website content uses your organizational voice. It is very important to maintain the consistency in your voice so that you communicate authority, professionalism and value. Your voice should always reflect your business objectives and goals. Before you can establish what your voice is going to sound like on various social media channels, answer the questions below to help you with this process.

Social media questions

• What is your objectives and goals?
• Do you know the audience you want to reach?
• What information interests them?
• Will your audience benefit if they listen to you?

It is very important that your social media and organizational voice reflects your business values and its mission while speaking to the audience you would like to reach. Find a couple of tips below that can help you define a social media voice for your business.

Defining a social media voice for your business

Authenticity: One of the first steps in establishing credibility for your business online is to be authentic. This doesn’t always translate back to being transparent, but it involves being honest with the people you want to reach, especially if you want to start engaging with them.

Personality: Always when you are communicating on social media, try to use your own personality. Nobody wants to listen to a robot broadcasting sales messages.

Authority: Offer your audience interesting and useful information that they will be able to use. Sharing expert advice and answering questions will help you establish authority and credibility.

Relevant: How often are you going to communicate with your audience so that you can make sure your voice is heard? People are using social media channels to communicate and to find out what is happening right now. Provide your audience with relevant and interesting information and they will respond.

Due to the overwhelming complexity and size of the web, and with the speed at which news travels, it is difficult to constantly monitor what is being said online. This is a huge problem for many, but if you want to solve this problem, you need a ORM (Online Reputation Management) strategy in place which serves as an early warning system to alert you of all the news regarding your brand. This can also help you respond and remedy where needed.

There are many ORM monitoring systems available online that can do this for you. These ORM systems informs you of all the information and news related to your brand and can also help you gather market insight and intelligence. A proper ORM solution is not just for monitoring your own brand online, but also to monitor current trends and statistics.

These monitoring systems can be quite expensive, but if you want to start monitoring your personal and brand name online, here’s a couple of tips to help you manually monitor your reputation online.

Monitor your reputation online

• Setup Yahoo Alerts and Google Alerts to send you a message as soon as your name is mentioned online.
• Use various blog aggregators such as Technorati to watch for your brand name mentions in blogs.
• Search for your brand name on Google Blog Search and save the results as an RSS Feed that you can subscribe to.
• Track for all mentions of your organization name, product names, brand names and key employee names.
• Monitor industry related websites and do a search for your competitors.

Online monitoring service

Once you have set up an online monitoring service in place for your brand, you should be able to track and research other relevant information such as competing brands, industry related terms, and general news related to your industry.

Monitoring your brand online can give you immediate feedback as the information appears. Monitoring is useful and important for controlling what people are saying about you online. Unfortunately, online monitoring is not enough. Sometimes, when you see your company name mentioned online with a negative comment by an angry customer, the damage is already done and you should counter the negative comment with a positive and honest one.

The best way to build up your reputation online so that the positive comments and mentions out weights the negative ones, is to actively control your space online. It is very important that you analyze your current space online in order to take the necessary action to control it.

If you have done your research and decided that you want to create a social media marketing campaign, the next step in the process is convincing your boss or marketing department that the budget and time invested in social media will achieve the results that you want.  Most people believe that social media is irrelevant to their business and that it is only for the youth. There are many articles online explaining ROI (Return on Investment) with social media. Social media marketing is more than just a campaign. It is a long-term commitment.

Identifying your social media objectives

It is vital that you identify your social media objectives. If there is no specific reason to use social media for your business, you will spend a lot of time and effort enjoying online conversations, but it will not produce positive results. You will not have many results to show how social media is working for you and no justification for the budget and time spent on it.

What overall business goals do you want to achieve with social media? Break these down and research whether social media will help you meet your goals. Identify and be realistic on the goals you want to achieve. Use your marketing strategy and look at the goals of that strategy. Can social media help you achieve those goals? Try to align your business goals with your social media objectives to ensure you achieve what you want to achieve.

Social media has a wide range of objectives that can help you achieve success online. Have a look below on a couple of objectives I have included that you can use in your plan. This list can give you a very good idea of what you can achieve with a proper social media marketing strategy.

Social media marketing objectives

• Generating leads
• Increased sales
• Establishing though leadership
• Building awareness
• Increased reach
• Launching with new services or products
• Research
• Insight
• Improved SEO (Search Engine Optimization) rankings
• Providing customer support
• Competitive analysis
• Improved client relations

When researching your social media objectives, don’t forget to apply the SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, timely) rule with your strategy. Always apply realistic time frames to all of your social media objectives and identify the metrics you are going to use to measure your success.