By Michael Burke & Hal MacDermot
For companies, organizations and individuals, an online reputation can be like a high school reputation -- fickle, and sometimes affected by the unscrupulous. On the other hand, a good online reputation helps you get ahead of the competition, and attracts more potential customers.
There’s a lot that you can do to take control and influence your online reputation, including projecting a positive presence that reflect your brand values, engaging your communities, monitoring social media conversations about you, and taking decisive action in case of trouble. Of course, all of this requires having a social media policy in place, and careful, advanced planning. The world of social media turns very fast and if it turns against your company, you need to move fast.
While there are numerous tactics you can pursue, I’d like to draw attention to some of the overarching strategy that frequently gets overlooked.
Think before you post
Trouble can spread fast, so you need to be ready. Have a social media policy in place. Earlier this year, “Amy’s Bakery Company,” an Arizona small business, featured on celebrity chef Gordon Ramsey’s reality TV show, Kitchen Nightmares. Pretty soon, Gordon dropped them, saying they were too difficult to work with (note: he doesn’t seem like the easiest person work with either). Shortly after, folks started criticising the owners Samy and Amy on social media, and they lost their tempers and...responded in force.
They claimed they were hacked. They blamed the FBI. They swore. They totally melted down.
Do the opposite of whatever Kanye West does
Kanye is a great case study in poor reputation management. Jimmy Kimmel pokes fun at his immaturity, and he responds by throwing an offensive and profane tantrum on Twitter. Now of course we understand that he works in entertainment, where supposedly “no publicity is bad publicity.” But even in entertainment there is indeed such a thing as bad publicity.
Kanye and Amy’s Bakery are extreme examples, but for all companies the lesson here is if your reputation is under attack don’t let emotions dictate your course. That’s not to say that your response must be void of emotion. On the contrary, you want your important audiences and stakeholders to feel your passion. But be sure that logic and not emotion is guiding your actions. Remember your end goal, get the facts out there that will best make your case to the people who count. If an emotional appeal is called for, be sure you’re portraying an emotion that will actually help your cause -- not just the emotion that you may be feeling at the moment.
And, for heaven’s sake, use correct grammar -- if people can’t understand what you’re saying, you’ll look crazy!
Acknowledge your mistakes and people will thank you
Your online reputation hinges on Word of Mouth, that is, what people are saying about you. By extension, it also depends what people are saying about your employees. Back in May this year, the John Schnatter, the CEO of Papa John’s Pizza was facing a full on PR disaster situation when two of his employees were recorded making a racist phone call to a Papa John’s customer they had just delivered too. The customer then posted the racist rant on YouTube.
John Schnatter responded right away by firing the two employees and publicly apologising on Facebook.
His swift and public action was applauded across social and traditional media.
Keep you social ears open
People are talking about you and your company, so you’d better start listening. There are a range of tools you can use to tune in, from basic and free to the more expensive work horses used by major corporations.
On the free and accessible end, Google Alerts and “Me on the Web” in Google Webmaster tools will track mentions of your brand and give you an idea of how and where your company is seen, at least on a basic level. If your budget is limited you may also be interested in free social media monitoring tools such as TweetDeck and Socialmention. More robust albeit pricier tools include Meltwater, Brandwatch pr Gorkana. These offer additional metrics, such as “sentiment.”
Define a “good reputation”Step back and decide what actually constitutes a “good reputation” for your company. What is it that you want people to know about you? What are the misconceptions you’d like to dispel, and the falsehoods you’d like to combat? Once you’ve identified these, accept the truth that you’re not going to be able to address all of them adequately. You’ve got to prioritize. If people only believe -- or disbelieve -- one single thing about your product, what does that need to be?
In many cases this can be deduced by simply asking what sells...but not always. Sometimes longer term objectives need to be weighed. For example, an airline might get tremendous short-term benefit from being viewed as the cheapest -- that’s not going to help them if one of their planes malfunctions. In the long run, it’s much more important that they be identified as the airline that puts the needs of the passenger first.
Who needs to know about your good reputation?
Equally important is recognizing that all opinions aren’t created equal. Sometimes the voice of an Internet Troll, and their blog that no one ever reads, will go completely unnoticed - unless you start to respond to it and add fuel to the fire.
What does matter is that the Influencers in your industry think and speak well of you. It’s important to follow their blogs and forums, and where appropriate join in the conversation. Join in the conversation by not just offering marketingspeak, but by offering something of value to the discussion.
You also have to be sure your key message is tailored to the sensibilities those whose opinions matter most. The cruel reality is that you won’t have the resources to address every concern, or appeal to every audience -- no one does. You’ve got decide who counts, and speak in language they’ll understand. Suppose, for example, you make tractor tires and Lady Gaga attacks your brand. Your response may be directed to her, but your language needs to speak to the influencers whose opinions are weighed by those who buy tractor tires (we assume Gaga isn’t one of those influencers, but we could be wrong!).
Pushing the “bad stuff” down the search page
A wave of bad reviews and blog posts can be very difficult if not impossible to remove. If the posts are libellous or downright untrue, you may have some luck contacting the publishing site moderators and trying to convince them you have been wronged. But with review sites like Yelp that are expected to offer both positive and negative critiques, this can be difficult or impossible.
With Twitter, if you identify Tweets with material infringing copyright, abuse or violent threats you may have some luck getting the Tweet taken down, but the process can be slow and imperfect. Or it might even seem you’re being ignored.
A much more effective tactic is to try and push the negative search results down the page. Generate as much good quality, positive new content as you can. If you generate great copy, engaging video and interesting blog posts, people will engage with them and share them. Your good content will climb up the search results and push out the bad.
Online reputation, social signals and SEO
Your online reputation is closely related to your social media presence, but what’s the relationship to your SEO here?
For several years now there’s been a big debate in the SEO community as to the importance that social signals have on search result rankings.
Social signals meaning direct signals such as Tweets, Google +, and Shares, and also indirect social signals such as greater brand awareness generating more inbound links, and higher numbers and more positive reviews in Google Local or Yelp (which of course ties into local search SEO). If you want your picture to start showing up for your content in search results, then get Google Authorship markup in order.
How does this relate to your online reputation. Well, assuming a good online reputation means you are getting a good social media buzz, that should mean you are getting a lot of strong social signals. Which could translate into taking you higher up the search rankings, although as mentioned, there’s debate on that.
A session on this fascinating subject was recently held at SMX East.
But how much is this relationship about ”cause” and how much about “correlation.” Do Tweets and Shares help improve your rankings, or are they just an after effect, a sign that your content is great, with good rankings, and that people Tweet and Share you because of the content quality. Matt Cutts has said that the relationship between Google’s plus ones and Facebook shares, and the Google algorithm , is one of correlation and not causation. In other words, plus ones don’t have an effect on the ranking algorithm: a great piece of content gets good rankings on its own strength, and by the same strength, gets plus oned.
If you want to get a little deeper in the subject, take a look at the Moz 2013 Search Engine Ranking Factors Report which documents the positive trend in social signals and ranking results correlation.
Conclusion
A good online reputation will help your business prosper and grow. A bad reputation can hit your bottom line. Think very carefully about how you want to present your brand values, and engage your communities. Make sure you have clear procedures and plans in place so that you know how to react to negative buzz, and never react without thinking. Have a clear social media plan, engage with your communities, and be prepared to react fast.
