Search, Social and Lead Marketing for Business Blog

Building an online reputation is quite a challenge but maintaining a good reputation is even more challenging. It involves a lot of doing and that includes effective online reputation management.

There are 3 steps that cover an effective ORM. These are elaborated below:

Step 1: Monitoring

The first step of reputation management includes monitoring of what is happening in and around your brand. The advent of social media allows anyone to give honest feedbacks about products and services that easy without having to worry on restrictions. However, not all you get are good feedbacks. Online discussions (particularly the negative feedbacks) about your brands must be monitored. And because these discussions could be so wide and complex that would take a lot of labor,  it is a great help if you have an early warning system of all the news relating to your brand so that you are able to address any feedback easier when needed.

Some monitoring tools you can use:

• Google Alerts
• Social Mention
• Radian 6
• Hootsulte
• Technoratti
• Addict-o-matic
• Reputation Defender

Step 2: Analyzing Feedbacks

Because it is not enough to monitor what people are saying about your brand, there is a need for you to analyze carefully the feedbacks as this gives you an opportunity to improve your brand. It is not appropriate to disregard comments particularly when it is negative.

Step 3: Influencing

The last part of online reputation management is influencing. Once you have identified negative feedbacks you need to influence the way people think about your brand. This involves the following approaches:

ð        Respond to a negative comment with a positive one;

ð        Select the right social technologies to connect with them;

ð        Let your company’s tone show you care and that you value their opinion;

ð        Participate in online discussion - because you can interact with them real time;

ð        Healthy conversations comprise of both positive and negative feedback.

In today’s market trend wherein new technologies like the Internet are widely used, it is imperative that every business creates an online presence to survive, succeed in the competition.

There are a number of ways to create an online presence for your business but blogging is considered as one of the most powerful tools. This is because of the following major reasons:

• It creates an organizational voice – blogging provides opportunities for members in your organization to create a collaborative idea or information useful for prospects and visitors;

• It builds credibility – regular posting of useful information for readers helps build your business credibility through times.
• It offers a two-way communication with prospects and visitors – blogging provides readers an opportunity to interact with you through comments (through comment form below your posts) so this makes your blog an interactive environment.

Before you commence blogging, it is important that you consider establishing a blogging plan in order to succeed. Below are some useful ideas which can help you build a more systematic way of blogging:

(1)      Understand your market – it is imperative that you are able to establish a blueprint before you start blogging. To do that, you have to (1)identify your market as this gives you a sense of direction (2) understand your goal so that you will not lose track and (3) know your purpose so that you can deliver to your prospects and visitors the information that matters.

(2)      Blog design and strategies – you have understood your market well and now it is time to streamline your strategies (do you want to be a prime source of information about a certain product?) and then pick a blog design or template that suits best your niche.

(3)      Regular posting – it is not really that significant if you post topics per day or once a week or once every two weeks what matters most is that you are able to do it regularly ( according to the schedule you promised to your readers – stick to it). To fulfill that, establishing a schedule and delegating tasks to members according to the schedule and regular monitoring can be a great help.

(4)      Promoting and syndicating blog – it is not good enough to just write substantial content; you have to see to it that your posts have readers. Social media campaign and content syndication are a great help for this. So see to it that you are able to build a network on social network sites like Facebook, Twitter, and social bookmarking sites like delicious. Also, when it comes to content syndication, you can use real simple syndication tools like feedburner to share your posts.

(5)      Measure ROI - it is also important that you assess the ROI (return on investments) performance of your blog to analyze whether or not you are on the right track. There are a number of useful tools to accomplish this task. Google analytics is one important tool that helps assess the performance of your blog. This will give you important information like conversions, visits, page views, duration of visits, where the visits are coming, etc.

Above are some important considerations that you need to take into account when building a reputation online. Take time to go over each of the items above before you commence blogging. It helps a lot.

Reputation is a Result of Perception

...hearing and seeing is believing

Image management or reputation management is really a case of managing perceptions. How your target audience (public) perceives your brand is what decides whether positive ties (relations) will emerge, grow and flourish. An airline may have a long-standing safety record with no major accidents in its history. And yet, bad food, discourteous service on board or even seemingly insignificant elements like poor sound quality of announcements can lead passengers to doubt the pilot's skill or aircraft's technical quality. Unreasonable perhaps, yet true; and not much anyone can do about it without good PR management!

Effective public relations, both offline, online and in combination with social media must follow a cyclical approach of:

• Research - Make an informed choice of which PR and social media channels are best suited to get your message across. Different stakeholders for your organization will frequent varied media based on their needs, interests and solution seeking efforts. Thorough research can help you decide on critical factors like timing, reach and forum / platform for interaction.

• Strategic Planning - This is the stage where you analyze your research to gauge audience motivations. Plan your PR messaging or work on an action plan of what to say, how to say it, when and where.

• Skilful Implementation - Any good PR exercise leverages a positive voice. This could be a leading news publication writing an article about your company, your CEO (or official spokesperson) being interviewed on TV or radio, a YouTube video of a happy customer offering a testimonial while demonstrating the use of your product, bloggers expressing their satisfaction (excitement?) about your service, and so on. No matter which one or combination of many voices it is, PR doesn't just happen; it needs to be supervised. Of course, you can get lucky and a great PR piece may come out of nowhere; but if you let it go nowhere after that, you've lost an opportunity!

• Evaluation - You plan your PR strategy with specific goals and objectives in mind. So after each PR deliverable is complete, it makes sense to evaluate the effectiveness of your exercise in relationship building.

• Measurement - How far does your PR campaign take you towards achieving overall brand reputation enhancement? Even if you didn’t spend money to garner PR and social media publicity, account for your valuable time and resources. Measuring ROI with criteria like media touch points and outreach of positive messages helps determine what's working and what's not.

• Continuity - Sporadic or random PR exercises can only generate short-term and short lived publicity. Reputed brands are built on consistent and sustained PR initiatives.