Today, I’m off to SMX East, and will be presenting on the topic of Reputation Management. So, I thought I’d put together a quick 6 step guide to managing your reputation.

1. Find out whether people are talking about your company, your product, your executives, etc.

Alerts and RSS feeds will give you an insight into what’s going on now.  But, you need to go back into the past in order to understand what’s been said before and to create a baseline.

2. Find out where they’re talking.

Don’t just assume that Google and Yahoo will give you every discussion on every site…they won’t.  There are many instances where a site or a forum discussion won’t be indexed, either intentionally (closed forums, noindex, blocked through robots.txt, etc), unintentionally, or because the search engines just don’t dig deep enough into the site.

3. Identify the influencers.

Which channels are the customers engaged on?  Which sites contain the greatest degree of conversations?   Which sites get the most eyeballs?

4. Determine the sentiment.

Are the discussions predominantly positive or negative?  Are there certain locations which sway one way or another?

5. Plan and implement your participation in the discussion.

Maybe you want to reward the positives, talk to the negatives to understand their concerns, and maybe move them to the neutral or positive column.  Or maybe, it’s just that you want to be part of the conversation, showing that you are listening.

6. Identify gaps in the conversation.

If you find that there’s an audience out there, but no central location for them, then, maybe there’s the potential for your company to create their own site for the audience to use.  And, if you can get them there, and they stay, it’s going to be so much easier for you to monitor the conversations.

Or alternatively, you could just send an email to Nan at serengeticommunications.com and let us figure it all out for you.

Filed under: Reputation Management on Monday, October 6th, 2008 by Simon Heseltine |
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