Welcome to part three of my ongoing Online Reputation Management series. The first two installments covered how to monitor your company’s online reputation and how to respond to feedback in various online arenas. Today’s topic approaches online reputation management from an SEO and online marketing perspective.

If you are still concerned about the negative results that appear when somebody searches for your company, it may be possible to replace some of the unfavorable listings with more favorable results. Depending on who you wish to displace, you may be able to reclaim the first page of search results by creating and contributing content on other sites. When done correctly, this can reduce the risk of potential customers finding less-than-favorable reviews and feedback.

So how do you pull this off? Create valuable, useful content and distribute it to other online sites. Find reputable sites that allow submissions and spend some time developing high quality work to share. Make sure you don’t simply copy and paste content from your site or others, as this will likely just be filtered out by the search engines’ duplicate content filters.

Examples of effective content include:

• Write Op/Ed pieces for local and national newspaper sites.
• Publish articles, white papers, case studies, or unique research.
• Create user profiles on social media and social networking sites.
• Submit useful content and promote others’ content on the social media and social networking sites.
• Write and submit press releases to online media outlets and PR syndication sites.
• Provide social media sharing options on your site to allow your visitors to promote your content.
• Ensure all of your listings in online directories and internet yellow pages (IYP) sites are up-to-date and complete.

These are just a few examples of the places that accept user-generated content, and that tend to try to rank their content in the major search engines. Take advantage of their SEO savvy and let them help you replace the negative content in search results.

Of course, these are only band-aid solutions that won’t cover up a gaping wound in your operations, quality, or customer service. Make sure you addressing the root causes of the negative feedback and taking care of the spurned customers. Otherwise, no amount of SEO will be able to replace the backlash that is sure to follow.

Any other questions or comments? Leave a note below and I’ll make sure to follow up with more detailed information.

Welcome to Part 2 of our 3-part series on Online Reputation Management. Yesterday, I wrote about how to monitor your company’s online reputation. Today, we’ll cover the critical skills you’ll need to effectively respond to the feedback you encounter. Tomorrow, I will discuss various ways to proactively contribute to online communities to improve your reputation instead of just reacting when things flare up.

First off, it’s important to know when a response is appropriate and when it might be better to just let it go. There are a lot of variables that you should factor into this decision. Among the most important are:

• What is the nature of the feedback? If a customer is looking for information about your company, products or services, try to lend a helping hand by providing useful information without resorting to a sales pitch. If a customer is writing extremely negative things in a complaint site, read the tips below on how to respond. If the feedback is positive, either leave a quick thank you or just sit back and feel the love.
• Does the customer want to be contacted directly? If so, don’t respond on the website where you found the post. Do some research (either on the site itself or in your customer records) and figure out how to contact them via email, phone, or letter.
• Can you do anything to resolve or explain the issue? Again, look at this as an opportunity to improve your relationship with this customer rather than a pest that must be dealt with.

Depending on the type of site where you find the feedback, you will have different ways to respond if you choose to do so:

• Blog - Leave a comment for the author and/or post your response on your blog with a trackback to the original post
• Forum - If appropriate, register as a member and post your response. Don’t be “salesy” or try to hide your identity. Be sure to contribute useful, relevant info rather than marketing messages.
• Complaint Site or Review Site- Look for a business owner feedback mechanism. Many of these sites allow business owners to respond to reviews. Caution: Beware of scams, extortion attempts, and sites that try to bait you into a fight that you are never going to win! Do some research about the site and figure out if your response will be given fair consideration and equal shelf space. If you don’t feel comfortable posting on the site itself, find another site or use your blog to post your response.
• Social Media or Networking Site - Join the site and look for ways to contact the individual in other channels. Be respectful of his or her privacy as many of these sites are used for personal as well as business relationships.
• News Site - Contact the editor or journalist and ask for room to clarify your position or a follow-up article. Consider writing an op/ed piece as well.

Finally, some ground rules for your response:

• Always post as yourself, not as an anonymous or fake person.
• Provide actual contact information.
• Don’t ask others to post positive things about you and try to pass it off as unsolicited.
• Research the incident that resulted in the feedback before responding. Get details from your customer service team or any other employees that dealt with the customer.
• Create accurate, complete profiles on any sites that you register for.
• Provide links, phone or email addresses for your customer service team, or the appropriate executive that can handle the situation. You don’t necessarily have to post these publicly if you contact the person outside of the original site.
• Take conversations offline if possible to facilitate communication and maintain the integrity of the ongoing conversations.
• Explain how you plan to correct the situation and take care of the customer.
• Explain how you and your company are working to make sure that this problem does not affect anybody else.
• If a peaceful resolution is achieved, politely ask them to update their story or complaint with the outcome.

These tips should help you resolve and defuse many of the potential online reputation nightmares. Take care of your customers and they will take care of you.

[UPDATE] Added link to Online Reputation Management Part 3: Contribute [/UPDATE]

Just like an old fashioned home intercom system, conversations with your customers only allow for one side to talk at a time. Are you too busy talking to hear what they are telling you?

The internet is a great conversation tool, but just as in real life there are some people that refuse to shut up long enough to listen to others. Many small and medium sized businesses are so focused on pushing their messages out to their target audience that they don’t pay attention to the messages coming back in from the field. Most large companies are guilty as well, although they are more likely to have the resources to monitor and respond to online feedback.

Does your company fall into this category? If so, read on for tips on how to monitor the conversation about your company, respond where appropriate, and contribute useful content to help improve your reputation.

Step 1: Listen to what your customers are saying

Many reputation management experts will tell you that the first step in assessing your company’s online reputation is to just listen. Pay attention to what your customers are saying about you online. No matter how squeaky clean your business is and how nice your customer-facing employees are, you will undoubtedly have customers that are impossible to please. Don’t just assume they are all naturally bitter individuals, some may have a legitimate problem that can be resolved peacefully. You might even be surprised how many happy customers are willing to post their positive experiences.

Fish Where The Fish Are

Obviously the internet is too big to randomly troll around hoping to find what you are looking for. There are a lot of powerful tools out there that can help you. Depending on your industry, some or all of these resources may be useful in sifting through the mountains of data to find the nuggets that pertain to you. All of them have search features that will help you find what you are looking for:

Technorati - Acts as a search engine for over 110 million blogs
Google Alerts - Sends alerts when your company appears in News, Blogs, Web, Video, or Groups results
Digg - Social media site that allows users to vote on stories
Yahoo! Answers - Over 75 million users ask questions and post answers on a variety of topics
LinkedIn Answers - A social network for professionals with a Q&A section
Wikipedia Article Edits - Track specific articles to get updates when anybody makes edits
Tweetscan - Alerts you when your company name is mentioned on Twitter
MySpace - The world’s largest social network
Facebook Lexicon - Counts occurrences of any keywords on users’ Walls over time
Google Trends - Provides search volume over time for any keyword
Yelp.com - Allows users to rate and review local businesses
Del.icio.us - Online bookmarking service allows users to share links

These are just the basics, but should give you an idea of what is being said about your company. Try searching for your company name, trademarked terms, products, services, brands, executives, customer service departments, etc. Spend a little time anonymously reviewing the results regardless of what you find. Don’t be tempted to jump into the conversation to defend yourself yet. That’s step 2, and I’m saving that for tomorrow.

Mirror, Mirror On The Wall

First, look for patterns and trends in the feedback you found. Do you like what you see? That information is your online reputation. That is what many of your potential customers are seeing when they seek your products or services in various search engines and social media.

Does the negative feedback seem to be repeated over and over? Perhaps there are unresolved customer service or quality issues within the company that your normal feedback channels are not identifying. One or two negative reviews scattered amongst many positive mentions will not sink a brand, but an overwhelming proportion of negative comments may raise red flags with many prospects. Rather than rely solely on a reactionary strategy, take control and fix the root cause(s) of these issues within your organization. The old adage is true, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

Take a little while to think about how you would respond to these complaints if they came from customers that called you directly. Handling these situations online is much more delicate, as the wrong words or implications can suddenly snowball into a firestorm of negative feedback.

Stay Tuned

Tomorrow, we’ll discuss how and when to enter the conversation. You will learn how to engage various online communities and effectively communicate your plans to resolve any issues you encounter.

[UPDATE] Added link to Online Reputation Management Part 2: Respond [/UPDATE]

[UPDATE] Added link to Online Reputation Management Part 3: Contribute [/UPDATE]

If you have specific feedback or questions, leave a comment or contact me and I’ll be sure to address them in future posts.

I finally got around to diagnosing and fixing the “Previous Entries” and “Next Entries” broken links on my blog’s Wordpress 2.5 platform. Since the very first post on this blog, the next_posts_link() and previous_posts_link() functions were not working as advertised and I didn’t know why. It has been on my list of bugs to fix for quite some time, so I finally devoted a little time this morning to silence the little nagging to-do item.

If you have an SEO-friendly Wordpress blog you might have changed the permalink structure to create more human-readable URLs for each post. For example, the default Wordpress post permalink is www.yourblog.com/?p=123, where 123 is the unique ID for that particular post. There are many plugins that allow you to create keyword-rich URLs that rewrite the p=123 into something like www.yourblog.com/your-sample-post/. Rewriting the permalinks for your blog posts could inadvertently disrupt other static URLs in your Wordpress platform, such as the www.yourblog.com/page/2/ and www.yourblog.com/page/3/ pages that are accessed via the “Previous Entries” and “Next Entries” links. These pages hold your older posts that have been bumped off of the first page of your blog.

It’s a simple fix for a common problem. Within the Settings of your Wordpress dashboard, click on the Permalink Redirect tab. Within the Permanent Redirect Manager, include the following line in the “Paths to be skipped” box:

/page/*

This tells your site not to try to rewrite any URLs in the /page/ directory. The * is a “wildcard” that basically means “anything”. You can substitute other directory paths in there that you don’t manage with the permalink redirect plugin that you may be using.

Hope this is helpful, and that it helps you check one more thing off of your to-do list.

I’ve never recorded or been a part of a podcast before, but Derek and Ross from Ingenex Digital just posted a podcast (23 30 minutes) that covers social media, search engine optimization and online marketing. The focus was on educating traditionally-minded senior executives about the challenges and opportunities that await in the online world. Derek interviewed me about several topics that are timely and relevant to companies of all sizes as they size up the internet marketing challenge.

Give it a listen and let me know what you think. Thanks again to Ingenex Digital for starting a great podcast series and including me in one of the initial sessions. Leave them a comment as well and suggest future topics and experts that they can include.