By Conrad Saam
Special to the Legal Technology Blog
People are talking online about you, your company and your clients. Right now, yesterday or maybe last week. Do you know what's being said? Do you know where it's being said? Can you respond? Online reputation management is the process of monitoring and guiding what is being said about an individual, a brand or company. As communication through social media and Web 2.0 sites accelerates, the online management of a brand will become increasingly important.
Consider the case of Domino's Pizza: In April this year, two North Carolina-based employees of Domino's posted a sick, nasty and disgusting video on Youtube of themselves in a Domino's restaurant with Domino's food violating all sorts of health codes and standards of decency. (The two were later arrested.) Yet, within days, millions of people had viewed the clip. Domino responded by jumping into social media, posting a Youtube video from their president and creating a Twitter account (@dpzinfo) to interact with the online community.
The process of managing a brand online is not actually that hard, it just needs to be done in the right way. Additionally, because of the ability of the Web to reach a wide audience in a very short time, online reputation management needs to be a proactive, not reactive process. There are 3 simple steps:
1. Monitor: ensure that you are monitoring Web 2.0 conversations for specific, important terms. For most situations (like law firm names, attorney names, etc.), this can be done very simply with Google Alerts, a free service that notifies you via e-mail every time Google discovers an entry for a specific term. For more common and widespread terms (let's say you represent Nordstrom and don't want to be alerted every time someone writes a post in their latest shoe-lovers blog), sophisticated, paid solutions from companies like Visible Technologies apply advanced filters and reporting mechanisms.
2. Participate: It's called social media for a reason -- you can't sit on the sidelines without actively participating. In the Domino's example, the company missed the boat by joining the conversation after they really needed to (at the time, @dominos was already taken and they had to start from scratch with @dpzinfo. No one had started to follow their tweets when they needed it the most.) Instead, participate in the conversation by building relationships through social networking and generating content on Web 2.0 sites.
3. Manage: People search for a brand (or a lawyer's name) using a variety of different terms and combinations, e.g., "Attorney Bill Ross," "Bill Ross 1017 Ross Lane Roseville CA," "Ross Smallings v. Strump Inc." Managing your online reputation is about putting your best virtual foot forward in as many places as possible. This maximizes the number of positive results for a wide number of terms surrounding a brand. One of the easiest ways to do this is to participate in sites that already do a great job of ranking your name in search engine results (LinkedIn and Avvo are just two examples of sites that are particularly good at this.)
By proactively monitoring your brand, participating in online conversation and managing what is being said, you can build a solid online reputation that truly reflects you. This has never been more important. Prospective clients are checking you out online every day. Are you happy with what they are reading?
Conrad Saam is the senior marketing manager at Avvo. Prior to Avvo, Mr. Saam's experience includes numerous awarding-winning interactive projects for clients including Disney, Nickelodeon, Lego, MTV, Ford, Macromedia, Microsoft, Kraft Foods, AOL, McDonalds, Mattel and Napster. He is a sought after speaker on interactive marketing and has been featured in publications including USA Today and The New York Times.
Conrad - nice post and so many good points for your audience to consider.
Cheers,
@bcahill
@visible_tech
Posted by: Blake Cahill | October 05, 2009 at 09:29 AM