PubCon is one of my favorite conferences to speak at every year, and I normally do a few different presentations at the event. Today I wanted to share with you my favorite presentation: Online Brand and Reputation Management.
Online reputation management is more important now than it ever was in the past.
While many brands focus on creating a beautiful website, they fail to remember that many people will see search results first. Search results will often impact what someone thinks of a brand before they ever make it to your perfectly crafted website.
The basic problem is that brand spending is out of synch with what is actually influencing purchases.
Online brand management can make or break your business online. Many brands do not effectively monitor ratings and review sites to understand how consumers perceive their brand.
We trust 2 things: People we know and people we don’t know. We don’t trust advertising.
This is why online reputation management is important. Consumers are forming their opinions based on what other people say about their brand. This means that it is vital to understand what people say and why, and respond accordingly.
See my presentation for some of the key points as to why online brand management is so important, and what you can do about it.
My boss just dropped a proposal in my lap and wants my input on it ASAP, dealing with online reputation management.
Basically this company sends out tweets of reviews we received internally from customers … the tweet comes from us with the verbiage in quotation marks. They post 20 in one day, and then none for a month, then 20 more etc. They also have their staff / contractors go post under their screen names on a few various sites as if the review came from them.
My first gut reaction was to cringe. Some of the immediate things that bother me are 1) the reviews are repeated around the web, same verbiage, which makes me think Google Panda will eventually ignore it all anyway. 2) people being paid to post – even though supposedly they are only ever using reviews we received. I would rather the REAL people post reviews themselves and us focus on making that happen. 3) our twitter only has the reviews in quotes, but if we can get the real people to post their reviews it will come from actual people by @ourname. 4) I can’t help but think if I were the real customer the review came from, and saw it posted around the web with someone else’s name on it, I would be offended. Granted the likelihood of that happening might be slim, but is it worth the risk?
Any input? My gut is still saying no thanks!