Burnish your brand’s reputation, don’t ‘manage’ it ~By Chris Abraham

Written By Chris Abraham

 



If you want to fix your online reputation, writing big checks to an online reputation agency isn’t enough over the long haul — you’ll also really need to get your own house in order.
Most online reputation management (ORM) agencies can easily take back all the land you’ve ceded to negative reviews, rigorous and vigorous besmirchment, and terrible happenstance; however, this is all assuming you’ve been done wrong.
I call this scenario “the clean.” The crime scene may well be bloody and I may well need to don a Hazmat suit, fill my bucket with Clorox bleach, and get scrubbing with my stiff brush until the apartment is again rentable. The crime is over, it’s unlikely to repeat, and my job is just to restore the scene to normal.
If, on the other hand, you’re a bastard who had deep contempt for the morons you serve, allow your resentment at their stupidity come off you like waves of heat and believe that the customer is always wrong and that all your products and services are pearls to swine, then, yikes! This happens all the time. So, instead of passionately working hard to service customers and clients with kindness, super-service, innovation, convenience and value, they just assume that good enough is good enough.

When it’s cheaper to hire PR pros than to change the culture

This happens the most with monopolies and essential services. We all know their names. And, they’re often lambasted, drawn and quartered. While the fact that most of their clients and customers are being held hostage keeps these companies complacent when it comes to very expensive revisions in process, quality, and service, they’re not stupid. It’s cheaper to hire an army of crisis communicators, PR agencies, ad men, and online reputation managers than it is to turn a Comcast into a Zappos — at least for a while, that is, and especially when you still represent a monopoly. Online reputation management does work, but it’s an endless game of whack-a-mole.
I call this scenario “repair and repeat.” My analogy here is war. Some neighborhoods in Israel are the victims of chronic rocket attacks. Israel’s smart: they realize that if they allow these neighborhoods to look war-torn then settlers will never move there, will never stay there.
They have dedicated teams to come in, immediately after every attack, and quickly mend the damage, be it structural or cosmetic, from panes of glass to entire rebuilds — all in the service of making sure that people in these neighborhoods feel like they have a semblance of peace and security, even though they’re living a life or Russian roulette. This is very similar to doing online reputation management for a company that has decided to spend all their money on PR, ORM, publicity, and advertising without making sure it integrates with actual services, quality, customer care, and the ability to deliver on what was and is promised in those ads, PR, and publicity.

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" Your keywords suck and are outdated "

By Chris Abraham

You probably built your website years ago by now. You’ve probably never updated your CV, just added your latest jobs and clients to the top. Your corporate bio, what you do, your products and services were probably written back either when your company opened, when you ported your brochures to the web, or the last time you did a major revision. Like I said, probably years ago.

Admit it

Why does this matter? Because language evolves very rapidly and how it evolves has little or nothing to do with what you call yourself, how you describe you your products and services, or the keywords you have locked and loaded into your tweets, your websites, your hashtags, your textual links, your Google AdWords contextual ad campaigns, your Facebook ad programs and Twitter promoted tweets.

And, if you don’t call your services what others are searching for, you’ll be surprisingly invisible when it comes to your prospects finding you on the Internet — and if you don’t add the exact, literal, titles, subjects, hashtags, and keywords that people are using to find you and your valuable services, then you won’t be found at all.
As I have said again and again, Google may well be the most sophisticated, intuitive, and relevant search engine going, but there’s a terrible secret that even Google doesn’t want you to know about when it comes to folks searching for and finding you:

Google plays dumb until it needs to be smart

Google is amazingly painfully literal and only gets smart and clever when and if it can’t find relevant results that satisfy its customers immediately and easily. When it can’t find what you’re looking for, Google will search its databases for name variation, for light synonyms, and the like — but if Google Search doesn’t need to be ingenious, then it’ll just be useful, serving only results that explicitly mention the exact keyword strings that the customer shoehorns into search.
Why, you may ask, does it play dumb? Well, being smart is very resource-intensive so if Google’s literal, all it had to do is find a match in it’s cached-and-prepped index — literal is quicker, simpler, and mostly a better result than when Google tries too hard to be clever — it’s win-win, until it doesn’t result in you or your business anywhere to be found. And that’s your fault, man — own up!

Let me give you a personal example

When I started in digital, what I did was called new media marketing. Then it became social media marketing, then blogger outreach, then digital PR and digital marketing. Another example is a service I offered which cleaned bad search engine results off of Google. I called it defensive SEO then defensive search. Now it’s called Online Reputation Management (ORM).
And, who knows what digital PR and ORM will be called in the future? It’s always evolving and one needs to not only keep up with what the professional wordsmiths and copywriters are calling what we do, it’s also what sticks, what people adopt, and finally, what people call what you and I do if they’re not part of our acronym-loving digital Internet cabal — we’re very often way too clever for our own good.
So, have you brainstormed recently? Have you interviewed your friends, clients, mom, dad, high school mates, wife, husband, kids, and colleagues? To ask them when they would search for were they involved in a particular scenario and needed someone to perform a service like yours?

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Business tweeting is a life-sentence

BY Chris Abraham

　Before you decide on a whim to register, activate, populate, respond, and promote your business or brand via
Twitter, take a second to think this through. My first question is: why have you waited until now? My second is: why now? And finally: are you prepared to commit to actively tweeting in good times and in bad, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do you part? Is that your solemn vow?Let me make this even clearer: this isn’t a marriage, this is partly like being a parent and partially like being a patient. As a parent to your bouncing-baby Twitter profile, you need to be attentive, creative, engaging, consistent, generous, a brilliant teacher and also a patient listener. As a patient, you’re had organ replacement surgery and you need to remember to take your medicine every day, without fail, for the rest of your life, or your pink new healthy liver will reject you; even more, you’re going to need to change your lifestyle, too. Why?
Well, now that you’re a parent to all of your followers and also a patient yourself, you’re going to need to start being a role model: consistent every day because one off-day in the limelight of your growing online brand celebrity can become much worse than a simple black eye. And since this child — these children — never sleep (like all babies seem never to sleep), this job cannot be limited to 9am-5pm, Monday through Friday — this is global, this is
GMT +10 (Australia) all the way to GMT -10 (the Hawaiian Islands).So, not only will you need to queue-up interesting self-promotional content and links to your posts, your press releases, or to mentions of yourself in the news, but you’ll need to spend another 80% of your time actually following the people you follow, responding to @replies, retweeting interesting content from other people, participating in conversations and utilizing relevant hashtags — and you’ll get extra points for following trends, sharing interesting content that doesn’t directly relate to your own company, products, people or services as well as for following industry-specific keywords in order to become part in other people’s relevant Twitter conversations. Even more, pursuing interesting people to follow, growing your community over time into something of a proper online community — a virtual family.
And I haven’t even started in on online monitoring, brand and reputation management, and using social as part or an
Online Reputation Management (ORM) and organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy, either — that’s something else entirely and fully worth budget, resources, and more hours in the day, week, month — including nights and weekends.Plus, there’s more: you can activate these people to become real friends, to participate in real tweet-ups and get-togethers. You can cross-promote these natural allies and compatriots or other funnels, such as email lists, blogs, Facebook Pages, Tumblrs, Pinterest, and Google+ — each of which will take just about as much time and energy as Twitter does if you don’t cheat and cut too many corners — though there are ways to make things much more efficient. To a point.
That said, I don’t want to start sounding like
Anne-Marie Slaughter in her controversial article in The Atlantic, Why Women Still Can’t Have It All — because in the world of social media, many hands make light work! And, if you’re the only person who’s responsible, you’re going to either need to distribute the work to your colleagues (this almost never works over the long run — and you’ll end up with the hot potato every time) or you’ll need to hire more dedicated Social Media staff (this can get expensive and it is really hard to keep the love alive as well as fire).
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Why haven’t you secured a ton of domain names?

By Chris Abraham.

If you’re interested in protecting and controlling your own online reputation, one of the easiest things in the world you can do is register as many domain names as are available and try to back-order all the rest. And, don’t tell me how expensive that’ll be either, because it’ll surely end up being a lot cheaper than option B, C, D, or E — where option B is the thousands of dollars you’ll need to spend if someone else gets your domains first and is willing to sell them back to you and option C is when, instead of selling your domain name back to you, they create an attack site wherein mis-info is the special of the day.

One domain’s good enough, right?

I have been in the online reputation management game for ten years, sharing everything I know about it for five, and folks are still walking around like it’s 1993. Maybe my megaphone isn’t big or loud enough but folks are still wandering around with maybe one domain name. Sometimes this domain name is their name; other times, it’s something cute or branded. Domains are so cheap that you should own at least twenty-five — just you. Seriously. You should reserve as many as you can actually reserve, meaning you probably cannot cross too many country codes off your list as most countries require residency or citizenship. But do whatever you can, whatever you can afford, it’s not too late (you can always put together a pretty good collection of domains made up of entirely of second- and third-tier domains.

Waaah! All the good domains are already taken!

 

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