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Social media has had a dramatic effect on the way businesses interact with consumers. Consumers have platforms within which to discuss the services and products they use. In many cases this opens up a great relationship between company and consumer. But with the good comes the bad and there are cases where social media becomes an outlet for consumers to voice their frustrations and share negative experiences.

Online brand management is key for all businesses. Just because your business doesn’t have any social media profiles and isn’t implementing a social media marketing plan does not mean your consumers are talking about you in those outlets.

1. The first step to managing your online reputation is to incorporate a monitoring system. The internet is larger and more complex than is even imaginable. This makes the idea of monitoring your online brand manually nearly impossible. Thankfully there have been several products introduced that will monitor your brand for you.

There are a lot of monitoring systems to choose from. Some such as Google and Yahoo Alerts! will email you when someone mentions your brand online. They also allow you to set up searches for keywords surrounding your brand. Another option such as Hootsuite lets you manage your own social media profiles by pushing out messages on multiple profiles at once and scheduling messages in advance. Hootsuite also shows you the mentions being made about your brand online. WSI offers a program called ReachCast that manages your social media, blog posts and content copy as well as monitoring all mentions of your brand.

These platforms offer different benefits so do your research and find the one that best meets your needs. Once you choose a monitoring system it’s important to allot ample time to monitoring what the platform finds for you.

2. The second step is to analyze what the monitoring system prepares for you.

How do you anticipate the feedback (negative or positive) will be received by your audience? Does it necessitate a response?

If you use your monitoring system to seek out negative feedback and then simply delete the negative comments you aren’t actually using the information to benefit your brand or your business. Someone who has posted their negative comments is giving you the opportunity to make things right. Responding to the comment and letting the person know that you heard what they had to say and are working to fix the issue will go a long way. Even if you can retain the business of the person who commented you may satisfy the concerns of others who read the comment.

3. The last step in this process is to influence your audience.

Choose the right social media outlets for your business. Facebook and Twitter are the most popular but that does not guarantee they will be the right fit for your business.

When you receive a negative comment in your social media page, spin it into a positive one by responding with a solution. Even if you can’t fix it right away let them know you’re working on it. This will go a long way with your followers.

Keeping current on industry trends and participating in online discussions surrounding your service or product will help to influence your social community. Start an industry blog to share your knowledge and opinions. This will also reinforce your credibility as an industry expert.

Use your monitoring system to do good things and improve your position with your clients and your industry peers. If you are ready to implement a monitoring system consider learning more about WSI’s ReachCast and contact a WSI consultant today.

For many businesses the success of your business is strongly effected by the reputation of your brand.  A vital part of brand management is preparing for a potential crisis. Simply planning on handling the situation in the event of a crisis is not enough. Quality brand management should always include a “what if” plan.

There are several key components to effective brand management during a time of crisis.

1. Speak Quickly – Communication is key to successful customer relations. In the event that negative things are being said about your brand don’t ignore them. Even if you don’t have an immediate answer to the problem at hand let your consumers know you’re working on a solution and that you’ll get back to them. Remaining silent on the issue is likely to fuel the problem.

2. Remain Consistent – Anytime you speak to consumers you should maintain the same tone. Times of crisis are no different. And it is important to maintain this method of communication during all conversations and statements surrounding the situation.

3. Designate Your “Crisis Team” – A part of your crisis management will be determining who will take the issue and handle it on behalf of your company. For some this will be their public relations department or outside firm. If you are not large enough to have such services you need to designate a employee or group of employees who will manage the situation. This team may include loyal customers who you ask to speak out on behalf of the brand of your company. Validation from fellow consumers can go a long way for restoring the impression of your brand.

4. Make Sure To Include All Employees In The Plan – Keeping some of your staff in the dark about what is happening with the business is never a good idea. Personal social media profiles are everywhere and you need to make sure you’re employees are not sharing things they should not. The wrong social media post by an employee can make things much worse.

5. Monitor – Before, During & After – Use a tool to monitor all social media mentions of your brand. ReachCast is a tool WSI customers use to monitor their brands. Google & Yahoo both have a social monitoring tool as well. These tools keep you clued into everything that is being said about your brand through social media. Staying informed at all times will help you better manage your brand.

It is always the goal that your crisis plan will never take action but it is always wise to prepare your self in the event it does.

First off let’s start with the obvious, what exactly is online reputation management. I feel like everyone is talking about reputation management, but very few are explaining what this is. Online reputation management involves managing reviews, mentions, conversations about your company, across many different websites. It requires active involvement on sites like Yelp, Google Hotpot, CitySearch, Angies List, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and so on. Really its about protecting your business or personal reputation online and not leaving it up to your consumers and clients to determine your overall online reputation for you.

Keep in mind that in todays online marketing environment, it’s often difficult to stand out from your competitors. And if you are in a volume business, negative reviews are most likely going to happen at some point. Even if you are not in a business that has lots of customers, one bad review can cause your prospects to hesitate to do business with you even before they even get a chance to read one word on your website.

Lets lay out exactly what NOT to do in regards to online reputation management in 4 easy steps

1) Ignore Negative Reviews – ignoring negative reviews on some of the top review sites is a great way to drive away potential business. Your prospects are going to find reviews about your company, and if you have not responded to those reviews, it looks like you don’t care about your customers.

2) Fight Back – fight fire with fire! If someone leaves you a negative review, another great way to drive away business is to be negative back. Tell the customer that they are the one that was wrong and to stop complaining, get a life, go away, find something better to do, etc . Responding back negatively is a sure fire way to lose even more prospects and customers.

3) Your Web Site is the Only Site That is Important to Your Business – continue to ignore review sites like Yelp, and Google Hotpot and social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Don’t claim your Google Places page or your Yelp page, Bing Local…etc etc These sites are just fads and will eventually go away and will just amount to a big waste of time for your business or marketing team. Your web site is the only site that people will go to when searching for keywords related to your business or when looking for more information about your business. Don’t worry about establishing a web presence across multiple web sites, that’s too much work and will never help you acquire more customers or manage your reputation.

4) Don’t Look at Analytics – continue to ignore all the great built in analytics data that exists on your YouTube Channel, Google Places page, Facebook Fan Page Insights data, Google Analytics, and Twitter. Knowing where your customers are coming from won’t help you adjust your marketing strategies, or tailor your products and services to what your customers actually want. Also, you won’t need to know exactly who your customers are (Men, Women, Age, Income, etc) as that will have little value to your business.

As you can see, the above 4 steps will certainly help you drive away more customers and continue to sour your brand and reputation online. If that is what you are looking to do, then follow those 4 steps for success (if that’s the type of success you want). Online reputation management can be a lot of work if you don’t have the right tools and strategies in place. Logging into 20 or 30 different accounts can be a daunting process and not monitoring or engaging on the right websites can leave you with little impact.  

I don’t want to make this blog into a sales pitch, but every once in a while I find as solution that will make people’s lives much easier and allow them to grow their business substantially. Take a look at WSI ReachCast which can manage the entire online reputation management process for you in one easy to use platform.

If you do business through a website you probably have the goal to appear at the top of all search results pages for your core phrases and keywords. With a solid search engine optimization strategy combined with a thoughtful pay-per-click campaign you can ensure your website will be among the top results for searches involving your keywords.

However once this goal is met where do you go? How can you build upon being the number one organic and paid search result for your keywords? Even if you are getting little traffic to your stand alone website, there are many more ways to drive quality traffic and brand awareness “off-site.”

The answer is to increase your web presence across many different online marketing channels. Being number one in organic search for some of your keywords is great, but it leaves room for your competition in the rest of the first page spots (2-10), and there is also more “space” on Page 1 in Google now with the integration of their Google Places listings. If your site appears first (or even 1-3) on the list of search results, it is very likely that the person searching will visit your site. Hopefully once they land on your site they’ll find everything they need and not leave until they’ve made a purchase or taken action with your company. However it’s more likely that they’ll go back to the search results and check out a couple other websites or even mix up what they are searching for to get even more specific. This leaves room for the competition to swoop in and steal the business if you are not targeting more than one location in the search results.

Enhancing your web presence means creating a strategy to dominate organic search results using multiple websites like Yelp, Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, Google Places, etc. There are so many sites, its impossible to list them all in this article. You need to register your business and website with local directories, review sites, setup a blog or 2 focusing on different keywords and services you offer, a micro site, social media, and article marketing sites.

When done correctly and optimized highlighting your keywords, location, business name…the goal is that your business could potentially take up the entire first page of the search results. Dominating the page and showing the person searching that you are #1-#10 in your market creates huge brand power. Even just getting 2 or 3 listings on page 1 for a keyword related to your services or products can drive quality traffic and separate you from the pack.

Increasing the number and quality of business listings for your website can guarantee that more people come accross your business. This will ultimately drive more traffic to your site and help show you and your site as a leader in your industry.

Magazines are now offering online subscriptions, consumers are catching up on television shows they missed online, and products are searched for and purchased on the web. Building an online presence is more important than ever.

Watch this video to learn more about the importance of digital marketing and look into WSI’s new platform that will revolutionize online digital marketing, WSI ReachCast.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCMmATc8lSE[/youtube]

Blogging really is a form of social media. Some social media sites are hard to measure the success of and blogging can be included in this.
 
The key to keeping a successful blog is to decide what you’re going to write about and why. Your posts should speak to a specific audience and share information that this audience will find both unique and interesting. You then want to stay focused on this topic. If you start your blog about car repair you should not write a post about fixing your roof.

Once you have outlined your blog topic, do some keyword research. Use the free Google Keyword tool and type in some keywords related to your blog topic. It helps if you get into the mind of your target prospect and ask yourself – Who am I trying to reach? What am I trying to accomplish? What would they search for in relation to this blog post?

Don’t wait to start tracking the traffic to your blog posts. Get Google Analytics or another analytics software installed into your blog right away. eFusion blogs come with analytics built in and Word Press blogs, you can easily add the Google Analytics tracking script. Tracking the analytics of your blog posts will tell you how many people are visiting your blog, what keywords they used, what blog post they landed on, as well as how long they stay and what they do from there.

Follow these steps to help you measure the success of your blog:
 
1. Track Visitation – How many people are visiting your blog?

2. Are You Sparking Conversation? – Do readers comment on what you have to say? Do they discuss it?

3. Duration of Visit – Use your analytics to find out how long people are staying on your site. Did they land on your blog by accident and leave right away or did they start with one blog post and spend time jumping around and reading more? This will help you determine if you blog as a whole is interesting to readers.

4. Page Visits – Analytics will let you see what pages people are visiting and what page they enter into your site through and what page they leave from. This can help you see what posts are grabbing traffic so you know what to keep writing about.

5. Physical Location – Analytics can get as detailed as telling you where your readership is coming from. If a high percentage of your readers come from California it might not make sense to blog about a recent snow storm.

6. Keywords – Find out what keywords people are using to reach your blog. You might find some great keywords that you could use to expand on throughout your existing site or even write more blog posts around.

Ultimately measuring blog success takes time. Measuring the ROI of a blog comes from readership and followers. A good web analytics program will help you better understand your readers and their viewing habits. The more you blog, the more traffic you will get which will ultimately lead to more business for you.

Taking your keywords into consideration when you are writing content helps your content to really work for your website. The content itself should be valuable and the keywords do the extra leg work.

Keyword rich content can improve your SEO but it can work even more successfully when paired with social media marketing.

Building strong social media profiles allows you to nurture relationships with your target audience. They can follow you and engage in conversation about your company or product.

When you write new content for your website you can share it with your followers through your social media profiles. This extends the reach of your content while also improving your social media marketing.

The more internet marketing tactics you utilize the more they overlap. Taking the time to link all of your marketing campaigns together will make them all work harder and be more successful for your business.

Recently, I was introduced to the power of Google Voice and decided to sign up and give it a try. I heard about the launch of this new service by Google awhile ago, but really haven’t had the time to check it out to determine what exactly it was and how I could use it in our business and how people could use it with their internet marketing strategies.

At this time its a 100% FREE service provided by Google. I can see where they might charge for this down the road, but right now their is no charge to use the service. My only concern with the free service is privacy issues, but I haven’t heard any complaints yet. So the question becomes, how do you use Google Voice and how you can incorporate this into your online & offline marketing strategies?

Google Voice essentially gives you a free local phone number in all states in the US. You can use this number and Google Voice account as your primary number on your web site or landing pages for call tracking purposes. Have an office in Maine but located in California? No problem, setup a Google Voice number to target any state you do business in.

Using a specific Google Voice phone number, you can find out how many leads are being generated from your web sites by using that phone number only on your web site. Any call that is generated using this unique number will be stored and tracked in your Google Voice account. If you are a small business and out of the office on a regular basis, this would help improve your lead response time as well (set it up so that calls placed on your site are automatically forwarded to all your phones).

Not only can you use it for call tracking and lead measurement but you can also use it to do the following:

- Setup call forwarding or “Find Me” for all your phones (cell phone, office phone, home phone, etc). When someone calls your Google Voice phone number, you can set it up so that it simultaneously calls all of your numbers. Never miss an important call again. Google Voice can become your virtual receptionist if setup correctly.

- Voicemail Simplification – all voicemails from my Google Voice account are stored online, transcribed, and sent to either my Iphone as a Text or email. You can set it up either way. I prefer to have it transcribe the message and send me a text. That way I get the voicemail in real time and don’t have to spend time opening my email and playing the message or logging into a voicemail account.

- Replace your office phone – we are now using Skype VOIP to make outbound calls. We tested a few VOIP services and found that Skype works just as well as any and much more flexible as far as using it wherever we go (coffee shops, moving between multiple offices, travel, etc). We setup our Skype account to use our new Google Voice number as the caller ID. You can also get a Skype phone number as well, but I recommend setting up the caller ID settings to show your Google Voice number to make things more simple. This is a great setup for a small 1 or 2 person office. If you have multiple extensions there are solutions through Skype for this, but I am not going to get into that in this post.

- Make calls online – Google Voice also allows you to send calls online, but in my opinion, Skype is a better solution for this for $30/year.

Google Voice also allows you to personalize voicemail messages for certain people, block callers, call screening, easily share voicemails via email or text, place international calls, send out free texts (SMS to Email feature is really neat), and make conference calls.

The key here is to use technology to help reduce costs, improve communication, and expand your online marketing tracking abilities. I suppose you could even use Google Voice as a tracking number in your offline marketing campaigns as well, but I am not sure that its really intended for that use. Make sure to read Google’s Terms and Services before using it if you are not sure about your intended use.

Learn more about Google Voice: http://www.google.com/googlevoice/about.html

It has been said repeatedly that content on your website is the best way to improve your Google rank.

This is still very true but there are a few things you need to do to your copy in order to make it work for you once it is on your website.

1. Review your content and incorporate keywords

Before writing and posting your copy you should have done significant keyword research. Once you have these keywords you need to make sure they are being used correctly. You should be highlighting key words in your title, subtitles, link copy, URL and tags.

You also want to make sure keywords are being used correctly with attention to grammar and spelling. This attention to keyword detail will benefit your search engine optimization efforts. It will improve Google’s rank of your website for those keyword search results.

2. Improve the quality of your external links

The second major factor in the way that Google evaluates your search engine optimization is dependent on your external links. By definition these are links to your website from outside sources. Examples of this may be another blog linking to a post of yours or a media outlet who wrote an article about you linking back to your site. Due to the integrity of these links it is not as easy to control as keyword usage within your copy.

The goal of these links should be utilizing your keywords in the links from other people’s sites. The quality of the site that is recommending you will also improve the value of that link. A form of links called “deep linking” happens when a number of their website pages link to several of yours is also beneficial. Even links to your site from others social media pages will improve your Google rank.

The best way to monitor the links to your site is to make yourself aware of your referring sites and market yourself in a way that entices bloggers and webpage owners to send their visitors to your site.

With the introduction of Google’s new Google Places system for local search they are also launching Google Boost.

Google Boost is currently only being offered in Chicago, San Francisco and Houston but they are hoping to launch more cities soon.

The purpose behind Google Boost is to add paid advertisements to help support your Places listing. Your ad appears on Google and Google Maps. You set the budget for your ad campaign and Google decides which search keywords will call up your ad. They make this decision from the information you give them about what categories your ad falls under. Google Boosts works like pay-per-click so you only pay when someone actually clicks directly on your ad.

Here is a list of the content you will need to include in your Google Boost Ad:
1. Business name
2. Contact information – phone number, address, email
3. Description
4. Highlight from your Place listing with the star rating and reviews
5. Link back to your Google Places page

Local search is very important for small business success. Utilizing Google’s new system is a great way to bring your business front and center when people nearby are searching for your products and services.

Google just launched Google Places. It is a new system for implement local searches within Google. Google uses ISP information to determine the location of the person searching and the businesses complete a listing about themselves. To ensure that your Google Places listing is showing up on top of the results page you need to make sure your information is complete.

Here are the top 6 factors that influence your Places listing.

1. Address
The physical address of your business is really important. This tells your customers where to find you and also tells Google what area you’re in so that they can best help those searching for businesses like yours. If your business has many locations make sure you include them all in your Google Places listing.

2. Contact Information
A phone number where your business can be reached is required for your Google listing. Make sure your contact information is easy to understand and includes all methods for contacting you.

3.Use Your Keywords
When preparing your listing make sure that you include your keywords in your listing title. As always using your keywords will improve your local search rank.

4. Categorize Yourself Correctly
Google Places allows you to list your business in a specific category. You are allowed 5 categories so make sure you choose the ones that best fit you.

5. Build Your Brand
Google takes into consideration how popular your business is and how many people know who you are. Building your brand awareness is a great way to improve the search results your business receives.

6. Get People Talking
Reviews of your business boost the quality of your listing. Encouraging your customers to review  your business can help you get higher in the Google results.

Besides these tips there are other factors that will contribute to your Google search engine rank. Some cannot be controled like your physical proximity to the person searching. However your brand reputation is an important element that can be controled. Mentions of your business on other sites and blogs will do a lot for your Google rank. The stronger your brand the better your business will do both in search engines and in daily sales/success.