Online Reputation Management and Andy Beal, part 2

In part two of the interview with Andy Beal, you will learn more about online reputation management by using Trackur. According to Trackur.com,

Trackur is an online reputation monitoring tool designed to assist you in tracking what is said about you on the internet. Trackur scans hundreds of millions of web pages–including news, blogs, video, images, and forums–and lets you know if it discovers anything that matches the keywords that interest you.

Remember that online reputation management is the process of managing your business and personal identity online. This includes monitor where you business name and personal name appears via the internet.

Question 3: Are there specific tools that business owners should use to monitor the success of their internet strategy plan?

I don’t think any internet marketing campaign should be launched until you have some kind of web site analytics in place. You need to know what’s bringing customers to your site and you need to know which marketing efforts are working and which are not. Google Analytics is completely free, so there is no excuse. You should also monitor external metrics such as blog posts, twitter replies, or mainstream media mentions. You can use free tools such as Google Alerts or Technorati, or you could grab a free trial of our Trackur service and use something a little more sophisticated.

Question 4: Are there things that business owners should avoid when developing their internet strategy plan? If so, please share specific details.

I’d avoid trying to focus on anything further out than 6 months. The web has proven that it can evolve quickly and what’s popular today may be different in six months from now. I’d also avoid jumping on a bandwagon, unless it makes sense for your business. If you target audience consists of 16-20 year olds, then building a marketing plan around Twitter wouldn’t make sense as it is under-represented by that age group. Instead focus on Facebook, which is where most 16-20 year olds hang out.

Question 5: Why is it important for business owners to monitor and manage their online reputation?

Well, the first reason is that we’re in a major recession so every dollar we spend on branding is a dollar we have to pull from some other budget. Building a positive brand helps to alleviate some of that spending–when you have a great reputation you’ll benefit more from free word-of-mouth marketing. Second, there’s a lot that can be learned by simply listening to your target audience. Even if you are not ready to participate, listening allows you to learn what customers like about your product, what they hate about your service, and how they feel about your competitors! If you listen to what’s said about your biggest rivals, you may learn that their customers long for a product feature that you can easily add to your offering.

The third reason why you should manage your online reputation is that, in the absence of your official involvement, the void can be filled by those looking to attack your company. Take your Google repuation for example. Have you entered your business name in Google recently? If you’re not managing the content that shows up in the first ten results on Google, a detractor could very easily write a negative blog post that shows up on the first page of results. One single negative result in Google and you could end up losing a lot of potential business–that’s why I call Google a “reputation engine.”

Hopefully you’ll never face a reputation attack, but you should absolutely take time to do an audit of what shows up in Google for your brand name. If you don’t like what you see, neither will your potential customers. You can learn more about this in my book, or I posted a free article on the subject and also a free whitepaper.

Question 6: Please share how you can be contacted.

The best way to reach me is to head to AndyBeal.com, where you’ll find all of my contact details.