More and more, online individuals and businesses need to be aware of the conversation that’s taking place on the interent about them. It’s called online reputation management.
You see it in the media almost every week now, where a business is being badly represented in the web 2.0 sites (like facebook, twitter, etc) and most times they find out about it way to late to take any sort of remedial action about it.
Instead the snowball effect takes hold and what could have been avoided by being proactive about their reputation ends up in a PR disaster across the internet.
Side Note: Here’s a good news story of reputation management in motion.
Now that’s all well and good I hear you say about bigger businesses, but what about us little guys, that aren’t so big.
Does it matter if there is someone bad mouthing our own reputation or our products reputation.?
I say it does matter, a lot, maybe even more so than the big fish businesses. Whatever reputation you have taken the time to build should be protected.
So what’s the solution…
Well, what I used to do, was get a Google Alert setup for all my products and business names, plus my own name. Then go to Twitter search and Youtube search and about a dozen other websites, and do a search for my products again.
These all create RSS feeds, which I then subscribed to using Google Reader. This would make my Google Reader overflow with feeds for the one topic, but the results were impressive. I then used FriendFeed to gather them together into some sort of RSS mash heaven, but even that was a massive pain in the you-know-what.
Cost = Zero $$. Time to setup. A lot. But worth it.
Ed Dale and Lynn Terry from Internet Marketing This Week Podcast fame, actually steered me into getting serious about my online reputation management.
I thought there has got to be an easier way than what I was doing, which would take me hours to setup for a new product to track.
Enter my newest creation. Reputation Smart.
It’s like Google Alerts on steroids. Just enter in your keyword phrase and it spits out a mashed up set of results from about a dozen different Web2.0 sites. Then allows you to get the results as an RSS feed or OPML file.
So what’s the big deal? Massive time saving! No mistakes! And all the results in just one RSS feed that you can subscribe to with your feed reader of choice.
So head over to check it out, and start tracking your online reputation. Oh did I forget to mention that it’s FREE (for now)
Of course if you do find negative remarks about you online…. That’s the topic for another blog post or two.
Now since this project is in BETA I’d like to hear back from you about what you think about my new tool, so leave me a comment on this blog post.
Talk soon.
Aaron