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Does GoDaddy Need Reputation Management?

Is shooting elephants a bad thing? PETA thinks so. Animal rights activists of various stripes think so. Even average Joes who don’t hop on the animal rights bandwagon are betting against it. But GoDaddy CEO Bob Parsons is setting his entire reputation on it.

Sounds odd, doesn’t it?

Parsons decided to help a few African villagers survive, so he staged an elephant hunt and captured it on video. Then he posted the video online. Today, he’s roaming the free world defending himself through media interviews. It’s reputation management in overdrive.

The problem is, this kind of reputation management necessity could have been prevented. But when your company is being led by someone who actively seeks controversy, prevention likely won’t be a consideration. You’d better pull up a pound of cure.

The best kind of reputation management is to not need any in the first place. I’m not going to say shun controversy entirely, but if you are the type of person who seeks it, be sure to count the cost beforehand. Choose your controversies carefully. That may be where Parsons went wrong. He didn’t exactly choose wisely.

Online reputation management is a tough job. It’s costly and it’s time consuming. Your better off not needing it. But if you do need it – and GoDaddy always seems to need it – need it because someone else is shooting bullet holes in you. Don’t need it because you’re shooting yourself in the foot. Puns intended.

Online Reviews And Reputation Management

There are plenty of websites online these days that offer consumers a way to review your business. Some of them are local directories and others are global websites like Google. Either way, a negative review online has the potential to hurt your reputation. However, you can turn a negative review into an online reputation management win in just a few simple steps.

1. Step 1: Keep a cool head. Don’t retaliate by posting a ranting response or threaten the reviewer. Everyone who reads the review will read your comments and that won’t look good for you either way.
2. Step 2: Say ‘thank you.’ It might seem odd, but a soft thank you for the review can go a long way. Let the reviewer know you care about their concerns.
3. Step 3: Apologize. Yes, you should apologize for the bad experience. This tells the reviewer that you have listened to their concerns and you are ready to make it right.
4. Step 4: Make an offer to fix it. Tell the reviewer you are willing to make the problem better by offering a free service or a discount as a way to make amends. If possible, send a private message. If that is not possible, leave your phone number on the review site and make your offer public. If the reviewer doesn’t give you the opportunity to fix the problem, then at least anyone reading your response will know that you’ve made a good-faith effort.
5. Step 5: Follow through. If you make any promises, keep them. If you tell a reviewer, or any customer for that matter, that you’ll do something, then do it. The best reputation management is good customer service.

If You Publish On Twitter Then It’s Public

The Press Complaints Commission (PCC) here in the UK has decided that once you publish content on Twitter, it is considered to be published in the public domain. The only exception is if you have your profile defined as private. This is an important ruling and while it comes as no surprise, it does formalize what as been just an understood standard.

What brought this ruling to a head was a complaint made by a public servant following the publication in newspapers of content that she had tweeted through Twitter. The content was a negative view of her workplace and as such was thought newsworthy by the print media. Her complaint was based on the fact that she thought her comments would only reach the 700 friends she had.

The PC has ruled that, although she only had 700 friends, each of those friends were free to retweet that content, and that the content was accessible by others. Whether the content related to her private life or working life was not an issue. Once you publish content it is public and available to others.

What is important to understand following this ruling is that the press now has free reign to publish and comment on any content that is found through Twitter as long as the originator doesn’t have their profile marked private. This means any negative comments you make about competitors, current or former staff, or current or former employers, could come back to haunt you at a later date.

Social media is an evolving giant, a giant that has not yet found a comfortable place in our old-fashioned legal system. One would think that this ruling would also apply to public comments made on any other social media site such as Facebook, MySpace, or blog comments. Social media has taken Chinese Whispers to a whole new level – the whole world can see who started the whisper – and publicly comment on it. Take heed – this is an important area when it comes to reputation management.

Do You Tie Your Employees To A Social Media Policy

Employee and employer rights have again gained media attention and, as usual, the focus has been on employee rights. What worries many employers is the right to engage in social media conversations that disparage their workplace. In the US, employees have what are known as ‘protected activities’. When it comes to social media, the approach is somewhat akin to that of a morning tea discussion and cannot be used to dismiss an employee.

Of course, discussing work conditions and wage levels is one thing, actually rubbishing a business is another, and that is where the latest focus is. More than that, some employers are taking action when friends of workers rubbish that employer, or their business. This is a gray area that has not been tested yet – it will be interesting to see what the outcome is when it is.

Employers have a justifiable claim in a way. If a friend rubbishes my employer, I do have the power to remove that comment from my social media account – if I choose not to, then I am by default condoning it. This then brings into question whether or not a business has a social media policy.

A well-written and clearly defined social media policy provides a framework for everyone. Under such a policy, employees know where to draw the line when it comes to any content published on their pages. Employees also know that certain content, if published, is going to be in clear breach of that policy, and that dismissal may be a consequence.

Many employers are struggling to keep up with the online world. Social media has become a particularly thorny issue. The last thing any business needs is its employees dragging down a business’s online reputation, simply because there was no social media policy in place.

Seven Keys To A Successful Online Reputation

Building an online reputation from scratch is not as hard as many people think. If you steadily build your business and provide good products and customer service, your reputation will grow with you.  For some businesses, building a reputation slowly is not good enough – especially if you have a lot of strong competition. You can speed the process up, especially if you’re prepared to use social media. Here are seven keys to a successful online reputation.

Listen and Filter – It all starts by learning to listen to the noise around your niche. Listening is the beginning; learning to filter what isn’t relative is the hard part. Focus on listening to the most important issues related to your niche.

It’s Not About You - Remember the 80-20 rule – spend 80% of your time talking about general issues in your niche, and only 20% of the time talking about your business or products.

Reciprocate – You cannot expect others to share your content if you are not prepared to share theirs.  I point you back to the 80-20 rule – your sharing should be 80% other people’s and only 20% yours.

Respond – If people reach out to you, you need to respond in a positive way. Make them feel that they are important, and that their problems are very important and need answering now.

Transparent - The Internet has been soured to a certain extent by those intent on getting as much as possible for the least effort. You need to be honest, open and transparent. If you make a mistake, admit to it, correct it, and move on – people will come to respect you more for it.

Let Go – Control freaks, move on. You cannot be in control of everything. You need to let others share your content and/or talk about you the way they want to. Entering conversations and trying to take control of the conversation’s direction can backfire badly. Control only what really needs controlling; otherwise, step back.

Authentic – Although you represent your business, you are you so be yourself.  People want to know there is a real human being there, not a robot spitting out corporate rhetoric and marketing nonsense.

It’s not that difficult. Follow those keys and you will find that others will fairly quickly come to respect you as an authority.  When that happens, they will prefer to do business with you.

Can You Remember Who You Have Linked Too?

If you have a web site or blog that is more than a couple of years old, then there is a good chance you have pages with outgoing links that are no longer valid.  In some cases, the web site is dead and buried; in others, the page you linked to has been moved or deleted.  Guest posts are a classic for running into this problem.

There are more important issues that are at stake. Web sites can appear to be well run and to have a good reputation. What you may not be aware of is any tactics being used that are frowned upon by the search engines. If the web site you are linking to has been removed and banned from the search index, it may well impact upon your web site.

In today’s online world, it pays to keep a record of which pages have outgoing links, and who they link too. At this time of the year, as things start to quieten down a little, you can spend an hour or two checking through each of the links to ensure they are still valid and that they are linking to pages that are indexed.

If you come across a page that is not in the search index, you will need to do some further investigations. That will start with the home page of the web site. Is that indexed? If it’s not, then you may be looking at a site that has been banned by the search engines. But it’s not unusual for individual pages to miss indexation – the search engines themselves tell us that they are not necessarily indexing every page in a web site. However, you would expect a home page to be indexed.

A little housekeeping will go a long way to ensuring your web site is linking to sites with good reputations – your web site’s reputation relies on it from a search engine perspective.

Reputation Management – Google’s Four Pack To The Rescue

Reputation management may be just a tad easier in the future thanks to a small change in the way that Google is handling search results. For some searches, notably domain searches, Google search results will now list up to four pages from the one domain. This is an increase from two and, while only affecting limited search phrases, should be welcomed by web site owners who could be subjected to online attacks on their reputations.

According to the Google blog:

• Up to four web results from each domain (i.e., several domains may have multiple results)
• Single-line snippets for additional results, to keep them compact

Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim fame has an interesting take where he wonders if this is an attempt by Google to push the RippOffReport off the front pages.  It may well be a response to poor reviews and articles that could potentially damage online businesses. I am not a cynic, but Google could also be protecting their own income as well. Many companies that rank highly in search results also undertake Adwords programs. Searchers are hardly likely to click on ads if there is a negative review at position two or three in the search results.

For businesses, there is nothing worse than undertaking a search for your own business on Google only to find harmful content in the top five search results. Google have made it possible to push these results further down the page. In fact, if you  have a blog as well as a web site, you may find your pages dominating the top eight positions in search results. Any negative content will then be pushed to the bottom, or over to page two.

Will The Test Of Time Undo Your Reputation?

There’s a certain cruelty to search engine optimisation. Once you create a page of content and optimise it fully, it takes months before it starts to achieve any decent search rankings. By then, it could be out of date. It’s a strange irony that website owners need to take special notice off.

One of the most important statistics to come out of any web analytics package is that of traffic. You need to make note of which pages are the popular in search engines, and to then use that data to regularly review the contents of those pages. If those pages rank well, and draw a reasonable flow of traffic, then don’t waste the traffic by offering outdated and useless content. That traffic will turn tail and disappear quite quickly, and they’ll take your reputation with them.

Nothing destroys someone’s confidence as quickly as outdated information. By regularly reviewing the contents of your pages, you can keep the information fresh and up-to-date and, more importantly, relevant to searchers. Having content that is being updated on a regular basis will help to build your authority in the field and that will enhance your reputation in the long run.

If you must keep that page’s old content then either use a redirect to a new page of content or create a link close to the top of the content that indicates more up-to-date content at the end of the link. Click throughs are not great with those links, but you are at least advising the reader of fresher content.

Who Is Saying What About You

If you want to stay in business then you need to know what others are saying about you. It’s almost impossible to search every social media site to find what, if anything, is being said. What you really need are tools that can do the job for you. Here are four free tools that may help you discover what is being said, and by whom.

SocialMention - if you have a presence across a range of social media sites then this could be the best option. SocialMention provides a very comprehensive array of data including, of course, who has said what about you.

BoardReader – a real time search engine that will dig out any mentions of your search term across a range of social media sites.  The data is presented in typical search results format.

48ers – also a real time search engine. 48ers trolls through sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Digg to see who has mentioned your search term.

Collecta – a popular research tools in some circles, Collecta delivers results based on searches inside major social sites. What makes Collecta a little easier to use is the fact you can filter out certain types of results.

These tools are fairly effective in what they do. Don’t try to run all four; you will spend hours sifting through the data and possibly confuse yourself completely. Find one you are comfortable using and concentrate on that.

Knowing what the world is saying about you in social media circles is highly important. If negative fires break out you can at least prepare to defend yourself. If you don’t know what is being said, it will be too late when you do discover the problem.

Will Your Past Come Back To Haunt You?

The Internet has become a beast full of vast amounts of data. Employers are now searching the internet for information on job applicants prior to hiring them, just in case there is dirty laundry floating about that could harm the employer. We talk about what others could do to your reputation, but the task of reputation management starts with looking at your own tracks on the web.

We have you been in the past. From a business perspective, where has your business been over the years. Directories and social bookmarking sites have come, been fashionable, then lost popularity – Digg is a good example. There was a time when everyone was ‘on’ Digg, now you hardly hear about it, although it is still going strongly. Do you have a profile on Digg? Is it up-to-date?

Out of date business listings can hurt your business. Potential customers may come across your listing and decide to follow up only to find that you’re no longer reachable through the details on that site. Sure, it may only be one or two people who find you through those listings, but the search engines will and as we have discussed in the past, if search engines find different data about your business, they could generate one or more duplicate listings in local search.

Your past, and your businesses past can have an influence on your overall reputation. There are two things you need to consider as part of your reputation management program – first, to keep a record of everything you do online, particularly everyplace you leave your business details. If your details change, you can then quickly update all your listings. The second component is harder – you need to find any old data that is on the web and either delete it, or update it.