Online Reputation Management by Advanced Media Productions, Boston, Metrowest, Massachusetts

Online Reputation Management

As consumers and businesses are shifting their research for products and services to the web monitoring for bad press is becoming a growing necessity. What consumers, clients and industry analysts are publishing online about a company, brand, and even company employees, is quickly and easily indexed by search engines and retrieved by the general public that is doing research.

Today it is very easy for anyone to publish information - negative and positive - on blogs, opinion forums and review web sites and companies need to be informed immediate when a negative or untrue post, article or review appears so that they can react in a proactive manner to protect their reputation and revenue stream.

Monitoring and Tracking
By actively monitoring the conversations that are taking place online, companies can get a good sense of what consumers, clients and industry analysts are saying about their products, services, employees, the competition and track all other related content that is published online. Monitoring user generated content online not only informs companies on what people are saying about their brand and company and what is happening in their industry, but is also helps in gathering competitive intelligence.

Monitoring what people are saying online is crucial to protecting a company’s reputation. Especially search engines have become dominant “reputation aggregators” of online forum posts, blog posts, online user reviews and flame sites, because they often give immediate visibility to content that is created with those tools.

Tools for Monitoring and Tracking
Through online tools companies today have the means to capture, understand and act on the online “conversations” that are occurring about their brand, products and services. Online monitoring typically includes tracking company name, product names, brand names, employee names, competing brand names, industry terms, as well as general industry news.

There are many free web tools available that can be used to monitor the content that is generated by the general public. Those tools can be used for:

Reputation Management - Monitoring and Tracking

	Blog, Podcast, Photo and Video Sharing Web Site Monitoring. This typically includes monitoring of new entries and comments or changes to existing content at Technorati, Bloglines, Wikipedia, Flickr and YouTube and blog trend analysis through BlogPulse. Nearly all the above services offer RSS feeds that alert you to a reputation threat within minutes of hours of their creation.
	Google Alerts. Google Alerts are extremely efficient at monitoring Google News (stores that appear on Google News), Google Search, Google Blog Search, Google Groups (Google Groups posts and replies) and Google Video for new search results that match the keywords that are tracked. Google Alerts offers reporting via email alerts or RSS feeds.
	Message Board Monitoring. Forum posts at a large variety of online message boards and forums can be tracked through BoardTracker.com, a forum search engine, message tracking and email/instant messaging alerts system, designed to provide relevant information quickly when important forum threads are posted.

Taking Action
The best course of action against negative criticism is to proactively influence what people are saying about a company and brand. It often pays off to correspond directly with the people that are talking about a brand or company online even if their comments are negative to find out what where they are coming from.

Actively participating in the conversation and eliminating the negative buzz by becoming a regular contributor to blogs and online forums related to your industry can be an effective way to counter bad publicity. Other actions that can be considered to proactively defy bad publicity or repair a damaged customer image are:

	Establishing a corporate sponsored online forum.
	Adding related positive content to a corporate web site.
	Starting a corporate or business blog.
	Establish personal profiles at LinkedIn, Facebook and other social media networks.
	Optimizing positive content for top search engine rankings through organic search engine optimization to make sure that the content comes up at the top of the search results pages at the major search engines and above that of compliant sites or blogs.

Online Reputation Management Services
Online reputation management is rapidly becoming an important strategy for many organizations, but tracking and reporting on hundreds of industry blogs, search engines, review sites, news groups and online forums can be a challenging task for an individual or business.

Advanced Media Productions’ experience and expertise in search engine marketing and optimization, online PR and online display advertising can help companies with monitoring, evaluating and responding to consumer feedback and consumer-generated media. Our Online Reputation Management Services are managed by our online marketing specialists who have years of experience in online advertising, PR and search engine marketing. A customized Online Reputation Management program typically includes:

Consulting and client needs analysis

Custom Online Reputation Management Plan including:

Monitoring

Data mining and analysis

Implementation

	•	Organic search engine optimization (SEO), including web site content development (text, video, mages), keyword optimization and link building.
	•	Online press release distribution.
	•	Blog marketing (blog posting and commenting).
	•	Paid search advertising.

Reporting and improving


Frequent online monitoring not only allows companies to track what is being said about their brand, products or services, but it also evaluates general conversations, pinpoints trends and collects competitive information. The overall benefits of an online reputation management program are:

	Collect competitive intelligence information that can be used for communications and product strategy development.

	Control adverse information about a company and brand.

	Provides early warning systems regarding brand or product issues.

	Allows companies to understand brand and product perception and reputations.

	Spot early trends in an industry and get a head start on the competition.

	Evaluate the online marketing reach as it pertains to online communities.

	Pro-actively influence an industry segment and what people are saying about a company, its brands and employees.

web site and intranet development services

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