6 Personal and Brand Online Reputation Management Techniques!

6 Personal & Brand Online Reputation Management Techniques. Your Personal Public Relations, Including 4 Resources to get you going!

Your Personal Brand Online Reputation Management Techniques in 6 Steps 

This is a re-purpose of a post we originally published on 25th February 2016. This post did so well it attracted the attention of a Growth hacker by the names of Sam Hurley. We will share more about why we have re-purposed this post,  which makes it even more poignant that You keep an eye on your personal and brand online reputation like a hawk. 

What a kerfuffle, you found an article saying bad things about you…Whatcha gonna do about it? Well keep calm and focus on your brand’s online public relations…We are here to give it to you plainly. In simple terms, these are your basic Online Reputation management techniques.

Which has been pretty much on our minds for this year as our brand is growing pretty fast. This online public relations quite frankly spills over into your offline life. We scratched the surface in our article on DIY Branding Mistakes you may be making, if you haven’t read that article, we highly recommend you do it here right now!

A while back we gave a great overview of the synergy between Social Media, Search Engine Optimization and Online PR which was a great hit. In this article, we focused on marketing public relations and social media. A lot has since gone on and we feel that this article needs refreshing.

With focus just on the Online reputation management techniques, tools, and tips esp. since you are your own public relations in marketing! In other words, managing your brand and personal reputation is your job. You must ensure you keep the good stuff way up in search engines and on social media if you are to attract your desired results!

Your online and offline brand reputation is extremely important whether you wish to simply climb the corporate ladder or you are an entrepreneur building a brand or positioning yourself as a go-to person for a specific service. Heck, these days even a potential date checks your socials out before they seek you out or accept you on a date lol!

Today “everyone, their dog and cat simply google everyone else.” Or they search for your name on social media as a way of finding info about you or your brand!

Are you a corporate? Know that for sure potential employers google you for: job interviews, and as part of vetting or keeping you in line. You may not even get that interview because of your online reputation. So Listen Up, it’s time you managed your online public relations like a PR pro because you gotta be unless you can afford one!

You absolutely don’t want people to find fishy or negative stuff about you when they search your name online. Many won’t think twice about canning you whether personal or professional! You cannot afford to let a bad rep settle with your name or brand on it anywhere near the first 2 pages of Google, Not even if you are Adidas or Virgin Atlantic.  So our steps will help you keep a hold of the control on your brand and name search results and keep the unsavoury at bay! See sadly dirt sticks and its harder to scrub it clean online esp. if it’s on Google first page.

Potential clients, employers, partners and customers who will check out your products, offers, services or brand way before they approach you for business may never approach you. If someone is looking to work with you or learn from you, more often than not, he/she will check your Facebook or LinkedIn before they accept your friend request or send you one.

As an entrepreneur people do check out your social profiles and judge you on engagement, comments, likes even follower count…! So how do you ensure your stay on top of your online PR? By leveraging online reputation management services or tools, keep and maintain it clean!

So below are our Easily Implementable, Steps for Your Personal & Brand Online Public Relations.

Step #1 Online Brand Reputation Management- CONTROL your Social Media & Online Presence

This is where you create or have created and promote your profile and brand via pages you control and rank them on search engines. We suggest you use your name unless it’s taken. Now is a good time to google your name if you haven’t yet thus far. You will learn if it is taken already and who is it.

Or you can book your name as a domain and across all social media platforms. When you do an online search you will most probably get social media profiles and/or your online resume coming on top unless you have some online real estate like a blog, website/s, info products, podcasts etc. And the later are what we encourage you to create as you will have full control of what goes in them and comes to public view…

A blog, website, popular podcast, useful info-products, training, etc. will help you to create a solid online presence. Combine that with an interesting and liked brand/name on social media platforms and you are managing your online reputation like a PR pro. You are doing what Ann Smarty calls;

“Carefully building up off-site brand assets.”

Share very well-crafted targeted value content that’s attractive to your audience and they too start to engage with you and you got a winning combination. The more HUMAN social shares and engagement you have on these platforms and your website/blog, the better for your online reputation. Google/Search Engines will love you and show more of that good stuff, pushing down any unsavoury content about your brand or name off the coveted 1 and 2 pages!

So you best get to work TODAY!

If you are on Facebook, you have definitely noticed a dearth of reach and engagement on your posts…And for many frankly it’s not even for want of trying! Even though most social media platforms have squeezed post reach in some form or another. Facebook has killed off any form of auto-posting of your content to groups aka Spamming.

WHY?

Because you barely are active in those groups so why post there? So You NEED to have REAL HUMANS sharing your content. Many creatives and bloggers have joined a social share or Syndication tribe or 5 and we encourage you to get with the program.

By the way if you are not an admin of one, then you can’t have enough syndication groups. Many admins are mini dictators and block you for real and imagined shortcomings with no recourse to why you may have missed a few or even reach out to find out why! GET ACTIVE IN AT LEAST 4 And…

We have a solution to help you increase that engagement and reach esp. via your Fan page. Consider this your VIP Invitation to the Social Bloggers Hub where we support you by sharing your content in real time and thus extending your social reach and helping in jazzing up your online brand and personal reputation management!

I find it sad to see awesome creatives with an image of their pet or a landscape as the profile picture and a blank space with “works at Self-employed and loving it” which leads to a generic Facebook page by the way! You gotta fix that now…this is your personal reputation management we are talking about so watch this short YouTube video to help you get more followers on FB and to your Fan Page!

In Video Below Yo will Get Online Reputation Management Techniques and Tips 2-3

You can Subscribe to Our Channel Here and Never miss a live Update!

Step #4 Personal and Brand Online Reputation Management Techniques – Manage your Website/Blog

You gotta be prepared to take control of what appears on social media and on search engines with your name on it. The results that come up when anyone googles your name should be great, see example below!

As a solo-preneur you are the brand and your website is one of your most precious brand marketing drivers. Its a violation when someone purports to be promoting your content without ever  having reached out to say hello, and even ask if its okay to “Overlay” your posts. Unacceptable! 

Anyhow, its essential that your website stays live and working for you and your audience 24/7 and that’s why we shared our Blog Monitoring Resources in detail, you should definitely check them out! Thank goodness we have these letting us know if such a purported help or any violation happens! 

So why does this matter for your online or personal reputation? We do break it down for you in the blog post above…so go read it for sure!

It’s imperative that your about page reflects what you want the public to learn about you as a person, your brand, services and offers. You got full control of this. Make it integral, informative and awesome!

 And if you are using Free web hosting services like Weebly, Wix or even free WordPress sites, You seriously need to reconsider. Cos you will not be able to do some things as webmaster and so you won’t be in control of your personal or online brand management.

Step #5 USE the FREE Online Brand Reputation Management tools

This is for serious marketers and business owners so feel free to stop here if this isn’t you. If you want to keep an eye on what’s going on with your personal brand….

Okay let’s get on with it….We are in this instance sharing with you 4 of the FREE brand online reputation management services we use, that you should have in your arsenal to ensure you know what’s going on with your brand.

Mention – We did share some about this in an earlier post on Branding you. As an online reputation management technique and resource, social mention works like this: You receive results based on a search term, name or brand. Your results image below are based on the following criteria:

Sentiment — the ratio of negative, neutral and positive mentions

Brand strength — whether your name or brand is being discussed on social media

Passion — whether the people talking about your name/brand will do so again

Reach — the measure of your influence. You also receive your top fans, hashtags, keywords, and sources e.g. Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Mention is similar to an old tool that used to be called “Social Mention” image shown below. But unlike Social Mention which was free, “Mention” has a subscription, after the trial period. 

Back in the day, we used to use IceRocket – which was free. Today we are firm believers that you get what you pay for and most social listening tools aren’t free anymore, And those that are free do not give you the freedom and data you truly need to grow and prosper in the digital space.

So we suggest you try Postinges.  It is NOT Free but it does give you a chance to test drive it before you commit. We suggest you try that and see if it is the right fit for your online brand management. Most times it helps us find who is mentioning our content or linking to it. Or alerting us to copycat posts of our blog posts! While content curation is okay, copy-and-paste jobs are simply disrespectful of the original author. So it’s good to know what’s going on.

As you can see from the image below all 3 mentions were copycat jobs and WordPress shut said sites down for breach of its T&Cs. Plus you may not want to link to that website and cancel that back link! Be sure to search all!

THIS IS SUPER IMPORTANT AND THE REASON WE RE-PUBLISHED THIS POST…

IceRocket is the then tool that helped us learn of what we thought was an amazingly kind act of sharing by someone we have heard such good things about. A one Sam Hurley…. On the Face of it, he appeared to be enamored with The original post. Tweeting it on autopilot every other day with Julie’s Twitter handle IMAGE BELOW. We were flattered and maybe a bit of the ego got in the way.

From when we noticed the almost daily re-tweets in June…We were flattered; a Growth Hacker with over 142,000 Twitter Followers sharing our post? How cool…!

Not so much Jose…

This man redirected our Link and Post to point to a copycat page as you can see  above. When we asked why he would be so disrespectful, he claimed he loves our content and had only added an Overlay, so he too can benefit from the share…! See response below

Clearly, Twitter allowed this kind of action to happen to lots of people’s content at the time. This man re-tweeted all kinds. With his own Popup and Capture page…While we have no further details on how overlay works, we doubt its respectful to the article author to overlay their content without their consent or even connecting with them!

He only sent us a Twitter follow when we confronted him! So what kind of admiration is that?  I doubt anyone would be so flattered. Neither should you! So this in itself is proof of why you must keep an eagle eye on your online content and those people who pose as admirers when all they are doing is in their interest! 

So at the Cost of Completely losing over 1000 social shares we have scrubbed this article clean and re-purposed it as a Caution to you.  

LESSON Fully INGRAINED! 

Google Alerts – an Invaluable FREE online reputation monitoring tool which we learnt as part of The Ultimate Branding Blueprint that we actually use to receive alerts of publications on certain topics and brands…(Keeping an eye on the competition never hurt.) But above all keeping an eye on Industry trends is even more productive for you!

Google does this when you opt to receive email Alerts of your specific search queries on articles, news, or blog posts in Google’s database as soon as they come out! Great for having a constant flow of content to learn, and curate too! Enter your website details/brand name or keywords and receive alerts if any info is published!

Hootsuite – This one is really useful for a whole lot more than your personal online reputation management. Its a plethora of resources to help you automate your social shares and updates, esp. on twitter. If you don’t use it already go create a Free account and play around with it. Very easy to navigate and it has tutorials too in short videos.  Or simply login using Twitter and Learn what is being said about you on social media!

Step #6 Monitor Your competition

Yes, whoever said that keep your friends close and your enemies closer did have a point. BUT IN OUR View avoid making enemies in business. They can be a real nasty source of Poor online brand reputation and you can’t control what they say esp. if it’s bad so keep em close and sweet.

How about approaching your competition for joint ventures?  Do collaborations with them and if you can’t beat them join them, for a bit.   Whatever you do, don’t rub them the wrong way. Keep your Competition as friends. Because you want to learn what they do that’s awesome and avoid their mistakes; and you could use…

Online tools to check out your competition and how they are doing! Any online brand reputation management service for just this kind of monitoring, you’ll find really useful ones at a manageable fee. 

Also Twitter Mention: Yes Twitter has some really awesome tools many don’t even use. It is yet another free tool we like to use to monitor the competition that you already use, but probably don’t leverage. In the search bar type your competitor Twitter handle e.g. [@KalungiGroup :(] and see what comes up. If they are a known brand, you will find an unhappy customer or two. Try searching your company’s competition if you are a network marketer.

This is a fun way to keep track. The whole idea is to learn what mistakes or what’s making the competition’s customers unhappy and avoid making those same mistakes!

You definitely know by now that taking a firm hold of your brand’s online reputation management is a consistent task. It is essential that you keep it under control or address any issues that may arise fast.

While you can’t stop bad press, you can push it to Google page 20 where no one really looks 😉 and focus on the maintenance of your good name!  The tools we share above are a start for you to get your act together. If you have a budget you can add some paid online reputation management techniques and resources to your vault. There are packages, you can find some in this webmarketingtoday article!

As Neil Patel says, “it’s essential to act swiftly if you receive an alert or find negative content about you, your brand, services or products.”

DO NOT ignore these opinions.  While the maker of such content may not remove it, your positive response will also be there for the world to see.

Have you got value in our Online Reputation Management Techniques, Steps and Training? If so feel free to like, PIN THIS POST,  Share on Social Media…And absolutely drop your comments and TIPS below!

We totally appreciate and you deserve more!

Live. Learn. Love

Julie Syl & Pauli Kalungi

Skype: Julie.Kalungi1

Twitter: @Juleskalpauli

Email: julie[at]Juleskalpauli.com

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