Reputation management will be important to your business.

Written by Mike Carter on September 1, 2008

Big brands are quickly coming up to speed with how to manage their reputations online. For an example of this, have a read of the reputation comparisons between BA and Virgin Atlantic.

According to Wikipedia, the definition of reputation management is as follows -

Reputation management is the process of tracking an entity’s actions and other opinions about those actions; reporting on those actions and opinions; and reacting to that report creating a feedback loop.

In regular speak, this means it is important to know what is being said about your brand, who is saying it and being able to defend yourself. In 2008, this is becoming more important for all the following reasons -

  1. Today’s web is a read, write, and comment environment. Everyone can contribute and comment online about any topic including property. The easier it becomes to contribute, the more you are going to hear the voices of the masses when it comes to working with you.
  2. Offline reputation for agents is very bad, that’s a given. With the property crunch you’ve got lots of people secretly thinking that the industry is getting it’s just rewards. This offline reputation will soon spill over into online world if not already.

So what can you do to prevent a bad reputation starting to creep into your online property brand? Here is the Zoomf 3-step strategy to getting your protection in place :

  1. The first step is learning. Understanding what it means to protect yourself and what tools are available will help your efforts to stem any bad publicity. This article is a good start.
  2. Google Alerts. Setup (free) Google Alerts for your brand name. Google will make sure to send you (via email) anywhere it finds your brand name on the web. After a month you’ll have a good idea about what is being said.
  3. Get involved. Probably the hardest part. You need to be pro-active and participate in discussions. Comment on articles, start blogs, respond to questions on Yahoo Answers and Linkedin. The opportunities are out there if you seize them.

Good luck with getting started!

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2 Comments to “Reputation management will be important to your business.”

  1. Ehud Says:
    September 4th, 2008 at 12:43 pm

    Great post! - In response to that specific online reputation management need, we’ve created http://www.lookuppage.com , an online tool to help manage and control one’s online presence, and track incoming searches. You can join for free, or opt in to a paid service and guarantee top position for your page across all leading search engines, using SEO and PPC.

    Cheers,

    Ehud.

  2. Will Critchlow Says:
    September 30th, 2008 at 4:54 pm

    Bit late to the party, but thanks for the link to the BA / Virgin stuff (you might also be interested in our monitoring tool at reputation.distilled.co.uk).

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