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reputation alerts

Improve your online reputation with Google Alerts

by Adam Green on March 22, 2009

in Google Alerts, Reputation management

The most common question related to online reputation is, “How do I get rid of negative mentions of my brand/company/product/me on Google?” This is actually backwards thinking when it comes to reputation management. What you should be asking is, “How do I get positive mentions onto the first page of Google results?” If you achieve this, you will push the negative comments so far down in Google, that people won’t see them. Even if a few people do bother loading the later pages of results, which hardly anyone does, they will figure that Google thinks the positive mentions are more important, and therefore more true. Remember, Google is reality to most people.

There is a simple formula for this that is guaranteed to improve your online reputation. It follows the old adage to accentuate the positive. All you have to do is create Google Alerts for your company/brand/product/your name, or anything else you want to enhance reputation-wise. When alerts arrive, sort through them to find the positive mentions that you’d like others to see. Then work on making these more visible to Google. You can:

  • Post links to them on your blog
  • Tweet them so others pick them up and possibly link to them
  • Use a widget to spread these positive mentions onto other sites
  • Share them on Delicious, Digg, and Stumbleupon

Think of this strategy as reputation enhancement through reinforcement. You are distilling the best links, and making them more visible in more places. Google will do the rest. Praise Google.

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Reputation monitoring with Google Alerts: Tracking related businesses

by Adam Green on March 21, 2009

in Google Alerts, Reputation management

When Thomas Friedman coined the term, “the world is flat”, he meant that businesses and consumers around the world can share equally in the benefits of the Internet. A side effect of this flatness is that overlap between businesses can easily occur based on company names and catchphrases. Take the case of the Hello Cupcake bakery at Dupont Circle in Washington, DC. From the site’s about page this business is run by Penny Karas. There is also a Hello, Cupcake book written by Alan Richardson and Karen Tack, who have a blog called Hello, Cupcake! So we have a collection of websites, people and products that are all related by the phrase “hello cupcake”.

Just to make matters more confusing, there are blogs that write about cupcakes that include mentions of many of these identities. And now this blog has contributed to the mess by putting them all in the same post. People doing a search for hello cupcake can easily get all these cross-referenced identities mixed up, so an effective reputation monitoring campaign has to include them all. A negative comment about the book, or the book’s author, or even a person with the same name as the book’s author, could reflect badly on the bakery.

Reputation monitoring is more than just creating Google Alerts for your company’s name and your name. You have to do continual research on related names, and track them as well. This means that Penny Karas should run an alert about both Alan Richardson and Karen tack, and they should have an alert about Penny. It isn’t easy, but you never know which mention of your brand’s name will be found when someone does a Google search. It makes sense to keep track of all the possibilities.

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Reputation monitoring with Google Alerts: Tracking the other yous

March 21, 2009

I recently wrote a post about restricting Google Alerts to just the real you. While that seems like an obvious goal, you should also consider creating Google Alerts that track others who might be confused with you.
For example, the Adam Green you are most likely to find on the Internet is a musician. There [...]

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Competitive monitoring with Google Alerts

March 19, 2009

Along with monitoring direct mentions of your product and company name with Google Alerts, you can also monitor consumer attitudes about your brands versus competitors. For example, let’s say I’m a brand manager for Nikon cameras, and I want to know which products consumers consider superior. An alert for better than nikon will deliver these.
The [...]

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Searching for your name with Google Alerts

March 18, 2009

One of the most common complaints I get about Google Alerts is that it delivers alerts on the wrong person in a vanity feed. Actually, calling it a vanity feed is too dismissive. Everyone should run a Google alert for their own name, just to keep track of the type of information Google is likely [...]

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