We have always known the importance of developing and maintaining a reputation. From the beginning of time your reputation always finds its way to the public – whether good or bad! The great thing about being online is that people cannot hide if they happen to have a bad reputation! Thats right. You do enough bad business and someone is going to post something poor about you.
I met a woman (I will call her Edna) a while back at a networking event. From all appearances she seemed very professional and since the reputation of the company she worked for was stellar, she earned my attention for several minutes during our interaction.
This is my first lesson that in making sure your online reputation matches your appearance!
She worked fulltime at a brokerage house in downtown Toronto and did financial planning on the side.
When I inquired about her services, she sent me to her website to get more details. When I went to the site she lost all credibility with me. Her site was designed by her 16 year old son and looked totally unprofessional.
When I asked her who designed her website, she said her son did because she was not a “technical” person. She left her marketing and user experience up to someone not qualified and it was reflective of the way she saw the “internet”.
Think of your website as a reflection of your company. Remember back in the day when people posted Yellow Page ads? Well people now go to your website instead! Since you are in control of the design of your site, it is also you that determines what your visitors will see.
You are being researched all the time by people deciding whether to be your customer, your business partner, your boss, your boyfriend/girlfriend, etc. As I mentioned in a previous post, there is no such thing as six degrees of separation on the internet. There can be just one degree – as in one click.
If You Conduct Yourself Poorly, Expect Search Engines To Display Results Outlining This
After typing in Edna’s name I then began looking at other listings and it seems that she has some people that have written some things online that have hurt her reputation. I was once again very surprised! Remember that the world wide web is a big place. If you tick someone off, eventually you can expect someone to write about it. It will not take long for the search engines to find this type of content.
Us Internet Marketing people deal with reputation management all the time. Client’s call us telling us they need help with some bad remarks that have been made.
So remember this moving forward. Your website represents who your company is. Make sure you treat people well or you just might get to read about your experience along with everyone else one day online! Edna knows all about this!
Yes, building a strong online reputation is of crucial significance. Be it for an individual, be it for a brand, the online persona as reflected through the website matters much. The website gives the first impression to potential leads and clients. And first impressions count a lot in cyberspace.
Yes, you’re correct online reputation is a thing to be considered seriously. I think online reputation is more important than word-of-mouth reputation. We can assess our OR thru many tools. Google alerts is an easiest tool for tracking what Google knows about a topic related to us.
Dylan
Anyone can Google you at any time to take a peek. There lies the importance of your online reputation. Not releazing this can be catastrophic! I remember a client, who was well ranked and had good conversion figures but failed to keep his good image. What happened is we had to halt his campaigns for a while and concentrate on efforts to polish his online reputation, and he lost a pretty peak time without any promotional activities.
Yes online identity management (OIM) builds and brings reputation to your site. You can build buzz for your products, promote your company via OIM procedures. It heightens the credibility concerns of your company on Internet leaving an impression on online community that the information is coming from the real source.
This digital reputation rewards richly for your site’s success in search engines. Another aspect of online reputation status is it improves the quantity and quality of traffic to sites that have content related to a person. I say this is somewhat equal to the ‘ image building ‘ concept done by offline media, and an essential facet of SEO process. This image enables you to create a social identity by participating in social media sites like Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Orkut, Myspace and other online communities and community websites.
Good post! Today anyone can create a web page that describes you inaccurately or criticizes your performance at a company. Sites have been specifically designed to trash bad dates and insult company representatives. Now you just don’t want these pages to come up when customers search for you. Hence making a good name for yourself online should be a priority as you have said in the post.
Nice read on that one Issac! Yes, online reputation does matter in internet marketing. There are tools available that help to monitor and manage your reputation. Google Alerts, Technorati and Board Tracker are excellent monitoring tools. And the social media sites like Facebook, Digg, Youtube etc. are ideal aids to maintain your good internet image. Any internet marketing strategy should include these things.
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