Protecting your brand online includes monitoring online mentions as well as proactively taking steps to keep your brand in good light in search engines, across social media, and more.
Reputation management tips
- Monitor brand mentions across web sites and social media – and respond when necessary
- Be aware of how affiliates are portraying your brand (remember: they only care about the referral fee – not your long term brand reputation): paid search ads, banner ads, custom landing pages, etc.
- Monitor competition mentions: gain competitive intelligence; discover opportunities for your brand
- Register your brand on multiple social channels to (hopefully) have those appear in search before any possible negative brand mentions; (additionally, to protect/own brand usernames on various social media sites)
- Create a ‘reviews’ page on your web site, complete with a collection of customer reviews; with some internal linking to this page (w/ appropriate anchor text), this page can rank above other sites that post reviews
Reputation management resources
- Google Alerts – be alerted by email or RSS when new mentions are indexed by Google
- mention – be alerted of new brand mentions on the web and in social media; track topics of interest; paid service
- X Pro (formerly TweetDeck) – follow streams of X posts for mentions, topics, keyword and hashtags; manage multiple X accounts; paid service
- Hootsuite – follow streams of social networks for mentions, topics, keywords and hashtags; manage multiple social media accounts
- X Search – search X for any term, topical hashtags and more; observe what is currently trending
- Blogtrottr – have news/blog/etc. feed updates emailed to you