It occurred to me on my way home from Mashable’s networking party (thanks for the comp ticket, Don) after SocialMediaCamp tonight that much of internet marketing now revolves around reputation management.
- Your ranking in the search results is based in large part on what other web sites think of you, as measured by Google’s PageRank algorithm and similar measurements at other search engines.
- Your ranking at Google and other search engines is increasingly based on whether you are listed in local directories like Yelp and CitySearch and what your customers say about you there.
- Your ability to land clients increasingly depends on your profile at professional networking sites like LinkedIn and what people say about you there.
- If you write a blog or post comments to other blogs, your readers will quickly develop an impression of you based on what you write and how you deal with comments and criticism.
- Similarly, your postings to discussion forums and how you comport yourself there feed your online reputation.
And the list could go on. The point is, For better or for worse, and whether you like it or not, the web is where many people go these days to assess your professional reputation. There are many implications that arise from this, perhaps the most germane of which is that you should take a proactive approach to developing and maintaining your web presence. Here are a couple of good articles on how to do this:
Reputation Management Emancipation Proclamation - 10 Ways to “Own Yourself” Online
Ten Ways to Fix Your Google Reputation & Remove Negative Results (this one is mostly how to clean up your online profile if it has been sullied)
Hang on to your hats. I’m going meta on you today, blogging about blogging. And I may even mention some bloggers who blog about blogging, so it could get pretty deep around here.
My last post on the importance of a strategic approach to internet marketing immediately elicited a long and thoughtful comment from an associate of the guy whose presentation I had written about. I loved this development for a number of reasons:
1. Keith’s comment is a great set-up for a future post on reputation management. I can only assume that Keith is a smart, proactive internet marketer who understands the importance of keeping track of what people are saying about you and your company online. (This is easy to do, by the way. To get started, go to Google and create alerts for your name, your employees’ names, your company and product names, etc. More on this in future posts.)
2. I just watched the blogging segment of Rand Fishkin’s excellent SEO training video a couple of nights ago. Rand recommends that you open your blog to comments only after you have a critical mass of regular readers (I think he said 300); otherwise you run the risk of having virtual tumbleweeds rolling across your comment-less blog for months on end. I thought about that but decided that getting any interaction with my readers would be worth the risk, so I have enabled comments here right from the start - and I’m glad I did.
3. I also got some insight into writing for a blog. As you’ve probably already noticed, I can ramble. Believe it or not, I actually published less than half of the words I wrote Thursday. Some of the dregs turned out to be useful in my reply to Keith’s comment. So I’ll save for a while the text files in which I draft my blog posts.
If you want to learn more about blogging, a couple of good sites to start with are ProBlogger and my friend Karen Anderson’s blog, Writer Way. These are both general blogs about blogging. As I find better examples of blogs related to massage education, massage practice, etc. I’ll post them here.
