Today we are interviewing Brett Borders of Copy Brighter Marketing. Brett specializes in online reputation management and social media optimization.
Brett, thank you for joining me today. Today I’d like to tell our readers a little more about online reputation management and its importance in the world of search marketing. I’d also like to get into how online reputation management is applicable to small or local businesses.
First, can you tell us a little about your background?
I have been online since 1989. I have been involved in countless communities, groups and forums – and I’ve seen a lot of interesting issues, scandals and changes over the years.
I got a degree in sociology (my thesis was on measuring social acquaintanceship networks) and a post baccalaureate certificate in interactive marketing. After college I worked as an English teacher in Japan, and then I spent a couple years traveling around the world. I have since worked professionally as an advertising copywriter, an online PR specialist, and an in-house SEO for a Web development agency. This year I started my company, Copy Brighter Marketing, so that I could focus on my internet marketing passions: social media and online reputation management (OLRM). I spend several hours a day researching and studying while taking on a limited amount of client work.
Sounds great Brett, can you expand a little on ‘online reputation management’? Who are typical consumers of this services and why do they need it?
Once upon a time, reputation was a tribal thing. You were known by your family name what the neighbors thought about you. When the industrial revolution kicked in and credit bureaus and law enforcement agencies started keeping records on everyone - credit scores and criminal records. Employers, landlords, courts, insurers, lenders now judge you based on this information alone.
Now in the information age, search engines are a primary form of media. What shows up in the search results for your name or brand is a cornerstone of your reputation. Online reputation management (OLRM) is the art and science of creating and sustaining desirable, accurate information about a person or brand online. It’s building robust, defensible portfolio of online identities for a person or brand that can’t easily be compromised by a little bit of smack-talk by a random website or anonymous person.
Online reputation management requires a combination of three main skills: SEO, public relations & social media marketing. It really helps to also have an advanced understanding of RSS and news monitoring technology, legal knowledge, and strong negotiation skills.
The typical consumer of online reputation management services is business owner who has been stung by negative feedback in the search engines. For instance, I’m currently working with a business owner whose only direct competitor has taken to actively bashing his product online - and he is being rather unprofessional and mean-spirited about it.
However, anyone who has a career or runs a business needs to think about online reputation management. Say you have a SEO company called “WizzBang Search Marketing.” All it takes is one disgruntled employee or pushy prospect to go on some high-ranking blog or social site an say you “suck” or are “rip off,” and it is going to be much harder to get business. One off-color blog comment can make it harder to land a corporate job, because HR is going to Google your name. One good side of this new transparency is that real scams and cults are now longer able to operate as effectively as they once were because people can call them out. The bad side is that innocent people can be subject or extortion and libel.
An SEO campaign usually focuses on getting one or two listings to the front page of the search engines. A popular kind of online reputation management strategy is to fill up the entire front page of the search engines with a mixture of positive links about you from a variety of sources (profiles, press releases, news sites, wikis, blogs) that look very credible and “organic.” - and is also very hard to penetrate by a low-ranking blog or Web page.
There’s also more to consider than just the search engines: blog comments, responding to reviews, participating in social communities and friending people online, getting inaccurate content and copyright violations removed, negotiating with Webmasters, and rewarding and encouraging positive coverage of your brand.
What are some steps you take to manage reputations online? Is there any suggestions you could give to a company looking to do some OLRM in house?
Well, social media sites offer a plethora of options for creating an extensions of your name or brand. However, one tip I’d like to throw out there is to not rely too much on creating profiles, as some online reputation management firms do. It doesn’t look very “organic” to look up a company and see a page full of Mixx & Friendster profiles – so people will tend to dig deeper to find the real “dirt.” I really like to work on building links to the existing natural pages (that you don’t control) that rank for your name - bona fide news articles, government sites, high-school reunion listings - building them up to making them stronger. I try to make my campaigns stealthy by working with a lot of the positive and neutral information that is already in the search engines.
Online reputation management is very strategic, like a slow-moving game of SERP chess. After deciding on the strategy and PR angle, the hardest part is often building the right links to need to push entrenched negative results onto the second or third page.
I do a lot of high-level link building myself and I work with overseas link builders to help with some of the ancillary stuff. The good thing about building links to ancillary profiles and sites-you-don’t-own is that since they are not your own primary domain, you can really experiment and find out what kinds of links and ranking factors work best. If something goes wrong or doesn’t work, you can always delete the profile and try another.
Getting highly-trusted, one-way links to online profiles, press releases, blogs and properties can be a challenge, but there are always ways to entice people to link out to where you need them to.
How about small businesses (SMBs) or local businesses? How does online reputation management affect these types of companies? What should they be doing?
Small businesses need to be aware that they are plenty of review and user generated content sites (like Yelp or RipOffReport.com) that are going to capitalize their reputation online if they don’t do it first. They also need to treat every single customer and prospect they contact with new respect, as if they were an influential media reviewer, because the individual now has a very amplified voice. Small businesses should be proactive and build up a reputation first, before it is “too late.”
Anyone with web savvy can do their own online reputation management, but the bigger your brand is and the more online conversations and comments there are about it, the more difficult and time-consuming of a job it becomes. That’s where a specialist can help.
Thanks again for your time Brett. I think we all learned a lot today about the importance of online reputation management and how it is applicable to many different kinds of businesses.
