Many years ago when the role of search in brand reputation was really coming into it’s own, Public Relations and SEO were becoming unlikely partners as way to position positive messages about brands and individuals in search results. The combination of Search and PR was actually the genesis of TopRank Marketing.
As Google became a powerful reputation engine, the need for individuals and brands to monitor and manage their online reputations increased too.
Today, with billions of internet users empowered to post content anytime, anywhere, the articles and presentations we originally published on Online Reputation Management (ORM) are even more important today. And yet there are thousands of brands and even more individuals that are oblivious and in dire need of ORM.
The good news is that an excellent resource on the ORM topic has just been published by my longtime pal, author and owner of Trackur, Andy Beal. It’s called, Repped – 30 Days to A Better Online Reputation. Here’s a review of this highly useful guide that will serve both your online reputation and online marketing needs.
The premise is pretty straight forward: Whether you’re a brand, an individual or a “brandividual”, online reputation is an increasingly influential contributor to your success. Or failure.
What Andy sets out to do in Repped, is provide a 30 day plan to help any person or company build, manage, monitor and protect their online reputation.
For business people, think of how many times you’ve “Googled” someone you just met at a conference, vendors that you’re considering or a candidate that you’re about to interview. Have you ever found something that made you decline a meeting or feel differently (in a bad way) about that person? Do you think they were aware the information existed? Even more importantly, were they doing anything about monitoring and managing it?
What you find on the search and social web becomes a very important first or second impression.
As a business professional responsible for being in the public eye or managing business communications and marketing, being able to assess and affect how people see you online should be a top priority.
The good news is that Repped provides a handy framework for taking control over how you and your brand are known online.
Two great things about this book:
1. It’s designed to be used, get dog eared, post it noted and turned into action. At 176 pages, Repped is (thankfully) no War and Peace, so you can skim through. But it’s also structured as Day one, Day two etc so you can keep going back and get your daily advice with specific things to do with “Today’s Exercise” at the end of each chapter.
Some of the key questions answered in Repped include:
What is ORM (online reputation management)?
How do you set up social media monitoring?
How do you find influencers?
What kind of content should you create?
How do you build social networks and community?
How do you audit your brand or personal online reputation?
What do you do if someone is trash talking your brand?
How do you clean up negative search results about your brand?
2. What works for Online Reputation works for Online Marketing. The core of brand marketing is understanding how you want to be known. What is it that you should be the “best answer” for? Following the advice Andy gives in Repped will help you take control of your online reputation. At the same time, many of the tips and tactics offered in the book are just good marketing in this age of brandividuals, influencers and author authority.
Everything from social media monitoring to content planning to social media and community building are covered in Repped. It’s not a deep dive though, it’s a primer. It’s a smart introduction to 30 days of things you could be doing to optimize how your target audience, peers, and industry see you and your brand.
If you would like a good guide for the kinds of things your business needs to do in order to take control over executive and brand online reputation, this book is it.
You can get Repped at Amazon and here’s Andy’s site in case you want to know more about him and his social media monitoring company trackur. If you want to meet him person, make sure you attend the ClickZ Live conference in New York April 1-2.
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