Be There Or Be Talked About, Managing Your Reputation Online
Submitted By: Penny Sansevieri
A few weeks ago I had an author call me in a blind panic - someone had reviewed her book online and it wasn’t good, in fact it was downright nasty. She was horrified, and the worst part, there was very little she could do. It wasn’t someone we, the publisher, or the author had ever worked with before, nor had anyone ever contacted her, how she got the book is anyone’s guess, but she did, and she hated it.
The price for online exposure can sometimes be high, but this story brings back the clear truth: regardless of whether or not you market yourself on the ‘Net, somewhere, somehow, you’ll wind up on there. Whether it’s through a review or some other posting, you’ll end up on the Internet and as a vigilant marketer you’ll want to know who’s saying what about you. Whether it’s good or bad, you can still manage it. Also, you want to keep an eye on what people are saying about your topic.
So how do you win the online reputation game? Here are some tips you might want to consider. Keep in mind that in all the years I’ve been online, I’ve not known a lot of folks to go through a negative posting, in fact, it’s generally the opposite. Most of the time those who choose to review a book or comment on a service do so positively, but even positive postings need to be monitored. Why? Well, there’s a lot you can do with them, and these tips will show you how.
1) First, monitoring your reputation online doesn’t have to cost you anything. You can do this very simply with tools that are already available to you for free. Google and Yahoo both have monitoring tools. They’re super simple to use, all you do is go to the links, sign up for them and plug in the keywords you want to monitor. Keep in mind that you’re not only doing this just to monitor who’s talking or writing about you, but to keep track of what’s being said about your topic, so you can both keep track of new developments and engage in conversations with other bloggers. These include http://alerts.yahoo.com and http://www.google.com/alerts
2) Use RSS feeds to help keep track of conversations on the Internet that involve you, your topic, or your book. You can go to any of these sites to create these custom RSS feeds: Technorati, blogpulse, google news, spaces.live, feedster, icerocket and google’s Blogsearch.
3) You can keep track of your keywords across 22 different search engines. Keep in mind that you’ll need an RSS Feedreader to monitor the feeds that come in.