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.

Author: Ismael D Tabije

Online Reputation is the art and science of managing communications between an organization and its key public to build, manage and sustain its positive image. It comprises of the activities and policies used to create public interest in a product, person, idea, institution, or business establishment.

By its attributes, it is committed to promoting particular interests to the public in the most favorable light. Thus, its goal is to create, through the organization of news and advertising, an advantageous image for its client, be it a business corporation, cultural institution, or private or public individual. In doing so, numerous research techniques and communications media are utilized.
Precursors to public relations are found in publicists who specialized in promoting circuses, theatrical performances and other public spectacles. In the United States, where public relations has its origins, many early PR practices were developed in support of the expansive power of the railroads. Later, PR practitioners were –and often are — recruited from the ranks of journalists. Some journalists, concerned with ethics, criticize former colleagues for using their inside understanding of news media to help clients receive favorable media coverage.

Despite many journalists’ discomfort with the field of public relations, well-paid PR positions remain a popular choice for reporters and editors forced into a career change by the instability of the print and electronic media industry.

Public relations practitioners deliver information through the media to target audiences or, with the advent of the Internet, directly to specific stakeholder groups. Because similar opinions tend to be shared by a group of people rather than an entire society, research may be conducted to determine a range of things such as target audiences, appeal, as well as strategies for coordinated message presentation. PR may target different audiences with different messages to achieve an overall goal. Public Relations sets out to effect widespread opinion and behavior changes.

Modern public relations uses a variety of techniques including opinion polling and focus groups to evaluate public opinion, combined with a variety of high-tech techniques for distributing information on behalf of their clients, including satellite feeds, the Internet, broadcast faxes, and database-driven phone banks to recruit supporters for a client’s cause.

Although public relations professionals are stereotypically seen as corporate servants, the reality is that almost any organization that has a stake in how it is portrayed in the public arena employs at least one PR staff. Large organizations may even have dedicated communications departments. Government agencies, trade associations, and other nonprofit organizations commonly carry out PR activities.