Google Alert’s Help Manage Your Online Reputation

What is Online Reputation Management?

Reputation is defined as “the opinion or social evaluation of the group of entities toward a person, a group of people, or an organization.” When we talk about the reputation of a business, we are referring to how a company brand is perceived.

The reputation is built from what your customers are saying about your brand, what ex-employees are saying about the company, and what the competition is saying about you. A positive reputation brings trust, confidence, and sales, which are ultimately reflected in revenue growth and profitability. In contrast, a bad reputation can lead to a decrease in consumer confidence and a reduction in revenue and profits.

Building a reputation on the web is a growing concept. Information travels quickly across the internet through online conversations in forums, message boards, reviews, blogs, and other consumer driven sites. The online conversations include opinions that could positively or negatively affect your company’s reputation. Search engines include the consumer driven sites when they index, causing the positive or negative opinions to appear in search results for your company brand.

Online Reputation Management is a technique used to monitor and influence the opinions built on the web. It incorporates tools that allow you to observe what is being said about your company and to take action on outweighing the negative with the positive.

Why is Reputation Management important?

Today’s society is becoming more and more reliant on the web. Customers use the internet to research and make buying decisions. Even when purchasing products or services offline, they do the pre-work on the web. Whether it is comparing one company to another or determining the cheapest price of a product, the web gives customers on the spot information.

Any information available to your potential customers affects your reputation and their buying decisions. Say for instance, they do a search on your brand and the first result to come up is a negative review posted by a previous customer that was unhappy with your product or service. Not only will the negative remark influence their opinion of your brand, it will also cause them to look elsewhere.

Online Reputation Management is important because it gives your company a means to actively listen and monitor what is being said online. It creates an opportunity to participate in the conversation and take action on preventing any negative remarks from building an unwanted reputation.

What are Google Alerts and why are they important to Online Reputation Management?

Google Alerts is a free online tool that allows you to monitor any word or phrase on the web. The alerts are created through your Google account. Once you set up the words or phrases you want to monitor, Google will send you an email every time the word or phrase is mentioned online. It will include a link to the website so you can become involved in the conversation.

It is important to note that Google Alerts is solely a notification system. It does not add information about your company onto the web. It only notifies you of what information is already out there.

Google Alerts help with Reputation Management because they give you the opportunity to track what is being said about your company brand, your products or services, key employees, and the competition. The alerts present the positive and the negative so you can take action in influencing your reputation.

Free Publicity or Keeping Tabs on Competitor for Free

Google has a very helpful service which can help you get more publicity or keep tabs on your competitor. And the best part it’s FREE!

It’s like a having an media clipping service which scrutinizes both the web and Google News database, then sends you an email as soon as something you’re interested in appears in the search results.

For instance, let’s say you’re a big fan of “Star Wars”. You can set up a Google Alert for
“Star Wars”. Then whenever Google finds any mentioned in a top news story or on the web, you’ll get an email including the web site address so you can go see where
and how “Star Wars” is mentioned.

To set up your own Google Alerts for free, just go to http://www.google.com/alerts (read further down for using this service and its paid alternative).

The exciting thing is you can use this service to grow your business in all sorts of ways.

Some of the obvious ways to use it include setting up alerts to see what others are saying about you online, ‘discover’ what they saying about your competitors, find out about new developments in your field of expertise and/or discover some other prominent with whom you might want to ally yourself in some way.

This service is also one of the best publicity tools ever created and it’s FREE! Here are three tips to use Google Alerts to get media exposure:

STRATEGY #1 –
Obtain IMMEDIATELY publicity by tying-in with breaking news stories.

One of the best and easiest ways to get FREE publicity is to be able to comment on what’s already in the news. For instance, one of my clients, Gerry Robert, book writing coach, wealth expert and author of Millionaire Mindset.

One of the strategies we employ whenever an alert pops up having to deal Wealth, Book Writing, Economy somewhere in America or Canada, you need to contact newspapers and radio/TV shows in that city immediately and let them know you can comment on what’s happening.

Robert then asked, ‘But how will I know when a related story hits the news?’

My answer: “Google Alerts.”

The results will blow you away!

STRATEGY #2 –
Building friendships with media contact who discuss your topic.

Another of my clients, Patrick Snow, also uses Google Alerts service in a very systematic way to get publicity.

Here’s what Patrick does: First he set up alerts to track stories written on his area of expertise, which is Success, Selling and Families.

When he gets an alert email pointing him to a good story on that subject, he then sends the journalist who wrote the story a short email saying he enjoyed article and offers a sincere compliment.

His email stands out because journalists don’t often hear from their readers and when they do it’s usually to complain. Within his email Patrick mentions his website CreateYourOwnDestiny.com to reinforce his credibility.

If the journalist writes him back and thanks him for his comments, Patrick then offers to send them a free copy of his book and mentions he’s happy to be a resource for them on any future stories they might do on this or similar topics.

Patrick Snow has made the front cover of USA Today and multiple TV/Radio interviews.

STRATEGY #3
The Hook is more than Book

Authors are always asking me about a good ‘hook’ or angle should be when approaching the media. I’ll immediately ask them, “What hooks have others used in your industry?”

Usually they don’t know, but by using Google Alerts (or even just searching the Google News database at http://www.google.com/news) you can quickly find video clips, articles in which others with similar expertise are quoted.

For example, let’s say you’ve written a book about Selling. Suppose also that you’re based in Houston. One day you discover a story in the New York Times about Selling in the New Economy. Well, if it’s newsworthy in New York, it’s probably going to be considered newsworthy by the media in your city. So pitch your local media on doing the same story, only this time they’ll be interviewing YOU as the expert.

Here are a few words of advice on implementing this strategy:

Use quotation marks to narrow your alerts, for instance, I have an alert set up for Bert Martinez and because he’s not the only person in the world with that name, I was getting a lot of off-target alerts. Every time Bert or Martinez pop up I received an alert by using “Bert Martinez” it allows be to receive more exact searches.