You should be Monitoring your Reputation

You should be monitoring your reputation and what is being said about you on the internet. Why? because one kid in Iowa with a blog and five readers can kill your reputation, that's why.

In the old days, big companies had news clipping services. Once a week the top executives were presented with a copy of every mention of the company in any newspaper or magazine in the country. Such a service was expensive back then. It costs zero today. When some blogger halfway across the country says something nice about you in his blog you can know about it within minutes. Nothing turns that blogger into a raving fan quicker than a personal email thanking him for his kind words about your company. Conversely, if he said something derogatory you have a chance to reach out to him and make amends before it turns ugly. How can a kid in Iowa with a blog and five readers ruin your company? Because his readers have blogs too and at least one of them probably has a few hundred readers and some of them will post the story on their blogs. And so on until you have a supernova on your hands.

It is easy to create blog and news searches in Google and subscribe to the RSS feeds of the search results. I also recommend setting up searches on Digg because many times something will show up on Digg long before Google if it is hot. Using an RSS reader, you can then check on your subscribed feeds as often or as infrequently as you want.

You should set up searches on:

• Your name.
• Your company name.
• Your website URL.
• The names of all of the public-facing people in your company.
• The names of your products and services.
• The URL of each product/service page on your website.
• All of your trademarks.

Once you have put those in place, then go back and do the same for your major competitors and industry leaders. Add searches for the interesting keywords in your industry and you have a your own personalized giant driftnet stretched across the internet.

Comments

[Lisa Koss]

Great ideas, Dave. I finally am following this advice. Got the same advice at the Grande Conference of the Americas in Orlando last month.

Very helpful and thanks!