So with that in mind I’ve thought up a very rough reputation management framework that can double up as a process for getting ranked on the terms that bring in the money.

Its more than an SEO trick

The broad model here is to get

• Feedback on what a business is doing to make iterative changes to the products or services from the feedback cycle
• Manage reputation, both positive and negative
• Use the online ‘ecosystem’ to spread the good word about a product or service.
• Keep clear of trouble from regulatory authorities who can affect you

The Preparation

Agree messaging for Professional / trade / consumer

Define online hotspots of interest and commercial intent:

• What keywords should the product or service be found on
• What kind of site / blogger / thought leader should be associated with this and how can their positive comments be given prominence around
• Most relevant searched phrases
• Brand terms for the client

Create the right environmental conditions to ignite consumer demand.

• Build a ‘tribe’ of followers, who you support and in turn will evangelise on your behalf. This is where you have a two way ‘conversation’ with your community of customers.  This was famously done with the Obama online campaign or with Lady Ga Ga and her ‘little monsters’
• Manage reputation very carefully.
• Be seen as transparent, honest, serving the user/customer as best as possible on value and service standards.

The Actions

Monitor sentiment towards the brand online using online monitoring tools like Google alerts and http://www.trackur.com/

If there is prominent negative sentiment:

• Respond to it immediately and be transparent and honest
• If its something where the brand has done wrong and can’t / won’t rectify, then abondon the client! or bury it by up-ranking other content above it (the resource calibrated by the reputation damage caused)
• If there is positive sentiment towards the brand, but the content is not prominent, then use SEO to get it up-ranked for critical phrases like brand phrases and get it referenced in other big conversation hotspots

Reach out to thought leaders who can evangelise the service or product

• As with Offline, if you can make it easy for these people, they will find it easier to write about you. Give them the ingredients from which they can make up their own minds about the product or service.
• In online there is a massive long tail of writers and thought leaders. In accumulation they are very valuable. Have online press packs and all the ingredients from which they can write up their own informed views
• Give your tribe the resources to feel included and tools they need to talk about you
• Have a contributing presence wherever there is an important and prominent conversation about you or where there could be an important conversation i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Forums, Chat Groups, Linked in
• Your comment / feedback points on your site or 3rd party sites

Give prominence to the positive feedback on the product or service

• Have these reviews rank on search engines on keywords users would naturally search for when thinking of the product/service
• If possible, gather reviews and testimonials from users and re-publicise them.

Structure feedback into:

• Reviews with ‘useful? yes/no’ and ask for ratings. Ratings out of 5 stars (standard rating formula online) so you can get a positive rating for the company / service that you can disseminate to 3rd party sites
• If its a product then encourage existing customers to write about your products on 3rd party sites i.e. reviewcentre.com Amazon.com

Support/Education:

• Have a comprehensive help section online
• Online Press pack (giving evangelists the information they need to propagate the service)
• Forum with knowledgeable staff at hand to answer specific questions
• A staffer out online engaging with users who are asking questions. This person would also engage in important conversations that ‘can be found easily’

As I was saying earlier, this is only an outline, but hopefully it will give you a sense of the scope of activities that can be undertaken.

More reading on the subject:
http://www.sempo.org/learning_center/articles/ElixirSystemsOnlineRepMgmt.pdf
http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2006/03/online-reputation-monitoring-beginners.html
http://www.radicallytransparent.com/
http://mashable.com/2010/04/25/word-of-mouth-marketing-stats/

Obama Twitters

Things that struck me about the Obama campaign….the lack of spend on social and how they used evangelists so well to get engagement with so many young people. (See below for the numbers)

So this leads me into my next point aobut Social:if the cause or brand is right, social will just take off (with a little push)

I really think this kind of social media interaction is critical for a brand…. the right brand. Having 1/2 million followers on twitter or 200,000 face book fans in your group does not necessarily mean real engagement. I think its very easy to think big numbers mean a wonderful dialogue with your community, when in fact it may jsut be effective marketing in play.

I also feel more and more that certain brands are ‘social’ by their DNA. And since social is largely self driving when a community picks up on a brand, i.e. they use the simple and effective stuff out there and just self organise. Its why I often find it strange how social media consultancies can charge so much for apparently so little, when as I say prominence in social will come from being and exceptional business and servin your customer in an exceptional way. the equation:

Good formula:

Be a purple cow + feed the conversation = manifestation of love of your brand within social.

Bad formula:

Be mediocre + No dialogue with your customers = pay for prominence and no love / engagement.

The Slideshare :

The definitive ‘silo’ blog post on presentations onsocial media

The slideshare on Obama:

Obama Media Spend

Brand Interaction Strategies

Social marketing

What brands can learn

Miley gives a very coherent explanation on why she had to say adios to the microblogging craze.

So with this one out , who will be next? and importantly will the flattened twitter graph pick up again (I think not…)

Going flat - oh dear

BTW – I do think Twitter is amazing, but it needs to distill, ie. there has to be mass unfollowing so users can focus on the people they are interested in, as opposed to scoring numbers because they have X followers.

I also see it as an amazing ‘portable’ chat space where memes can evolve rapidly , leading to potent communication – and then die to emerge somewhere else coalescing around another idea or event. Twitter trendsmap will give you a feel for this.

Twitter trendsmap

There is an addendum to the Miley twitter axing:

“To my dearest fans,

You all are the closest thing to my heart & it breaks my spirit to hear that some of you feel neglected since I deleted my twitter. It was a wonderful way to stay connected to you & I really felt like during that time we became very much like friends. Twitter is a beautiful thing if used for the right reason. I love my job so much that it is hard to believe sometimes that it is considered “working. But, in the end it is still a business and I do need some sort of a “normal” life as well. I often complain to the ones closest to me that I don’t seem to have much of a private life any more and part of that is my fault. How can I whine about my life being to public if I am the one telling the world what I am doing? Some things in my life need to say in my life only and not on some gossip site. I never want any of my fans to feel like I don’t love them or care about them BUT, sharing the same love and respect for me I need to have the space to grow as a person and make some mistakes. I need to be able to live and learn in private. I never want to quit entertaining it is my life, my love, and my passion but I can’t have my personal life be other peoples entertainment.

Twitter is not the only thing I am cutting back on. This is not an attack against this particular site, I just think kids all over the world could maybe take a little vacation from Cyberspace. My problem with the internet is it makes negativity so available. It allows people to anonymously hurt others without any consequences. That is not the real world. Not only that, but if we spent more time enjoying what we are doing besides tweeting about it, we would enjoy our lives a whole lot more. I have very little free time and the moments that I do have I should be spending with my family and friends and loving every minute of their company.

Now of course rumors have been started that Liam is the reason that I deleted my twitter. I hope my true fans know how stupid that is. I had mentioned to him that someone made a fake twitter with his name and we both starting chatting about how ridiculous it is. Liam is a wonderful friend and he did not try to make me delete my page, he just helped me realize how much time I was wasting on that site.

I really hope you all know how much you mean to me and how much I truly care about each and every one of you. I will keep in touch through Mileyworld and MileyCyrus.com as I did before twitter. I love you all.

Blessings

Miley Cyrus”

Shame there is so much ‘snake oil’ at the moment, because there are good bits in social and once you understand the core of social i.e. relationships and shared experience, then it all makes sense. If you don’t understand what I’m talking about then this Youtube video will enlighten you: (This one is not actually a joke)

Tweetmeme - very addictive

I was at a gathering of Twitter’ites orbiting around Jeff Pulver a substantial investor in Twitter and had the pleasure of briefly meeting Sarah Blow the person responsible for community on Tweetmeme.com.

They say:

TweetMeme is a service which aggregates all the popular links on Twitter to determine which links are popular. TweetMeme categorises these links into Categories, Subcategories and Channels, making it easy to filter out the noise to find what you’re interested in.

I’m glad I did meet her, since I’m now a fan of this amazing new site. I guess its a bit like Techmeme in that its not about users directly voting for stuff, but to me it’s a bit like Digg (but far better) because its about twitterers just doing whatever they do and tweetmeme picking up their output and organising it, i.e. the vote is a by product of normal activity, leading to a far better gauge of sentiment.

The problem is that sites like Digg and Reddit are user submitted content which are voted upon, with some algo filtering and some human filtering. Its the human stuff that causes problems since you get into the area of qualitative judgement on what is good. So you often end up with news sources on Digg being banned for some random reason and so there ends up a covert form of censorship. In other words popular is not necessarily represented on Digg or Reddit.

So I will be using this site along with Reddit for my ‘meme’ fix and I think you should too.

BTW an interesting article that echoes my feelings on Digg: http://www.searchandsocial.com/seo-blog/decline-of-digg/

and another 10 great ‘decks’ on social