We’ve already covered the basics (101) on how to find positive mentions and analyze negative results as part of your overall reputation management strategy, so now it’s time to figure out how to create positive mentions in order to push down negative results or, for those without negative results, to own the first page of search results and beyond for your keyword, brand, company, or name.
Creating Social Media Profiles
Web 2.0 Profiles. Image Via Flickr
All the buzz lately is about Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and hundreds of other social media sites. Some businesses, including some of my offline clients that only want to “deal with removing the negative results,” are initially against creating profiles on all of these social networking sites with the thought that they are either a waste of time or too time consuming. While I could go on all day about the benefits of starting conversations and dialogue on these sites, I realize that when a client signs on, my first priority is to complete the task at hand, which is to push down negative results. The thing about Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, niche social networking sites, and the various social bookmarking sites is that many of them have both a number of links pointing to them and high PageRanks, allowing them to be trusted by the search engines and therefore rank high for any keywords that they are optimized for.
With sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, it’s easy to optimize those sites for your name, company name, or in some cases, a very specific keyword. With both Twitter and Facebook, you can create user names that will be used in the URL (brands like Whole Foods have their twitter ranking on the first page of Google for their keyword) or pages that can be optimized for longer tail keywords.
On top of those sites ranking for keywords easily, I also highly recommend that you claim your frequently used user name, company name, or name on as many sites as possible so that you don’t have to deal with other people claiming those profiles and possibly doing harm – writing negative opinions about your company AND ranking high for your keyword, responding to customers without your knowledge, or using your name to pitch products that you don’t endorse.
For starters, I’d recommend creating profiles – at minimum – on the below sites. These sites tend to rank high when optimized correctly and have high traffic volumes, which means someone will eventually claim your name; might as well be you.
Why those sites? In my experience with helping clients out, those sites tend to rank high (top 10) in a short time period without much effort – a few links and optimized when creating (username = keyword, about or bio section has keyword in it, etc.) can garner you another positive listing in the SERP’s, allowing negative results to move down more quickly.
Now there’s (what seems like) thousands of social networking sites created each month. Not every site will rank high or even last that long. Once you create the main sites, start looking for sites that are related to your niche. Sites that you are active on will eventually rank higher no matter what, so while claiming your name/brand/keyword on as many sites as possible is helping you out against name squatters down the road, focusing all your attention on claiming names without any intention of updating those sites in the future means you may spend quite a few hours of work without much to show for at the end of each month, at least not in regards to your online reputation management strategy.
So here’s what I suggest:
- Find social networking sites related to your niche.
- Create profiles on sites like docstoc, scribd, and youtube. These are examples of sites that allow you to upload documents and content, create links back to your site, and get links from various sources.
- Create profiles on article marketing sites. You’ll also use these sites to upload articles, but creating logins and usernames now will both save you time later on and get the profile claiming out of the way. Sites like ezine articles can often rank high for your name or keyword once you get started with article uploading.
- Create profiles on social bookmarking sites. Social bookmarking is the process in which you bookmark a page, blog post, or site using tagging features. Sites like StumbleUpon and Digg can get your site a lot of traffic if your keyword is found popular or interesting. Take a look at a site like social poster for a list of social bookmarking sites to begin claiming profiles on.
- Use sites like Knowem, Namechk, or Usernamez to find all of the credible and popular social networking sites that are currently available for you to create profiles on. Sites like knowem also have a service that allows you to outsource the profile claiming for a small fee (unless you have a lot of time, the time involved with creating profiles can get quite high).
Creating New Sites
A number of clients don’t have the resources it takes to create a full blown site (flash, fun, interactive, thousands of pages, etc), but fortunately, that’s not always needed in online reputation management cases.
Simple sites can be created by buying a domain (under $10/year), purchasing hosting if you don’t have it already (under $100/year in most cases – sites like Bluehost allow multiple domains to be hosted per account), and setting up a Wordpress/Joomla/Tumblr site. I’m a big fan of Wordpress since it’s easy to use, has a number of plugins that allow for you to both optimize and make your site more functional, and themes are available for free or low cost from a number of sources. I use the Thesis theme on this site because it’s easy to customize, but you can also check out some of the below sites for additional themes (both free and paid):
Sites I’ve created for past clients (with the use of templates) include blogs, scholarship announcement sites, job/career sites, landing pages for special promotions, mini sites for specific departments within a company, press release/pr/news contact sites, community involvement sites, employee geared sites, social media sites (here’s what we’re talking about online/here’s where we are online/etc), and industry related sites (links to resources/free information/etc).
Getting Positive Press
Positive press can be created in a few ways, but the benefit is that other sites will write about you if your news is picked up, or you can create “pages” on sites that re-publish press releases on a regular basis.
Here’s a frequently updated list of press release distribution services – some of them free online services and others are paid. Use those sites to distribute optimized press releases that announce positive news, new clients/initiatives/services, charity involvement, scholarship announcements, new hires, presentation/speaker/conference announcements, or anything else you deem newsworthy. Optimize the press release with your keyword in the title, body, and tags, then submit to the press release distribution services and include a link back to different (positive) sites that you own or want to rank high. The more links each site has from trustworthy sites, the better chance it has of ranking high.
Commenting On Other Sites
Commenting on other blogs can be useful for linkbuilding (if the site allows dofollow links), but in some cases, it can also help a site rank for your name/keyword if the comment is optimized correctly.
