X SEO

Recently, I was contacted by a small business owner who was facing what appeared to be an insurmountable slump in sales. The business owner was a wreck. He’d opened his store in a part of town that no longer received much foot traffic since a new overpass was added to a major intersection. Sales were dismal. He had a good product, but there were stores that were more accessible with similar products at a comparable cost.

One day, the business owner decided to try to capture more sales through new marketing techniques he’d heard about from a friend of a friend. This person swore by his methods and the business owner had nothing to lose, so he figured, “what the heck, why not!”

The first step was to re-arrange his shelves. His products were usually grouped by category, but his friend had told him that instead of keeping all of one product category in a single location, he should move these products to other parts of the store. This would make his customers search for the different products and stay in his store longer.

The second step was to call a press conference each time he stocked a new product on his shelves. Press conferences are a great way to get noticed, so he decided to contact the local media each time he added a new product.

The third step was to hire part-time workers to visit the other local stores that sold similar products. During their visit, they would strike up a conversation with the patrons of that store and casually mention his store, so they knew about him.

The fourth step was to also hire part-time workers to talk to others about his business. He would give a dollar for each time they brought up his business and products in a conversation. He would also hire a big team of people to drive around town telling everyone they saw about his company. They were not to use any negative words, just positive mentions of his brand, products and even his name. Now, others would see that everyone talked about him in a positive way.

The fifth step was to stop using his current point of sale tracking and fulfillment software. He’d been told that the manufacturer knew how much he was and wasn’t selling because of this software and they might make it difficult for him to market their products if they noticed his new sales methods.

The final step was to put fliers up around universities and government buildings, because he knew smart, affluent people visited there. He wanted them to see his business and associate it with those organizations.

The business owner was eager to see his new sales approach in action and once it was setup, he knew this would lead to immediate success.

Can you guess what happened to the business owner?

• With the new, cumbersome product display, customers became frustrated and left the store before making a purchase.
• The local media stopped paying attention to him because they were constantly being flooded with news that wasn’t really news. And, the publications that picked him up were so low-quality that he didn’t capture many sales from them.
• Once the other local business owners caught on to what his part-time workers were doing in their stores, they told them to leave and banned them from coming back.
• With so many people being paid to talk about his business, the community lost trust in his brand.
• He switched to the new point of sale software and it was good, but now he didn’t have the data that he usually relied on to make informed business decisions.
• The fliers didn’t seem to work at all.

The new marketing methods were a disaster. He was losing sight of why he’d gone into business and was on the verge of closing his doors. All of the time and money he’d spent on this new plan had been a waste. He realized that what he should have invested in instead of a quick fix was:

• differentiating his products or customer experience from his competitors.
• surveying his current customers and non-customers to discover what they really wanted and thought of his business.
• communicating the purpose of his business to the community.
• training for his employees to increase their knowledge of his products and customer service.
• researching the area to see how he should market himself to his local customers while being respectful of them and true to himself and his company’s brand.

This story was inspired by a post published yesterday on Mixergy, which summarized “how to rank on page 1 of Google (even if you’ve never heard of black hat SEO).”

I love the Internet.

As a user I love being able to meet people I wouldn’t have otherwise been connected to and how easily it is to be part of larger conversations. As a business owner, I love having this direct line to the people we’re trying to help and serve. Of course, there are also days when I don’t love the Internet and when the Internet makes me cry.

I’ve written before about some of the dark sides that go into blogging and community management. Because it’s not all rainbows and unicorns out there. There are trolls, and angries, and people with nothing but a grudge and whole lot of free time. And when one of these otherwise nice folks comes for your brand or your head, it can ruin your day. Worse than that, it can lead to an emotional reaction and an online reputation management problem that you’ll have to diffuse later.

You can’t let that happen. And the way to not let it happen is to learn the proper way of responding to negativity about yourself or your brand on the Internet.

Control the situation, control your brand. It’s really that simple.

Consider this your course on how not to get defensive about negative things written about you on the Internet. You can buy me a latte later.

Step 0: Locate Your Big Girl (or Boy) Pants

What sucks about negativity on the Internet is that it can will happen to you. It doesn’t matter how ethical you run your business or nice of a person you are. At some point, someone is going to have a problem with you and they’re going to let you know about it, probably in a not-nice way. Acceptance of this will be your very best friend.

It also makes you an adult.

The simple truth is you don’t have the luxury of being sensitive or having an emotional response when you rely on the Internet to promote your business. Displaying either of these characteristics will, very simply, hurt your business and prevent you from getting where you could. Instead of pouting or being passive aggressive, put on your big person pants and learn how to use it. Sorry, you don’t get another option.

Step 1: Scream. Or Punch Something.

Just because you can’t have an emotional reaction online, doesn’t mean you can’t have one from where you’re sitting. You’re human. You probably even have feelings. When someone takes time out of their day to attack you, it’s going to sting. When this happens, go to a semi-private place and do whatever you have to do release that initial OMG-I’ll-Stab-You adrenaline. Cry. Punch something. Snuggle your dog. Whatever you have to do. But get it out. Once you do, you may return to your computer to deal with the problem at hand.

Step 2: Get the Facts

Now that you’ve had a chance to settle yourself down, break apart the negative comment and start looking at what was really said without the emotion.

• What is the complaint about: Do they refer to a specific incident? Did it happen to them or someone else? Are they repeating something they heard?
• What specifics are cited: Products? People? Places? Times? Events?
• Who is the person making the complaint: Are they in your community? Do they have a (positive) presence elsewhere? What’s important to them? Where do they hang out online?
• What are they really mad about: Bad experience? A bad company response to that experience? Something else?
• Have they complained about this elsewhere? Has anyone else? Is this a new issue or an existing one?

Take as much information as you can from the posting, because even if the tone of the comment was out of line, if you break things down you’ll usually find some truth or lesson hidden within. And that’s what you want to do – get to the root of the problem, and then deal with it.

Step 3: Get Supporting Data

Before you hop right in and respond to your negative friend, get any other supporting information you may need. The worst thing you can do is piss this person off even more by not knowing what you’re talking about when you go to address them.

• Is there any record of what they’re referring to?
• Are you familiar with the product or service they had an issue with?
• Do you understand, as best as you can, why they feel the way they do?

Unfortunately, the answer to all of these questions may be “no”, but collect as much data as you can. If there are others on your team who may know more, ask for their input.

Step 4: Engage the Naysayer…or don’t

Not every negative comment written about you or your brand is going to warrant a response. If someone comments that your service is awful and then five more people comment, calmly, telling the person why they’re wrong, your work is done. Feel free to go get a massage. If in your research you find that this person has a long history of being kind of a douche to brands and that responding only eggs him on more, then let it sit.

However, in many cases, you’re going to want to respond to diffuse the situation. If you are going to respond, you’ll want to:

• Remain calm: If your hands are still shaking or you’re still crying big emo tears over what was said about you, you’re not ready to respond to the situation. Go talk a walk or pass the responsibility off to someone who can handle it. The minute you show anger, defensiveness or emotion in your response, you lose and are immediately discredited.
• Don’t be snarky: Tone is a funny thing online. Some people can read it, some can’t, and some don’t realize that “funny in your head” doesn’t always translate to “funny on the Web”. Do yourself a factor by leaving the snark and humor out of your response and just talk straight. It may not be as amusing but it will save you from shoving your foot further in your mouth. Trust me on this one. I have a Nike logo permanently imprinted on my esophagus.
• Put the facts first: Use all the research you compiled to lay out the facts behind the person’s complaint. Don’t do so in an aggressive or patronizing way, just explain the situation, citing as many specifics and sources as you can. A smack of a reality may calm the person down and, if it doesn’t, it at least shows everyone else watching what happened and that you’re handling it.
• Apologize for anything that’s your fault, nothing else: If the person has a legitimate complaint about something you or your company handled improperly – apologize for it and be sincere. But if you didn’t do anything wrong and there’s nothing to apologize for, don’t just issue the apology for the sake of it. The other party is going to see right through and they’ll call you out on it. Don’t make an ugly situation even uglier. Plus, it’ll make you feel crappy.
• Present a forward-moving action step and take things offline: With the facts laid out and apologies issued, present a forward-moving action step. You’re aware that this happened, now what are you going to do? Let them know that you’re going to follow up with a phone call or an email to take things offline and remedy the situation. Doing this allows you to speak to the person directly (where they’re almost certainly going to be a lot more rational) and it allows you to solve the problem without being watched. Even if you’re just dealing with an angry blog commenter, taking the situation to email can help salvage the sanctity of your comments section.

In most situations it will take just one response from you to diffuse things and get them headed toward a calmer, more productive path. It’s amazing how letting people know that you see them immediately changes the tone of a conversation.

Step 5: Document It

With that situation handled, take some to document it so that you can learn from what happened.

• What was the complaint?
• Is it something you can fix?
• Who was the person who filed it?
• How was it handled? What worked? What didn’t work?

Creating documentation for these types of incidents can help you discover patterns – both in terms of what works and where issues arise in your community. It will also help you identify problem members that you can pass on to the rest of your team in case they encounter them in the future.

Step 6: Let It Go

You’ve learned from it, you’re smarter for it, now let it go. Hanging on to the negativity can only hurt you and your company. In this age of constant-connectedness, you need to be out there. You need to be talking to people. And you can’t do it while still holding on to past grudges and hostility. Know the reason for why you’re engaging online, and keep with it. What you’re doing is important, even if one person decided they didn’t like you that day.

Step 7: Look for Ways To Leverage It

I know. Now you think I’m a bad person, but sometimes there’s a way to use negative press, flame wars and attacks to benefit you in the future. Should you do this immediately and while you’re still in the middle of the problem? No. But when things settle down, don’t discount it.

So someone yelled at you – can you use it as case study on how to handle sensitive situations? Did someone larger than you notice the ruckus? Can it be used to start a relationship with that person and get you a potential guest post? Did the online complaint make you change something in your business? Can you pitch that to the local media and even get the complainer some positive attention for helping generate trend? You may be surprised.

We’re all using the Web to do and deal business. That means we need to be careful about our responses, even when things getting a little emotional. Hopefully the
tips above will help you avoid that emotional ORM disaster and, hey, maybe even help you leverage that bad press.

Online reputation management (ORM) is a huge, and growing market. For others it means they have a huge public relations problem. I have worked with a few companies and individuals with just such a problem. I’ll tell you the story and outcome of one such client, who will remain nameless.

ORM Problem: My client fired an employee who posts negative information about the company on a forum and review site. The truthfulness of the postings are irrelevant and they stand to lose a lot of business for people searching their company name. The negative postings (negatives) were listed in positions 2 and 4+5. Even someone searching for their phone number will see these negative results!

ORM Failed Solution: My client came to me through a referral. They had already hired an ORM firm ranked on the first page of Google and got literally no results after 3 months. They gave me all of the information they had which included a few business listings and web 2.0 type sites that were built with duplicate content. In all, they spent $3500 and had 6 web 2.0′s and 25 business directory listings. None of those 31 pages were showing up on the first 3 pages of the SERP’s. $3500 down the drain.

My ORM Solution: When I explained my approach to his problem my client was shocked and initially not interested at all, and you might be as well.

• Step 1: Scrape content and spin heavily. I spun a single 400 word article to 98% uniqueness, then did it again with a different article and combined them into one 400 word article.
• Step 2: Throw it against the wall and see what sticks.

When all that matters is the negatives moving down and off the first page or two, who cares what site is showing up in the #2-10 positions? All my client wanted was to have the negatives out of view. I created 8,000 unique pages of content over the course of 48 hours.

• Step 3: Wait. For most people this is the hard part. You want to do something, but until you know what is going to stick against the wall. During this time, I’m getting the pages indexed. I usually give this step about a week. After a week I expect to have about 75% of the pages indexed and usually see some starting to show up on the first 5 pages. For this client, I had 5 pages in the top 10, and controlled the entire 2nd and 3rd page. Literally every single page was one I created for this client.
• Step 4: Link building to the ranking pages. Now that we know what is sticking to the wall, we need to build some links to these pages to get them to move up. The timeframe is completely dependent on the quality of your link building methods. I generally shoot for 1-6 months depending on the competition of the keyword for this step.
• Step 5: Change content so it’s appropriate. After you move the negatives off the first page, you should have 3-9 pages one the first page that you created. If the content isn’t reflective of your client, it needs to be rewritten and changed on the pages you created…You did keep the username and password of every page you created, right? Depending on the client, they might want to provide the content, they might want to review content you have created, or they might not care as long as it’s good.

This method does not work for competitive keywords and should be clearly explained to your client along with a timeline of expectations. In SEO, it’s usually impossible to give an exact timeline and I find it’s usually better to over deliver.

Some clients have a very public brand, are overly concerned about their public reputation, or get themselves into regular trouble. These clients generally need an ongoing ORM relationship. Small companies and single issues can usually be handled in under 6 months.

For my client, the total time from start to finish for 3.5 months. He now owns the entire first page. One negative is at the bottom of the second page, and the other negative is nowhere in the top 100. Success!

Brandon Hopkins owns a complete link building service at DiamondLinks.net. He frequently works with ORM clients and even agencies building links and content for their clients. Contact Brandon if you have a reputation problem!

photo credit: Shutterstock/Josh Resnick

No related posts.

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis WordPress Theme review.

Online Reputation Management and the “Spaghetti Method”

Whenever you are involved in an ORM (Online Reputation Management) campaign, your goal is to displace negative results in the search engines with positive results. In a previous post we looked at creating microsites. In this post, we are going to look at leveraging social media profiles.

As with every search result in Google, the top results are generally made up of the most trusted and authoritative results, so it makes the most sense for us to talk about the most trusted authoritative social media sites at the moment: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google plus.

Facebook

Facebook is by far one the most popular and visited sites in social media; however, for many people, it can also be the most problematic. The most common issue on Facebook is people or their friends posting unflattering or unflattering status updates or pictures. That status update or pic from that party weekend in Cancun where you …. let’s just not even mention it again … may have been funny at the time, but it’s not funny when you are applying for a job, trying to get the condo board to think you are a qualified, responsible tenant, or trying to prove that drunk driving incident really wasn’t you. Thanks to Facebook’s new timeline feature, it makes it incredibly easy for someone to skim through your profile and isolate those “wild college years.” My suggestion? Create a “close friends” group and edit all those items so only they can see them (see How to Create a Friend List). Alternatively, you could “go nuclear” and just block all the old info on your timeline. It’s much more drastic but also a lot more bulletproof.

If you are a company, you may not have those drunken college years to contend with, but you may not have a rich history, or even a profile. If you don’t have a profile, start one. I’d link to a resource but, to be honest, Facebook changes so often that the link would need to be updated every few months. Instead, just Google it [how to create a business profile on facebook].

Sadly, we all now have to treat our Facebook status updates like a Public Relations team. Don’t post anything outlandish or crazy that you don’t want to be associated with. An alternative course is to regularly post completely off the wall crazy information that is completely unbelievable. This gives you a bit of wiggle room and allows you to have plausible deniability. This really is only an option for personal accounts and not businesses.

Twitter

The next site you need to focus on is Twitter. Again, if the person or company you are doing ORM for doesn’t have an account, you’ll need to get one going ASAP. The more trusted and authoritative your Twitter account is, the better it will rank in the SERPs. While Klout isn’t perfect, it’s a good place to start. If the Twitter account isn’t posting content now on a regular basis, you’ll need to start. To get the most out of social media with the least amount of time, I suggest using Hootsuite and or Bufferapp (see How to be Involved on Twitter in Less than an Hour a day). Post good content, share good links, respond when someone talks to you (using the @ symbol). If you want to drive your Klout score up, get followed by people who already have a high Klout score. Have conversations back and forth with them ( it’s the back and forth that really counts). This advice holds true for a business account as well as for a personal one.

LinkedIn

Most people who have jobs have, at the very least, a LinkedIn account. If they haven’t changed jobs or at least tried to get new job in the past few years, their LinkedIn profile is probably outdated and could use some updating. Within the past few years, LinkedIn has added the ability to create company pages (see creating company profiles on LinkedIn). If you are doing ORM for a company, please ask all of your key employees to create profiles and to update their profiles to link to the company profile.

Google Plus

Google Plus is the latest serious player in the social media profile space. At the time this post was written Google had made some serious aggressive changes to “force” Google Plus results, giving them higher and greater exposure. Whether this is a long term change that will stick remains to be seen. At the very least the person you are doing ORM work for should claim and create a Google Plus profile. However, for maximum results, they will need to verify the profile and connect it to articles or posts they have written (see How To Create A Google Author Account). If you are doing ORM for a business or organization, see how to create a Google plus profile for your business. Again, these services are in flux so the actual steps may change.

You could simply set up these profiles, but to get the most out of them you need to keep them looking as “lived in” as possible. That means updating semi-regularly and connecting or being friends with other users and having a dialog or conversation with some of them. With the exception of Google+, all of these services have API’s so you can update them with tools on a scheduled basis such as Hootsuite or Bufferapp.

Once you have these accounts looking lived in, you can start pointing links to them. You want to use optimal anchor text (ie, the person’s name or name of the company in most cases). However, you do want there to be some variation. If 100% of the links pointing to a site have a 100% anchor text match, it look manipulated and and artificial, so mix it up a bit. You can do some interlinking but be careful: interlinking all of them, creating a nest of sites, link brothel, or artificial link pyramid designed just to manipulate link equity will stick out and will probably be discounted.

While I only spoke about four social sites in this article, there are hundreds of websites you can create profiles on for ORM. It doesn’t make sense to try and set up and populate all of them. If you want to establish them and prevent someone else from squatting on them, use a service like KnowEm. Once you have them secured, you can cherry pick the best or most appropriate ones to flesh out and work with.

So what are the takeaways from this post:

• When performing ORM, set up and register individual or business profiles
• The most important services currently are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google Plus
• Use a service like KnowEm to secure secondary profiles
• Flesh out the most important or relevant profiles
• Come up with a plan for updating the profiles on a regular basis
• Develop and interlink the profiles without making it look overly manipulated
• Give the profiles a human feel and build trust signal by having back and forth conversations, interactions, and engagement with other profiles, especially profiles with established trust signals

photo credit: Shutterstock/82048177

Related posts:

1. Looking at Fake Social Media Profiles Somewhere in the middle of all the drama last week…
2. Talking Social Media With Loren Feldman of 1938 Media I had the pleasure of hanging with Loren Feldman of…
3. How Businesses Should React to Negative Social Media & Reviews Social Media still scares many businesses both large and small….
4. iPad Apps and Social Media In case you didn’t already know, I’m the owner of…
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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis WordPress Theme review.

Using Social Media Profiles for ORM

Is your reputation management strategy a turn off to your customers and critics?

Should we respond, get angry, fire back, ignore the situation, censor comments, or just see what happens?  Those are some of the many questions that marketers are faced with today.  With more and more consumers and customers turning online to share what they think of a particular brand or company it has become increasingly difficult to capture everything that is being shared.

In April of this year Yelp.com reached 50 million users with over 17 million reviews on their database.  If you are a professional responsible for online reputation management it makes you wonder how many other means are there for your customers and critics to share their opinion about your company.

According to a recent infographic created by Digimind 47% of American companies’ net worth is tied up in intangible assets like brand equity and reputation.  That being said there are two questions that I would like you to ask yourselves:

• Do you know what your customers,competitors, and critics are saying online about your brand?
• Do you have a plan in place to respond to negative feedback?

If you answered no or maybe to either of these questions then there are some things that you should know.

You Gotta Cover Your Assets.

Step one is knowing where you are present online. Step two is devising a plan for using those assets to your advantage.  The state of online reputation management today calls for more than a company website.  Try leveraging your social media channels as a way to attract, engage, and inspire positive feedback about your organization.

[It] is Not Just About Control.  It’s Also About Letting Go.

You are in control of what you post, where you’re present, and how you react to questions or comments.  Make sure that your online approach is aligned and consistent for each platform.  It is impossible to censor every negative comment and piece of information you have online.  Instead respond consistently and appropriately when you do find negative information.

The Rules of Engagement.

Should an issue arise I recommend you have influencers in your corner.  If you take the time to properly build and cultivate relationships online you will be prepared with an army behind you to approach the subject when and if it happens.

The First Rule of Fight Club is: You Do Not Talk About Fight Club.

If your approach to reputation management involves not talking about or planning for negative press then perhaps it’s time to rethink your strategy.  Managing your personal or company reputation head on will show that you have listened and that most subjects are not off limits.

Please Don’t Take a Turn to Negative Town.

Counteracting negativity with negativity is a recipe for disaster.  If you can, try to take a positive approach and do your best to present your case online if you deem necessary.  If you believe that a formal response is in order, maintain a positive outlook and show that you are open to feedback and will address comments head on.

There Are No Mistakes, There’s Things we do, and Don’t Do.

Learning from the mistakes we have made is key in improving a reputation management strategy.  Perhaps you responded poorly to negative feedback.  To avoid making the same mistake twice devise a plan for addressing issues and shedding a positive light on your organization.

Well, I Guess We Can Close the File on That One.

False.  Ongoing monitoring of your online reputation is key in protecting your assets online.  Consider implementing some cost effective solutions that enable you to monitor issues in real time for quick response. It is important to not only monitor your brand name but also products, the company, and key executives.

Not Sure How You Rate?

If you have a few moments I recommend completing the survey below.  I am curious to know how our readers would rate themselves or their companies when it comes to addressing online reputation management.  I would like to share the results on the TopRank Blog in a future post to see how our readers are addressing issues currently and provide additional tips on reputation management for the future.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. |
7 Ways to Improve Your Online Reputation Management Strategy | http://www.toprankblog.com

by Miriam Ellis

Almost exactly three years ago, I published a post here on Search Engine Guide entitled User Reviews As Local Activism. In that piece, I encouraged citizens to make the extra effort to leave good reviews of their favorite locally-owned businesses as a positive form of supporting them in an economy that is often heavily slanted towards corporations and big box stores. Three years ago, reviews were just starting to take on the power that they have today, and at that time, I think I gave only a passing thought to the other side of the coin – the potential for people to leverage negative reviews to promote their personal agendas, both political and otherwise.

Now, having just read articles at Alabama Live and The Huffington Post, I know what the flipside of the coin looks like.

Starting around October 13, small business owner Steve Dubrinsky’s Birmingham, Alabama deli became the target of a campaign to inundate his Google Place Page with negative reviews, many of which attack him for allegedly employing illegal immigrants. This must doubtless be considered fallout of Alabama’s decision to uphold the strictest immigration laws in the nation. In interviews, Dubrinsky has declared that his workers are legal, but this has not stopped his neighbors from slamming his Google Place Page with hate reviews and threatening his deli with a boycott along these lines:

Within a week of this, there was an onslaught of positive reviews for the deli, most of which simply praise the food and service, but others of which directly speak to the perceived abuse of the review system:

Like many people with even a drop of Indigenous ancestry, I find the specter of relatively recent immigrants making laws about other, newer immigrants to this great land to be darkly ironic. As one Huffington Post commenter put it:

Where’d your people come from? You got legal papers from my Native American people giving you the legal right to be here? Seems that maybe it’s you who needs to pack up and head back to the fatherland­, hombre.

I will also make no bones about the fact that, given the United States’ bleak history of conquest, enslavement and never-ending civil rights violations, I absolutely loathe any law or language that hinges on race. Sit yourself down and read Barry Estabrook’s Tomatoland, a book about the enslavement of Hispanic Americans in the ag fields of Florida happening right now, as I type this article, and you will realize that this country has yet to leave its worst ideas behind. Gives me the creeps, to say the least.

But, from a purely Local perspective, I’m writing about this issue today at Search Engine Guide because it calls so strongly into question the role review hubs like Google, Yelp, TripAdvisor and the like will be called upon to play in the online publishing world in which sets of stars and blank fields will be taken for a soapbox by many users. This is what I’m hoping we can discuss in the comments.

Google’s Review Posting Guidelines make this statement (italics mine):

Keep it real

People read reviews to learn about real experiences from real people, so be authentic. Keep your reviews to your own, direct experience with a place. Try to describe your experience as accurately as possible, including both positive and negative aspects.

Off-topic reviews

Reviews should describe your personal, first hand experience with a specific place. Please do not post reviews based on someone else’s experience, or that are not about the specific place you are reviewing. Reviews are not a forum for personal attacks, rants or crusades. Please also do not use reviews to report incorrect information about a place — use the Report a problem link for that place instead.

Even without the article in a high level publication like The Huffington Post, some type of flag will likely have gone up in Google’s system as a result of a single business gaining pages and pages of reviews over the course of a single week. Let’s hope the deli’s supporters don’t run into a goofy Google spam filter based on review velocity that might actually lead to a penalization of the whole listing. I feel this case is well worth watching because I do believe Google will have to take some sort of steps regarding the very large number of reviews left this month for this business that would most certainly fall under the heading ‘personal attacks, rants or crusades’.

For comparison, look at Max’s Delicatessen’s Yelp Profile and you will absolutely no sign of political controversy. It’s an odd day when a small business has only 16 reviews at Yelp, but 182 on Google! Has Yelp, with their sometimes infamously stringent review policy, already kicked in behind the scenes, erasing the aura of controversy? They certainly have the right to do so, given their guidelines, and I am watching to see what Google will do.

And finally, I think this brings up a related issue that is worthy of discussion and debate. Local news sites, local blogs, local review hubs…the unifying quality of all of these is that they strive to paint an accurate picture of local communities.

If, like most communities, yours is unfortunate enough to be inhabited by its measure of certain citizens who are comfortable using racial epithets and who are likewise comfortable making public attacks of a racial nature on local businesses…this is an accurate picture of your community. If a humble delicatessen in the South becomes a political batteground, and online communities delete all references to what is happening there, how informed and true is the online version of our world? How accurate is the index?

The dozens of politically-motivated Occupy Wall Street reviews continue to sit on the Google Place Page of Zuccotti Park in NYC. Despite being an evident violation of Google’s guidelines, they occupy most of the Place Page’s review space. A creative use of the medium, perhaps, but is it right?

In so many ways, the Internet is a champion of free speech, enabling us to communicate our views and to encounter the views of others in ways never dreamed of before. But when it comes to hate speech – and the advent of this concept of the ‘hate review’ – where do we stand?

I hope you’ll weigh in with your thoughts on this interesting development in the world of online reviews. Should review entities remove reviews that do not center on a customer’s actual patronage of a given business, landmark or site? And, if such data is removed, does this make the picture of the business more or less accurate, on the whole? Finally, what should a business owner like Steve Dubrinsky do, finding himself in the middle of this online reputation attack? Respond to the reviews? Hire a lawyer? Sue the portals that are enabling this content to be published about his buisness? What’s your take?

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Be sure and visit our small business news site.

Social search is an interesting animal, mostly because there are so many different approaches. There’s realtime search, like we’ve seen from Google+ and Topsy in the last week. There’s Google’s social search, which simply sprinkles social results throughout its web …

While a trustworthy reputation could take years to build, it could be destroyed in a matter of minutes. At first, this seems ironic, but when you think about all the information online that is extremely accessible, it makes more sense.

What follows is a look into how the City of Troy responded to disaster with takeaways you can immediately implement in your own business for online reputation, social media and SEO emergency preparedness. Prepare now. Act later.

Over the weekend, our little town of Troy, NY got hit by Hurricane Irene. By the time she was in our backyard the category 3 had calmed to a tropical storm. We sustained strong winds, but nothing too serious. Or so we thought.

The real problem was the rain. Lots and lots of rain. It kept coming, but by the end of Sunday it started to slow. That relief was short lived. Soon after the reports began to roll in about a mudslide wiping out businesses, dams in danger of breaking, boats being smashed to bits and water filling our streets. As a community, we’d forgotten about the most dangerous side effect in a river district — surface runoff.

You see, Troy, NY is nestled in this beautiful river valley:

There’s Outspoken Media! Oh wait, it’s surrounded by rivers.

With just 4.69 inches of rain, this happened to the Hudson’s water levels with the worst of it peaking right now:

Disaster struck a community that wasn’t expecting it, but we had a secret weapon that kept us all prepared in the midst of everything.

Mayor Tutunjian.

If you’re a fan of Outspoken Media, how amazing the Troy Mayor’s Office is shouldn’t be a new discovery, we’ve already discussed how the Mayor uses social media better than 99% of us. We got to see this in full force yesterday, through the night and into today. It was incredible to watch Mayor Tutunjian so quickly disseminate vital information through his Twitter account and respond the community’s concerns. More important, when news of a voluntary (and potential mandatory) evacuation broke, it didn’t come from the local news, it broke on Facebook and was promoted through Twitter! Eventually news picked up on the story, but much later.

The biggest problem was that the community didn’t trust or understand WHY news of this caliber would break on Facebook. They were questioning the validity of the news and wanted proof. Surely government officials wouldn’t use silly social media sites to spread serious news. Who posted that evacuation notice to the City of Troy’s Facebook page?

Someone smart. Someone informed. Someone who is using every tool at their disposal to quickly and efficiently touch the people that matter.

Social media isn’t a passing fad. It has become a part of how we communicate and live. If the Mayor’s ROI is in gaining the trust of his constituents, I would like to think (anecdotally) that after his response to the flooding of our city his approval ratings just soared. Regardless of whether you understand WHO was posting to Facebook or Twitter, news broke faster through those mediums than anything else. Within minutes connected individuals were knocking on doors and telling their neighbors to move their cars to higher ground. The Mayor effectively mobilized a city by touching a few through social media faster than he could have by any other means. That’s amazing and we should be taking notes.

So, what can we learn from Hurricane Irene and Mayor Tutunjian about emergency preparedness for reputation management, social media or SEO disasters?

• Gather your advisors and trust them – Build a network of consultants, agencies and/or teams you trust to give you the facts and act in your best interest. Sometimes that means not going after the biggest fish, but staying true to yourself.
• Plan for the worst, hope for the best – You should have a plan in place *before* disaster strikes. Learn from the misfortune of others, because acts of god and awful things can/do happen. You cannot plan for everything, but try to picture the absolute worst case scenario. What would you do? Once you’ve envisioned it and thought through your options the unknown will feel far less intimidating.
• Implement an early warning system – If you aren’t already using an online reputation monitoring solution like Radian 6, Visible Technologies, Trackur or even just Google Alerts, you should be. If you don’t have a way to gather news about your business, products or service, you’re acting blind. You might a disaster brewing, but you wouldn’t know it until it was too late. Don’t let this happen. Find a solution that is cost-effective and easily managed. Learn how to use it and start monitoring those mentions.
• Mobilize early – When you discover something disconcerting, put your plan into action. You should have scenarios built out and based on your discovery, you or a member of your team will know what to do. This may be as simple as further monitoring or as complex as implementing a coordinated PR/ORM/Marketing offense. Get everyone that needs to be involved in those decisions together early. If it’s nothing, you’ll have some practice under your belt for when the proverbial sh*t does hit the fan.
• Communicate frequently – If disaster really has struck, make sure you’re communicating with your advisors for the most recent insight, your team who should be implementing your plan and your community who *needs* to know what is going on. If you’re in charge, you need to be transparent, timely and available for questions. There is no role more important, it will gain your communities’ respect regardless of whether you have all of the answers.
• Act. – I’ve already discussed the importance of shortening your OODA loop to gain a competitive advantage. The same is true when recovering from a disaster. The sooner you make a decision, the sooner you will be on a path to recovery. If you make a mistake, you’ll find out sooner if you act now, which gives you more time to recover. If you didn’t make a mistake, perfect, you’re on your way. This is vital. The number one way to fix a reputation management problem is to get back to business. We (people) have this incredible capacity to forgive when things return to the status quo. If you made a mistake, fix the problem, apologize and get back to work. The only reason we’re disappointed is because we were a fan to begin with.

Troy, NY will bounce back from Hurricane Irene. Eventually, these waters will subside and we’ll be sipping Guinness at Ryan’s Wake remembering when:

How will you survive your future online reputation, social media or SEO disasters?

UPDATE – For those wondering, Outspoken Media’s office doesn’t appear to be in any danger of flooding and all is well. Unfortunately, there are a lot of bridges into the city closed and water is still rising, so we’re working from home today. Business as usual, just don’t have access to the more office-y things.

Also, Lisa had a vacation scheduled for today, but camping doesn’t mix well with hurricanes. Instead she’s our reporter in the field. Here’s some of the aftermath around the Capital District:

Ah, the notion that the Internet isn’t real life. It’s so cute, so innocent, so absurd! What makes us believe this? Is it denial or ignorance? It doesn’t matter.

Either way, it’s dangerous.

I didn’t really want to talk about Weinergate. It’s not only gross, but it pains me to think about how someone in public office can be so blind to the scope of social media and the Internet. But, looking at my own social media feeds I realized that former U.S. Representative Weiner is not alone. Many of us are blind. Too many of us, and as we’ve learned, being too, um, forthcoming online can often cost your job if you’re not careful.

Avoiding Mistakes

Weinergate started when Rep. Weiner decided to use Facebook and Twitter to solicit online relationships with women concealed from the knowledge of his wife. This is a stellar plan to begin with, but to top it all off, Weiner sent explicit texts and pictures to his online ladyfriends using a government-funded cell phone. Doh.

And then the unthinkable happened: he accidentally tweeted. I know, you’re shocked, right? That never happens. Meaning to send a picture of his junk to an online mistress via Direct Message on Twitter, he accidentally tweeted it to his public timeline. Although promptly deleted, it was still something that quite a few people noticed, and of course saved.

What can you learn from his congressional Weinergate?

Lesson #1: The Internet is Forever

To combat a potential online reputation management issue, we all must accept that the Internet is no longer a “second life”. People act like it’s is a shield, making them brazen and unusually open. But in reality, what you do on the Internet is more likely to stick with you in the future for a lot longer than it would in “real life.” Why? Because the Internet is real life…only under a magnifying glass.

Imagine what Anthony Weiner’s Google search results will look like in the next few years. Unless he’s smart enough to hire an online reputation management company, they will still be riddled with articles about this unfortunate incident. Then compare this outcome to that of Bill Clinton’s Lewinsky scandal, which happened before the rise of social media.

It makes me wonder, would Clinton have been acquitted of impeachment if all of his business had been online?

How to Prevent Mistakes

1. Only publish private messages from private accounts.
   This was Weiner’s first and most crucial mistake in avoiding this reputation nightmare. Had he had the foresight to keep public and private social media accounts, he could have avoided the entire thing. If you’re going to commit adultery (which we don’t condone, but for argument’s sake), never do it from a public account that could potentially hurt your business’ reputation or your own.

 

2. Re-read all tweets or status messages posted on public accounts twice before sending them.
   We’ve all seen far too many people manning company accounts who attempt to be clever by posting some politically incorrect joke to gain attention and create conversation. That’s an OK tactic, but only if you’re willing to stick by it. If you’re doing something controversial you might want to look twice at what you’re posting before you do it because backing down is not an option. It makes people angry.

 

3. Don’t participate in shady behavior that would embarrass your mother.
   Alright, I’m under no delusion that this post will stop any shady behavior, but please think about the traces you’re making when you’re doing whatever it is that you must do online. Not sure what traces you’re leaving? Keep reading.

 

Pointing the Finger

After people noticed they saw something they shouldn’t have on Weiner’s Twitter account, it spread like wildfire. Rep. Weiner tried to deny he had anything to do with the picture at all. He even went on to say that someone hacked into his account and posted a random picture of a penis to simply make fun of his name.

Upon further investigation it was found that the tweet was sent from a TweetDeck account that was consistent to most of the other tweets on Weiner’s account. While this didn’t prove anything, it put increased pressure on Rep. Weiner to come clean. And his story started falling apart…

Lesson #2: The Internet Leaves Traces

Computers are far more complex than most people realize, capable of tracing details down to every character you type. It’s no wonder that online reputation consultants are such a needed and growing division of PR. But what traces are you leaving?

1. Your IP address is logged.
   Keep in mind that it’s very easy for someone to look up the IP address of the computer from which you’re sending information. While most preliminary IP lookup Web sites won’t give people details, that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. If necessary, authorities have the capability of looking at this information.

 

2. If you give a mouse a cookie…
   Ah, cookies. The delicious advertising evil that flaunts things we want to buy in front of us while we’re trying to work. I hope that isn’t just me. The use of these is so extreme with third party cookies tracking your movements from site to site. But, they’re hidden too, so there are traces most people don’t even think about. Let’s just say I wouldn’t buy anything embarrassing or illegal at work.

 

3. Deleting doesn’t work.
   This goes beyond the fact that anyone can screen-shot anything you do on a public social media site or even blog for that matter. I’ve seen many deleted tweets resurface via this method. You can delete a tweet or blog post/comment from your account, but once it goes public someone will always have a copy. And if you’re using Facebook, privacy be damned, they keep records of all account activity, even what has been deleted. They own that information and will use it as they see fit.

 

Lying to Cover Your A**

As speculation that Rep. Weiner was lying about his illicit behavior increased, women involved in his online rendezvouses started coming out of the woodworks.

What did he do? He emailed his long-term online girlfriend, porn star Ginger Lee and asked her to lie for him and tell the press that they don’t know one another. He then combined it with his arrogance instructing her on PR tactics and telling her to use “y’all” to sound more innocent. He sure knows how to woo a woman.

Lesson #3: The Truth Prevails

Knee deep in lies and with the media hungry for fuel to feed the flame, copies of e-mails and Facebook conversations surfaced (probably for a nice chunk of change) between Rep. Weiner and his many online pursuits.

Take this lesson back to when you were a kid and your mom told you that the truth always comes out. Especially when all of the cheating, lying and coercing is taking place online and your emails are staring you in the face word for word. It’s much harder to have a he said- she said public debate this way.

1. Be accountable.
2. Be polite.
3. Don’t write anything you’d be embarrassed for the public to see.

The People Will Rally

Due to the cover-ups and busted lies, more investigations were prompted about Rep. Weiner’s activities. One such investigation was his potential online solicitation and involvement with a 17-year-old girl. *sigh*

Fellow politicians began rallying for his resignation, and while the President wasn’t one, Obama did offer his opinion that if it were him, he would resign. Game over. Once your colleagues and the general public rally against you it’s a lost cause.

Three days after Obama’s interview, Anthony Weiner resigned from Congress and issued a public apology.

Lesson #4: Some Things You Can’t Combat

Escalations were what really made the situation what it was, a bloodbath. If you remember lesson #3 that truth prevails, the more information that comes to light, more attention will be thrown at the situation you’re trying to bury. It’s best to come clean about something completely on your own terms so that the situation doesn’t get worse.

If it gets so big that the President, mainstream media and Internet rally against you, it’s an issue even professional ORM experts or crisis communication agencies may not want to touch. And then you’re really in trouble.