Online Reputation Management is something you and your company can not do without these days. It’s because the need for brand and reputation management continues to increase in importance as consumer time spent on the social web replaces traditional media. Furthermore, let’s not forget the fact that :

· Customers are online – Customers who find products and services via internet channels have various experiences. Many consumers blog, write reviews, make comments and share opinions on social networks. It’s important to have a good handle on customers that are publishing both negative and positive information so the brand can monitor and engage in the right way.

· Journalists are online – Public and media relations is an effective marketing/communications channel for merchants, networks and in some cases, affiliates. Journalists are increasingly researching stories online and the way companies represent brands can influence whether a particular one is considered for a story or not.

· Competitors are online - Brand monitoring online and within digital media provides companies a real opportunity for competitive research. Discover what other brands are doing to be effective and whether they publish negative information about your brand in order to attract sales from products and services.

However you choose to look at it, it means one thing and one thing only : that the future of your brands are also online. It does not necessarily mean that you will kill your brand if you don’t engage in these activities, – but rather that you may hurt your real-world business if you neglect to nurture your online reputation management. Take some time to study it. As usual, followings are a couple of good articles about it for you to dig further :

· Basics of Online Reputation Management

· PubCon : Online Reputation Management

“A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while he gets to know something.”

• Wilson Mizner ( 1876-1933 )

In my last post, we talked about social media and its implications to your PR strategy. I promised you that we were going to cover the issue of listening on what people say about you and/or your company.

Before we start, it will be very crucial to remember that listening is a very big part of communication. In fact, it could even be argued that listening is a part of life that we can’t live without. Any good communicators out there will confirm this fact. Just ask somebody you admire for his / her communication skills. It’s undeniable.

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In the context of Social Media, it can become quite confusing, – especially for a first-timer -, to scan and monitor what people say about you. As in real-life communication, it takes a skill to listen. The good news is, it’s easy to acquire the ability to listen in Social Media. Enter the “Search” function.

To elaborate more on this, we’re going to use Twitter as an example. By now, you must know already about what is it. If you have not join Twitter, do so now. You owe it to yourself. Find some important people to follow, – or better yet -, some people who is relevant to your field.

Assuming that you have already done all of the above, what you need to do now is searching the public timeline for the topic pertaining to your field. Owing to Twitter’s wild popularity, there are some excellent tools out there to do this very thing. Make use of them. Followings are three of them that I myself use most often :

• Twitter official search tool
• Tweetscan
• TwitterTroll

Official Twitter Search page

Now all you need to do is go to their sites and type your topic, much as the way you use Google or other search engines. For example : Peter is in the business of airlines. He would want to search for “airlines”, “flying”, “flight” or other similar search terms. The search tool will then give him tweets from people that used such words in it. Don’t just stop there, however. Push your listening act a little bit further. You might want to even search for your brand. Type “Apple” for instance, and you will see what I mean.

Once you reach this point, it will become easy for you to see what people say about you and/or your brands. Don’t forget other valuable information like what their needs, preferences or anything else that might help you to sell more. Good luck !

First and foremost, let me state that this post is just an introduction to a Social Media Strategy, – and as such, will quote a lot from other authoritative sources in the field. Among those experts that helped elaborate about this issue are well-known Web Strategist and Gurus like :

• Jeremiah Owyang
• Brian Solis
• Sparkplug blog, by Wendy Piersall
• Chris Brogan

First of all, let’s take a look at why should we need to learn more about Social Media and utilizing it in your Public Relations strategy. There are so many apparent reasons for this, but among the most interesting ones are :

• Mainstream media is increasingly looking to social media to connect with site visitors
• Mainstream media is using sites like Digg, del.icio.us and Netscape to source content. and ideas for their own articles/news stories .
• Search Engines pay attention – the posts that do well on social media sites rank extremely well – and nearly instantly. This also influences your overall site rank (I can only say this second part speculatively, can anyone confirm?).
• Site exposure to new readers/visitors that would never find your site otherwise.
• Significantly increased Technorati and Alexa ranks which translates into higher advertising revenues
• The ‘Secondary Gain” includes all of the above, plus an influx of activity from many smaller social media sites such as DogDott, PopURLs, YCombinator, DiggRiver, DiggMirror/DuggTrends, and many others.

To be more concise, Chris Brogan sums it up succinctly as this list of goals :

• Increase customer base.
• Generate leads.
• Drive sales.
• Build awareness.
• Make money from your content.
• Establish thought leadership.
• Educate customers.
• Customer-source part of your product development.
• Reach new channels of customers.
• Improve internal communication.

Seems obvious ? Indeed. But there are some more important factors to remember before you devise your company’s Social Media PR Strategy. The essential things-to-remember must include :

• Listening: implement at least a rudimentary listening platform. We’ll cover this in a later post.
• Communications: build a starting place to hold your conversations. And by this, I mean a blogging platform.
• Methods: determine the mix of content you intend to create, and build workflow around it.
• Community: most social media strategies have to address community and how you will embrace the people you seek to gather around your business.
• Neighbors: develop a plan to reach out to others in your community, comment, and share.
• Outposts: develop social network outposts where you can communicate with other communities, and also share the way back to your own platform.
• Marketplace: if your strategy involves making money, build a marketplace external to your community. Keep these separate.
• Attention: learn how to build awareness and encourage relationships with the media you’re making.

I encourage you to dig more about this if you aspire to succeed in using Social Media as part of your PR strategy. As I said in the beginning of this post, there are some valuable written gems ( read : blog posts ) out there. Read them up. You can start with the following well-written advices from the experts :

• “10 Social Media Strategies for the Fortune 1000 Corporations” by Jeremiah Owyang

• “The Poetry of Social Networking to Court Customers and Invest in Relationships” by Brian Solis

• “An Introduction to Social Media Strategy and Socially Driven Content“ from Sparkplug

• And finally, “Starting a Social Media Strategy” from Chris Brogan