Contents
Foreword by Robert Scoble, managing director of FastCompany.TV and coauthor of Naked Conversations.
Part I, Understanding Your Online Reputation, demonstrates the power of social media online to build or destroy your reputation and how to engage customers on this new playing field.
Chapter 1: Your World Is Now Radically Transparent (DOWNLOAD)
The switch from traditional media and corporate monologues on Web sites to social media on the internet makes everyone a journalist. They will judge you, your company, and your brand. Reputation management requires new skills in this radically transparent world.
Chapter 2: You Don’t Own Your Company’s Reputation
Companies can spend millions of dollars each year to promote and manage their brands, yet a single negative blog post can destroy a reputation within days. The power to control a brand is rapidly shifting away from the companies that have the deepest pockets and instead, it’s the companies that best listen-to and engage their customers that win the reputation race.
Chapter 3: Developing Your Personal Brand
Individual director, CEO, and employee reputations are key components of company and brand reputations. Entrepreneurs and professionals live or die based on their contacts and reputations. The internet adds another layer of complexity to individual reputation-building, however, there are first-mover advantages for those individuals who act now, using the internet to increase their connections with relationship-enhancing content.
Chapter 4: Navigating the New Rules of Engagement
The shift from traditional to social media requires new skills, tools, and an understanding of social media platforms. Customer engagement means trusting, listening, and learning from your stakeholder communities, and responding to their comments with quality content in an honest, authentic manner. It also means joining and participating in networks they frequent, and having the courage to be radically transparent.
Part II, Using The Best Reputation Management Tools, gives you very specific tools and shows you how to use them for building your stellar reputation online.
Chapter 5: The Art of Generating Buzz
In your quest to become radically transparent you’ll need to impress those who control the media. While mainstream journalists used to hold the power to influence your customers, that power is now shifting to bloggers and citizen journalists. By understanding how public relations has evolved—and learning the new approaches to sharing your message—you can influence what’s said about you.
Chapter 6: Managing Your Reputation With SEO
The contents of ten blue search engine links can decide whether your company wins a new contract or you win that promotion. While you can’t guarantee which web pages will appear in a Google search, search engine optimization (SEO) can help tip the scales in your favor.
Chapter 7: Using Multimedia Content to Engage Your Audience
Astute companies use relevant digital images, video, and audio to demonstrate their expertise and gain respect. You can solicit fabulous multimedia content produced by the citizen journalists and also craft your own content for posting on your websites and in the social media.
Chapter 8: Writing Engaging Text
Great writing will engage your important stakeholders and enhance your reputation online. Regardless of whether you write white papers, books, blogs, web pages, e-mails, or instant messages, make every word count. You can do this with professional, engaging and deliberate writing adapted to any situation, as described in this chapter.
Chapter 9: The Power of Blogs
Building and launching a blog can add a lot of value to you and your business but is not something that should be done half-heartedly. The software you select, the style of blog you use, and the way you engage your readers all play an important role in determining your success or failure in the blogosphere. Understanding what your stakeholders expect from you and how to reach them with an authentic, radically transparent voice, will ensure your blog is a positive reflection on your reputation.
Chapter 10: Social Networking
Social networking provides an opportunity for your stakeholders to connect with each other and discuss your reputation. By understanding the different types of social networking platforms—and the best way to engage them—you can lay a foundation that builds a positive reputation for you or your business.
Chapter 11: Your Online Activities: You Are What You Do
Your actions have a huge impact on your reputation. Stakeholders review your books at Amazon, your products at ePinions, your online retail store at Shopzilla, and your performance on eBay—the more positive the reviews, the better your reputation. In Second Life and other virtual worlds, you can build a fantastic reputation that will cross over to your first life—it may be time to join the 11 million avatars in that virtual world.
Part 3, Building, Monitoring, and Managing Your Online Reputation, gets you started on discovering your current reputation online and turning it into the one of your dreams.
Chapter 12: The Importance of Reputation Monitoring
Monitoring the Web will ensure you’re alerted the moment your reputation faces critique. In order to get the most out of your online reputation monitoring you’ll need to know why it is important, what keywords to monitor, where to watch, and when to take action.
Chapter 13: Monitoring Your Online Reputation
Many free and inexpensive tools make it possible to set up a monitoring system without breaking your budget. If you prefer to automate your monitoring efforts, there are some solutions that offer to do the heavy-lifting for you—while still keeping you in full control. Alternatively, if you’d rather your reputation monitoring campaign be handled by experts, you can outsource the task to a professional monitoring firm.
Chapter 14: Repairing Your Online Reputation
Despite your best efforts to build a positive reputation, there will be occasions when your brand faces an attack from a blog, forum, or social network. How do you identify a reputation attack, when should you engage your attackers, and what steps should you take to repair your damaged reputation?
Chapter 15: Seven-Step Action Plan
To craft the kind of reputation online that will open any door, you need a reputation management and monitoring plan. The seven-step plan in this chapter asks you to do some deep introspection about your offline character and goals, then to devise strategies and objectives for reaching your reputation dreams using online media. In the process, you’ll set up monitoring tactics and a crisis management plan for long term sustainability.
