Feb 29 2008
Monitoring Your Online Reputation
The Internet has made the world a much smaller place, but it can still seem overwhelming to monitor what is being said about you and your business. No matter what industry you are in, you will eventually have a disgruntled customer. Many will also have to contend with competitors who try to boost their own reputations by attacking others.
To monitor your name, I recommend Googling yourself. This will remind you of what people see when they look for you. If you have pictures of a racy Cancun vacation on your MySpace page, this might be the time to set that to private if you are developing an online business reputation. Then when you make a great contact you can be confident they will find the professional image you are cultivating when they Google you to find out more information (because they will!).
If you have a somewhat common name, odds are that people will have to determine which information belongs to you. There are a couple of strategies around this:
- Use your picture in profiles, articles and websites to clarify your identity
- Buy your name domain (www.betsytalbot.com) even if you do not choose to do anything with it now. For a mere $10/year you can make sure that a porn star or sleazy politician with the same name as you doesn’t steal your online thunder, or even insure that a competitor can’t buy your name and redirect it to their site.
Setting Up Alerts
Often when something is said about you it may not end up on page 1, which means you won’t see it until it has gained enough traction to make it to page 1. If you have a lot of time and a great memory you could Google your name and keywords every single day and scroll through all the pages (I hope your name isn’t Jane Smith!), but I am sure this is not the best use of your time. Whether you are monitoring who is talking about you or want to know how many times your product or service is mentioned online, Google Alerts is the easiest, cheapest solution for you.
How do you set up a Google alert?
- Go to www.google.com and sign in (if you don’t have an account, set one up take advantage of all of Google’s services - it is free!)
- Click “More” at the top left side of the screen and then “even More” from the dropdown list.
- Click on “Alerts”
- Type in the word or phrase you want to search for
Use quotes around phrases to be more specific (i.e., “betsy talbot” instead of betsy talbot - without quotes always returns results on any mention of “betsy” or “talbot” on the internet - too many alerts!) - Select Comprehensive as the type and choose how often you want the report
- Confirm the email address.
It is really that simple! On the time schedule you choose, you will receive an alert every time your word or phrase is used. You can use this to monitor your name, company name, suite of products or services, or even to keep up with the news on industry terms important to you. You can even follow news on your favorite author or business guru.
Monitoring your online reputation is a wise business move, and one that takes little effort and zero dollars.
Posts
Do you have any advice if someone else has already bought your domain name? What about those www.janedoe.name domains? Worth it?
Karen, you can buy a version of your name (especially if you are going to be a best-selling author!) or you can contact the owner of the domain name you want and make a pitch to buy it. All the domain name companies offer this as an option.
If your name is already bought, you can go the route of “thejanedoe.com” or “theofficialjanedoe.com.” Some people also use a hyphen - “jane-doe.com.”
If possible, get the easiest spelling of your name available. That is how people know you and that is how they will look for you.
Okay, this may seem like going into the paranoid side of things, but I also bought the domain names for my kids. They are still young enough that they don’t use the computer, but I figured that they should have the use of their names as domain names when they are old enough.
What a great idea! I don’t have kids so the thought did not occur to me. Thanks for pointing it out.