We write a LOT of really technical articles here at the Reputation Management Way.  So, since that’s the case, we thought in this post we’d “keep it simple” and tell you about one of the most basic, but also one of the most important ways to look after your online reputation — facebook.

Yes, that’s right: facebook; it just might be the most critical piece of social media real estate that exists in the world right now.  It’s not just essential for individuals to share information, it’s essential for businesses as well to have an existing online presence.  Facebook is the linchpin of such an operation.  Any business, even those such as local hardware stores or pizza shops that have been around for a very long time, should take how they’re seen online seriously, and creating social media profiles on locations such as facebook (perhaps the most important one) is the best place to start.

Another VERY important feature when it comes to facebook, is the fact that it ranks so very highly on search engines for absolutely anyone that uses it.  This is true for both businesses and individuals, so if you’re having a problem with your search engine results (of any kind), the very best and fastest way to begin a “stop-gap” solution, or any sort of solution, is to create a facebook profile (if you don’t already have one).  Log-in and post 5 (or so) relevant posts or topics, and try to link to other sites that you like or find interesting as well, perhaps those currently in the news.

However, facebook is one of many sites that rank very, very highly on google, yahoo, and bing, and is taken very seriously by search engines.  HopLite ORM is a company that has compiled a very large list of websites that can be very useful to improve your online search results, if you want to know more just click here to visit their website.  They also have an online knowledge-base that covers a broad range of ORM topics; for that just click and (quote) “read this” to check it out.  See if there’s anything there that can help on your quest to ORM success, and don’t forget to sign up and use facebook, it’s probably the most important, basic, and yes “simple” way to make your online search results look amazing.

So, our last few articles focused specifically on the needs of companies (or on matters directly related to businesses in other words), but ORM for individuals is equally important, and often times (though not always) there can be some degree of overlap.  In our post just below, we talked about how for businesses, creating positive content on the internet and specifically content that appears on search engines, can create an excellent “break-wall” against any reputation problems that may come up in the future for that organization.  But this is also true for individuals, and creating positive content for search results pages can help immediately even after a problem already occurs for individuals as such.

We recommend users click here for an article from http://hopliteorm.com, which is a company we’ve featured a few times here at the Reputation Management Way.  Social Media is the easiest way to throw up positive content and positive entries that, in many cases (though not all), is guaranteed to show up where you want it on google and other similar locations such as yahoo and bing.  The article lays out a few Social Media sites that can be useful for individuals (and technically companies too) to put up positive content fast, and when we asked Hoplite on this matter they also recommended you read this page also, if you would like to find other information about orm that may be helpful, as there is much more on the topic even than that.

In general though, users can also feel free to contact us here at the Reputation Management Way as well, by clicking on our contact page up top to reach us by e-mail.  If you have any questions at all, just get in touch with us and we’ll help you on how to reach online reputation management success.  And we’ll try to do one or two more articles very soon about how individuals specifically can improve their online search results.  But the article listed above can help anyone (both businesses and individuals) improve their search results very quickly by providing quick ways to throw up positive content.

The article we have linked to from PR News Online talks very technically about how to achieve Online Reputation Management success.  Again, as with our last post, this article focuses strictly on the business side of ORM, rather than focusing on individuals (we’ll try to focus on that in our next few posts).   The first piece of advice they give is probably the most important, to analyze your internet profile as compared to your competitors.  They are right to say that there might well be faults in your digital approach, especially when it comes to the way things are put together on webpages that you own and social media profiles that you operate; specifically (very specifically) with the way things are written, and the way things are worded.  This can cause more problems than you think.

Another very serious issue in regards to ORM (perhaps the largest in the article) is listed in the second “benchmark” point.  That, it’s very important for an organization, or individual, to create a large amount of positive content before something very bad happens, and something large occurs in the form of negative publicity on the internet.  If there is a large amount of positive results already there on search engines to work with, it is much easier to deal with any problems that may arise later on, since it will be easier to “push” that content higher up and push unwanted listings down.

We can see when it comes to the technical side of Reputation Management, there can be a lot to deal with.  That’s why here at The Reputation Management Way, we try to stay on top of things, and the article is right to point out that businesses should always do so as well.

The following article (linked to here) goes over some ideas for how to monitor your internet reputation from PR Daily.  This article in particular, focuses strictly on business, and we’d like to take a minute here at The Reputation Management Way to draw a distinction between the sorts of strategies suggested in the link, and the kinds that individuals would use to monitor their online reputation.  First off, the article suggests using automated monitoring software to keep tabs on who’s talking about you and who’s saying what on the internet about the particulars of a business.  For an organization that reaches a certain size, this can be quite effective and even necessary.  Imagine if you’re a company that has a thousand employees (or much more) and many departments.  It may be quite challenging to keep tabs on who’s saying what about you online (especially if you haven’t hired another company to help).

But for individuals who wish to keep tabs on how they appear online, or for certain kinds of companies of certain configurations or sizes, monitoring software may be overkill, and may not be necessary. One should keep in mind the business case and the specific circumstance they’re dealing with in a given instance.  The article also has some very good strategies on how to deal with negative reviews, and even some ideas on how to stop negative reviews on sites like Yelp, and Urban Spoon.  Specifically, they suggest asking customers to write reviews ahead of time, before any negative reviews are written independently by disgruntled customers or patrons, but we have one suggestion on top of what the article says.  If you want to go that route, and you certainly can, you should create business cards that suggest where to go on the internet to write a positive review, but hand those cards only out to those customers whom you like, or get along with, and are confident in general will write positive reviews about your business, you should NEVER hand them out to people whom you have any reason to believe will write a negative review of your company.

We can see that when it comes to ORM, there are many strategies and paths you can take, the article linked to above certainly describes some of them, but no one path is right for everyone, or every situation.  Check out our other articles and postings for more on how to make your internet search results pages look better then ever.