Monitoring and managing your online reputation is a very important job for the established leader. There are tools out there that can help you do this important task effectively. Mention just might be the better solution over Google Alerts for monitoring and managing your web reputation.
First though, you have to nourish your online reputation by being credible and honest. If you are an established entrepreneur and have been marketing online for a while, you understand how important establishing and maintaining a good web reputation is. Your online reputation is dependent on your influence over people and how big of a following you have built. Along with this, trust and credibility play an important role. To build and maintain these two key components, you should stay active with your online reputation and you have to do it honestly.
Attempting to influence a discussion by pretending to be a customer is not a good idea and can do a great deal of damage to your name. In fact, here is what Global CEO of brand value agency, Jez Frampton has to say about it. “If you try and pretend to be one of them you get found out pretty quickly. The backlash to doing that is likely to be much bigger than if you hadn’t got involved in the first place and had just done a good job listening,” he says. (Tim Anderson, guardian.co.uk, July 2013).
With that in mind, the second thing you need to do in order to manage your name is to find the discussions out there on the web about you. Many turn to Google Alerts for this job. However, Google Alerts is not the most effective choice since its alerts are not in real time. What this means is you are receiving information on a mention of you a week later which really slows down the process of removal or you commenting back on the mention.
A good alternative to Google Alerts is Mention which is a powerful application that enables you to monitor your name or any keyword for that matter in real time. It allows you to react on-the-go and reply to comments, retweet posts or share directly from their platform. It is a great application for both small and large businesses since anyone can afford it and benefit from it. It even won the “Startup of the Year” nominee at the TNW French Startup Awards ceremony.
Another good thing about Mention is that its platform is accessible through desktop and mobile. Plus, unlike other applications, the transition from going from desktop to mobile was and still is user friendly and everything is still in real time.
To conclude, your web reputation can either make you or break you.Bad comments and discussions involving you will most likely happen, but how you respond to them will determine if you keep the credibility and trust in your reputation. Monitoring and managing such comments through tools like Mention is key to maintaining a good online reputation and keeping your following.