Social Media: The tip of the reputation management iceberg (Part 3)
Posted by Kevin Joy on Mon, Oct 19, 2009
Part 3 - Continued from...Social Media: The tip of the reputation management iceberg - Why the urgency?
Sweat the small stuff
When companies try to wrap their heads around internet reputation
management, they often focus on the criminal or potentially explosive stuff.
Make no mistake: Malware, phishing, counterfeiting, trademark and copyright
infractions, URL redirection, defamation and domain-based threats can all do
serious damage to your brand. Even one successful attack can permanently
destroy trust in your organization and drive away customers for good.
But danger also lurks in the unintentional or lesser forms
of threats, the kind of things that, even if not criminal in nature, can still
frustrate your customers and keep them from returning.
For example, do you actively and regularly review the links
on your organizational Web site to ensure they’re still valid? How about those
links into your website? Although they
should, most companies don’t. How about checking for uses of marks, images,
logos, etc. in 3rd party sites?
I often hear people say it’s too time-consuming, or that the pages where
they occur don’t rank high enough to worry about in search engines. That it’s too expensive and their people have
better things to do than repeatedly surf internet sites.
I’ll politely disagree: Every company needs to do this and
should, given how relatively simply this can be accomplished. If you had a
physical store, would you open it in the morning with products strewn randomly
on the floor? Or would you want to make sure everything is neatly where it
needs to be so shoppers can easily find what they’re looking for? And if you came across your logo or wares
being used in an unauthorized fashion, but in a far away place, wouldn’t you do
something about it if you could do so easily?
Your online presence deserves the same attention, because
visitors will abandon a site with broken links, preferring instead to spend
time on a competitor’s. Also, the long tail nature of Search Engine
Optimization (SEO) is such that even the more obscure terms are increasingly
important in driving qualified traffic.
Finally, traffic can be driven to less popular pages via links from more
popular ones, so why take the chance?
And that argument about not having enough time or budget to
do? Look at it this way: Do you know how much business a sub-optimal Web site
is costing you? It’s likely significantly more than any maintenance would cost.
And what about the cost of each lost visitor?
Or worse, what’s the cost of each “non-visitor”, those whose online
experience is such that they are either diverted away or negatively influenced
to the point of not seeking out your brand further? Services like ours can be cost effectively
deployed – allowing you to have the peace of mind that your site isn’t filled
with broken links, that SEO investments are being optimized, that your
customers aren’t being targeted for illicit activity and, in the process,
allowing your people to focus on what they do best.
Stay tuned for the final blog post in this series - Social Media: The tip of the reputation
management iceberg - Getting Started...