posted by Nicolette Beard @ 8:40 AM
Your brand is your most important asset. Your brand is what attracts the best job candidates, commands a premium in your stock price and helps you retain top talent. Your brand is what distinguishes you from every other company out there. Your brand is your essence.
Imagine building a solid reputation for decades and overnight it’s in jeopardy. All your industry accolades and employee goodwill can’t help you now. That’s why having a reputation management plan as part of your ongoing communications is so crucial.
If you’re not proactively managing your brand, someone else will do it for you.
Creating Web Habits to Protect Your Reputation
If you haven’t been creating content through digital channels, the chance of your corporate domain being pushed down in the search engine results page (SERPs) is high.
A disgruntled former employee or unhappy customer can mobilize dozens of mentions before your communications team even knows about it. Most people don’t look beyond the first page of the SERPs, so you want to consider the various digital assets you can be distributing online.
Of course, optimizing your entire website (aka SEO) so that search engines can find all of your pages is the simplest course of action. Engaging in a paid search campaign to maintain your brand throughout the year is another. Publishing white papers and case studies frequently will place your name before stakeholders and employees on a regular basis. And creating social media profiles on relevant social channels, and encouraging your employees to do the same, adds up to a lot of incoming links from trusted sources.
Remember that social media amplifies your message and can expand your digital footprint exponentially.
“Citizen Journalism” – The New Normal
With the rise of the 24/7 online news cycle, it’s imperative that your company be monitoring social media channels. Breaking news today will stream through social media sites like YouTube before mainstream media can deploy resources to confirm or deny a story.
Remember the U.S. Airways flight that crashed into the Hudson River? Twitter was where that news first broke. “Citizen journalism” is becoming the norm, and companies need to be prepared immediately to cover their own news, which means grasping the social technology tools that make this possible.
We recognize social media brand management may be outside your comfort zone. However, social media is the “new normal.” But at the very least you should be prepared to respond in some fashion. Even if you have no use right away for Twitter, Facebook or YouTube, park your name anyway. Detractors often try to “brandjack” a company name.
Becoming a Trust Agent
Reputation management must become part of a company’s online communications strategy. While none of us can foresee what event might spur Internet chatter and take on a life of its own, you can react and/or reframe the situation if you have a digital content strategy in place.
When a company is committed to disseminating information to the media, its customers, employees and investors, it’s earning trust. Getting the word out about your company through as many communication channels as possible: news releases, blog posts, e-blasts, video, tweets and fan pages, all play a part in managing your online reputation.
If a company is sincere, transparent and accessible in its communications, consistent messaging over time will solidly position your brand with key constituents and help put you ahead of the curve, if and when a difficult situation overtakes the news cycle.
At the end of the day, it really is all about trust.
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2.19.2010
posted by Nicolette Beard @ 12:27 PM
One of the most challenging aspects of owning or managing a website is the consistent need for new content.
Unless a website is frequently updating its pages with new product information or service offerings, it will see its influence, with both readers and search engines, decline over time. We talked about the hazards of becoming a “tombstone” web property in a recent post.
I’d like to share ways to generate content that not only will help you maximize your website’s visibility, but also improve its usefulness to your visitors.
Leveraging Your Digital Assets
I’ve borrowed a page from the so-called “Internet marketing gurus,” who’ve mastered the art of re-purposing their “must-have” e-book. You, too, can leverage your existing content and enjoy better search results at the same time.
There are portions of your site that are easy to forget: a letter to shareholders, pictures of the company sales convention, a podcast of a new product demo, etc. You may not realize that this content can be optimized for more search value. These are your digital assets. They took just as much time and money to develop as your user-friendly navigation or your killer app.
Optimizing Images
If you’ve paid for professional photography and own the rights, you need to start earning back the money you paid by optimizing those images for search engines. Allow the search engines to reach the directory they live in, and offer a plain image behind any that are displayed in Flash enhancers, so they can be indexed.
You can also leverage your images in social media profiles such as Flickr or Photobucket. I knew a photographer who had a limited budget but wanted to showcase his fabulous portfolio. His web developer set up an account and linked the website directly to Flickr. Unfortunately, the images were named 0700154scl.jpg – not search friendly at all.
Ideally, you want to include alt tags, a link title tag, a proper title (not some number useful only for filing) and metadata inside the images to better associate them with branded and non-brand keywords.
Re-purposing PDFs & Documents
Besides being a great B2B lead generation tool, white papers can enjoy a shelf-life beyond their initial post date. Most companies spend hours developing sales materials, press releases and collateral material as well. Not only do your visitors see this as valuable content, but search engines do too! They are capable of crawling and indexing this content if you provide a pathway to it.
When you post your PDFs, or similar documents, to your site, make sure they contain at least one link back to your site inside the document, preferably with anchor text pointed to specific pages. This is a great way to leverage “free” downloads of your case studies. You’ve now created an incoming link from web properties that have downloaded and shared your content, which helps lift your pages in search engine results.
YouTube No Longer “Kids Only” Content
YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine and a marketing channel not to be ignored. The Diet Coke & Mentos experiments went viral with 11 million views in 3 years. I’m sure every B2B has a “how-to” video just waiting for an audience.
Post the video to your website, and let the search engines get to the files. Give your video its own page with corresponding copy, and submit a simple video sitemap via your robots.txt file.
With these three tactics, you’ve solved the problem of creating new content on a regular basis. Make re-purposing your digital assets a way of life for your business website.
Additional Resources: Optimizing for Universal Search
