How Google Authorship Markup can build your Reputation as a Thought Leader

May 31, 2013 by

If you want to take your reputation from good to great, becoming known as a thought leader is a powerful way to do it. In addition to championing progress and innovation in their fields, thought leaders constantly create new content, especially online, that not only demonstrates their expertise but also shares valuable cutting-edge insight about their industry.

Google Authorship markup is currently one of the best ways to develop your position as an expert and thought leader. By verifying you as the author of your content and making it easy for your audience to access everything you publish, Authorship markup gives you an instant credibility boost and provides a platform for your thought leadership.

There are 3 ways using Google Authorship markup helps you build your reputation as a thought leader:

  1. Verifies you as the author

  2. Links together all your online content

  3. Improves your visibility online

Verified Author Status

Being recognized as the author of exceptional content is the first step to becoming a thought leader. After all, if no one realizes that amazing guest article on a high-profile site is yours, does it really do you any good?

Authorship markup connects your name and face to your content. It shows Google that you are willing to put your name on the line for what you create, and it shows searchers that you are an authority in your field. It destroys anonymity online so you can claim your opinions, research, and other content, and all the reactions they inspire.

Linked Content

Once your audience starts recognizing your name, they want easy access to everything you publish so they can stay up-to-date on the most current predictions, trends, research, and innovation in your field.

Authorship markup follows you around the web and links all your content together on your Google+ profile. This way, it doesn’t matter where you published your latest article. Your audience can quickly and easily find it right on your profile. All your content in one place builds your reputation as a thought leader by showing how prolific of a writer you are. The more you write, the more of an expert you must be.

Improved Visibility

Closely related to verified author status, improved visibility helps more people recognize your name and makes you more relevant and credible. Authorship markup helps you become more visible by providing a rich snippet search result with your photo, name, and links to your Google+ profile and other content.

These richer listings make you stand out from other search results. The more often your content appears in search, the more your audience will recognize your name, face, and leadership in your field. Richer search results have the added benefit of higher click-through rates, so your content gets more traffic, too.

A verified author profile, linked content, and improved visibility all help you establish your reputation as a thought leader by building trust and conveying authority. Your name, photo, and profile all indicate you are real human being, not some SEO robot, which builds trust. Your follower count and number of +1s on Google+ provide social proof that you are an expert worth following, which builds authority.

And the more exceptional content you publish, the more of a thought leader Authorship helps you become.

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Online Reputation Management Basics for Politicians

May 13, 2013 by

Image is everything in the world of politics, especially when so many voters aren’t as informed as they could be when choosing which candidate or bill to support. And since so much research happens online these days, politicians need vigilant online reputation management to stay on top of their game.

These basics provide a solid online image foundation for everyone, but are especially critical for anyone working in politics.

Wikipedia

Although Wikipedia does not allow politicians (or their associates) to create their own Wikipedia pages, having one is a tremendous asset to a politician’s online reputation. Wikipedia articles are almost always the first or second result in a search, meaning they are known for being generally trustworthy and receive lots of search traffic.

Additionally, most constituents begin their online research with reputable, neutral resources like Wikipedia, so having a Wikipedia page is crucial to educating undecided or independent voters about you. If someone else hasn’t created a page about you on the site, your online marketing or reputation management agency should be able to create and monitor a page for you.

Blog

A politician’s own blog and website are the perfect places to further educate curious voters and make clear their message, values, campaign actions, and other important aspects of their image.

A personal blog is an especially powerful political online reputation tool for several reasons:

  • It allows you to explain your views, ideals, and message
  • You can quickly and easily publish campaign news, such as press releases, videos, or news events that support your point of view
  • A regularly updated blog makes you seem trustworthy and keeps constituents interested and informed
  • Blogs tend to rank highly in search results, so searchers are more likely to find you
  • You are in complete control of what’s on your blog and website

SEO

A regularly updated blog won’t rank well on its own. Politicians must also employ search engine optimization (SEO) techniques for their blogs and websites to rank well. And the higher your own content appears in search results, the more people will visit your official site, blog, and other channels instead of seeing negative content.

The most important SEO tactics for politicians to be aware of include:

  • Using your main keywords (such as your name and campaign issues) in page titles and descriptions, URLs, headings, alt image tags, and throughout the content of the page
  • Updating your site regularly so search engines crawl your website more often (one reason blogs are powerful)
  • Link to trustworthy, helpful resources to benefit site visitors
  • Get links from trustworthy, helpful resources, such as your Wikipedia page and your party’s official website

Social Media

A politician’s social media accounts often appear high in search results, pushing negative results out of sight. They can also make the candidate appear more human and help disseminate his or her message. But they can be disastrous if handled wrong.

The most important thing to remember about social media is to not post anything that could reflect negatively on you in the first place.

As this Politico article states, “You are what search engines and social networks say you are. A bad online reputation can cost you the election.” Use these basics of online reputation management for politicians to keep a sharp image online.

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How Social Media Affects Online Reputation Management

April 29, 2013 by

Social media plays a huge role in online reputation management. The many platforms available, their popularity in search results, and how quickly and easily they can spread information all make social media powerful tool in your reputation management arsenal.

There are 4 major ways social media can affect your reputation management online, and the consequences can be either positive or negative. That’s why it’s crucial to have a strong, sound strategy in place for what types of content you’ll post, when you’ll be active, and how you will respond and interact with followers.

Build, Change, or Solidify Your Reputation

Everything you say and do on social media–including the major social platforms as well as blogs, forums, review sites, and other interactive media online–has the power to build a new reputation, adapt an existing image, and solidify your current profile. What you like, what you share, the comments you make, the content you create, the causes you support, the information you give–all of these affect how followers perceive you.

This is where a sound strategy is so important. Without a plan to follow, a seemingly innocuous comment or a small mistake can snowball into a big reputation problem.

Social media has such a powerful effect on your reputation management because your actions happen in real time. Where press releases and traditional management tactics may take days or weeks to make a difference, what you say or do online can go viral in a matter of hours.

In addition to creating a good strategy, use social media to your reputation’s advantage with these best practices:

 

  • Claim your name on all the major social platforms

  • Use the social media most relevant to you and your target audience

  • Be consistently active

  • Use a variety of social channels, such as forums, blogs, multimedia platforms, and the big 4 (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+)

Control How You Appear in Search

On top of affecting your reputation itself, social media is an important component of managing your reputation because it tends to appear high in search results. When your social profiles and content appear on the first page of a search, less desirable content gets pushed down, meaning your audience is less likely to see bad reviews, detractors’ comments, and other negative content.

So not only does your social strategy build or change your reputation, it also affects how much of the first page of Google you own.

The good news is, following the best practices listed above is a pretty easy way to get more real estate in search engine results. The bad news is, any negative consequences of your actions on social media will also appear highly in search results.

Rule of thumb: if you don’t want it to appear on search, don’t put it online at all.

Monitor What Others Say About You

Although there are too many social channels to effectively keep track of everything everyone thinks about you, the real-time publishing nature of social media helps you see a fairly accurate representation of how others perceive you at any given time. And knowing what people think of you is the first step to managing your online reputation.

How do you know what people are saying and thinking about you?

 

  • Set up Google Alerts for your name, your company name, and important keywords

  • Use Technorati to discover what bloggers are posting about you

  • Sign up for tools like TweetDeck, SocialMention, or Trackur to find and save keyword searches, hashtag searches, multimedia, and social conversations

Respond to What Others Say About You

With monitoring how others perceive you comes the opportunity to respond. Strategy is important here, too, because responding to a detractor’s comment or bad review in the heat of the moment is often worse than letting the negative content sit for a few days.

At the same time, staying abreast of your followers’ and customers’ real-time perceptions and comments can help you avoid crises, take advantage of newsjacking, provide exceptional support, and continue building your reputation.

Responding to positive mentions of your brand–such as retweets of your content, good reviews, and thank yous–is always a good move. It shows you listen to and value your audience.

Done right, responding to negative brand mentions can help you resolve problems, improve your offering, and correct misinformation. When you respond calmly and professionally, even negative social mentions can support your reputation for listening to and valuing your audience.

It’s impossible to ignore how much social media affects your online reputation and how you manage it. The trick is to craft and follow an effective social strategy.

 

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Rebuilding Wall Street’s Reputation: 7 Key Factors to Focus On

April 9, 2013 by

With the national economy taking its time to recover and plenty of recent financial scandals, Wall Street’s reputation has tanked. If Wall Street, banks, and other financial institutions want to rebuild a solid reputation, they’ll need to focus on the 7 distinct perceptions consumers have about them. By addressing each of these areas, Wall Street bankers and stockbrokers can tackle the problem of a poor reputation from several angles.

The 7 key factors Wall Street must address to rebuild reputation are:

  • citizenship

  • financial performance

  • governance

  • innovation

  • leadership

  • products and services

  • workplace environment

Citizenship

Consumers expect companies they do business with and those who hold a lot of power to show good corporate citizenship and social responsibility. Citizenship in this sense is the idea that businesses like those on Wall Street must be actively compliant with the law, monitor and be accountable for their own actions, and have a positive impact on the environment, employees, customers, stakeholders, and the public at large.

Financial Performance

No one wants to buy from, work for, or invest in a company that isn’t financially stable and making a steady profit. Scandals, embezzlement, debt, gambling, poor investments, sour mergers or acquisitions, and other cash-flow problems all reflect a negative financial performance.

Governance

How a company is run can have a big impact on the company’s reputation. Consumers expect a company to be run efficiently, fairly, and responsibly, with strong values and appropriate policies.

Implementing a better system to punish employees involved in scandals and reward those who live up to the company’s values and mission would go a long way to rebuilding Wall Street’s reputation. So would making processes more efficient, policies more fair, and values and mission statements more in line with the other 6 factors.

Innovation

The most successful companies–which, coincidentally, usually have good reputations–evolve and adapt. They are not afraid to update old products and policies, create new ones to match the times, and otherwise innovate in any way they can to perform better and please stakeholders.

Wall Street has stagnated by doing the same things the same way for years. It’s time for them to get creative and change how they play the game to regain trust and rebuild a strong reputation.

Leadership

Thanks to the internet, consumers expect companies to have visible leaders who are experts in their industries and take a stand on important issues of the day. Wall Street executives should strive to be an influence for good and become thought leaders in smart investing, ethical banking and financial policies, and other relevant topics.

Products & Services

Businesses live or die by the strength and value of their offerings. Wall Street institutions must make sure their products and services actually help customers, solve problems, and are appropriately priced.

Workplace Environment

Although this factor mainly affects employees, it makes a difference in a business’s reputation. Consumers expect businesses they frequent to treat their employees well, and an employee’s assessment of the company is more powerful than a random customer.

Rebuilding Wall Street’s reputation will take a lot of work, but these 7 key factors provide the much-needed guidance to get them on the right track.

 

Filed Under: Online Reputation Management Tagged With: , , ,

How Executive Reputation Management Builds the Company and Your Personal Brand

April 4, 2013 by

If you are a chief executive in your company, managing your online reputation is just as good for your company as it is for your own image. That’s because as a visible leader in the business, your reputation and ideas support and reflect the company’s online profile in addition to building your personal brand. There are 4 main ways executive reputation management can help build the company’s good reputation. They’re even more important–and effective–if you’re starting a small business or creating a startup.

Hire Better Talent

Good executive and company reputations work together to help you hire more skilled employees. Both company and executive reputations attract prospective employees by giving them a good indication of:

  • the workplace environment

  • business values, mission, and culture

  • recognized and rewarded behaviors

More importantly, if executives have reputations as industry experts and thought leaders, the business naturally attracts the best employees. They are dedicated to the industry, tend to have more talent, are diligent and hard working, and want to learn from the big names in their field.

Close More Deals

Whether you sell a product or service, strong executive reputations help the company generate more leads and sales. When executives are known for expertise, leadership, and quality, those attributes build and support the reputation of the company overall. With those virtues, the company’s offerings and customer support are more likely to be top-notch, which attracts more customers and clients.

Strong executive and company reputations can also help you

  • justify charging more for your products and services

  • negotiate better mergers and acquisitions

  • resolve employee or customer problems more smoothly

Attract Better Customers and Investors

On top of getting more leads, sales, and revenue, positive executive reputations help the company attract a higher caliber of customers and investors. With strong executive reputation management, business leaders can effectively share the best qualities of their personal reputations with the company reputation, attracting customers and investors who value those qualities. Some of the best personal qualities that attract better customers and investors include:

  • industry expertise

  • high-quality products

  • efficient and fair governance

  • social responsibility policies

  • supporting charities or important causes

And better customers and investors mean more funding and more revenue to grow the business.

Get Better Media Coverage

People connect with other people, not businesses. So an executive’s reputation is ultimately more important in getting media coverage, while more good press builds up both the company profile and the executive’s personal brand. Executives who maintain a positive online reputation attract more reporters and better news stories, and have an easier time getting their press releases and news published.

Executives who become thought leaders take it one step further by increasing the visibility of the company. By regularly publishing expert content with the business name as part of their byline, these executives build the exposure and expertise of their company and their own brand at the same time.

Filed Under: Executive Reputation Management Tagged With: ,

How the Banking Industry can Improve Their Online Reputation

March 28, 2013 by

Banks are notorious for having bad reputations, and things have only gotten worse during the recent economic downturn and financial crises. Knowing which factors influence a poor reputation and some specific steps to take can help banks large and small rebuild their good reputations.

A 2012 Study by American Banker concluded that some of the largest banks: Wells Fargo, Citibank and Bank of America have the poorest reputations.

4 Reasons Contributing to Banks’ Poor Reputations

1. Fee Increases During Hard Times

According to CFO.com, banking profitability is down from from about 26% in past years to about 14%. While fee increases support bank profits, in the context of a larger economic downturn they have a strong negative effect on reputation. Both real and proposed new fees and fee increases create a reputational backlash.

2. Lack of Direct Interaction & Communication

According to AmericanBanker.com, direct interaction and exposure to the company’s messaging (including “advertising, marketing, public relations activities or social responsibility efforts”) have huge impacts on a bank’s reputation. A lack of either or both has a large detrimental effect on reputation.

3. Relative Value Mindset

Banks often see reputation as just another way to beat competitors. While reputation can be a major differentiator, building a good one is not a race to the finish line.

4. Recent Scandals

Banks seem to have more scandals than most other businesses. All scandals adversely affect all banks. They prompt customers and investors to pay more attention to bank behavior so even the littlest problem can become a major concern. If scandals lead to criminal indictments against banks, the net effect is even worse because no one wants to do business with a criminal.

5 Ways Banks Can Rebuild a Good Reputation

First, improve communication both externally and internally.

External communication includes:

  • positive brand messaging
  • asking for and responding to feedback from customers and investors
  • showing that your bank is a responsible, trustworthy lender in tough times

Internal communication means:

  • making it clear to employees what kinds of behavior are rewarded or unacceptable
  • talking about the company’s strategy, mission, and values
  • accepting and responding to feedback from employees

Second, focus on consistency.

If you’re communicating one thing but doing the opposite, your reputation will align with your actions. Compensation and reward structures must match your internal communications to employees. Acquisitions, lending policies, customer service, and other actions must align with your external messaging to customers and investors.

Third, work on existing relationships.

Because bank profits are decreasing and other industries are moving into the banking sector, banks cannot afford high customer churn rates anymore. That means it’s important to work on retaining customers and improving their experience and direct interaction with you.

Fourth, live up to expectations.

According to Anthony Johndrow of Reputation Institute (source), customers expect banks “to engage in citizenship, good governance and innovation, along with having solid financial performance and trustworthy products and services.” A bank’s ability to meet those 5 expectations will be reflected in its general reputation.

Fifth, use social media more aggressively.

Because social media promotes both communication and direct interaction, it can be a more powerful positive influence on reputation than other sources. Use it more aggressively to help customers and provide accountability and transparency.

Filed Under: Online Reputation Management Tagged With: , ,

Travel Industry Online Reputation Management

March 27, 2013 by

According to eMarketer, the number of people who research and book a trip online increases dramatically every year, and the trend will only continue. That’s why it is so important for hoteliers, agencies, and other travel marketers to take control of their reputations online.

Start your online reputation management off on the right track with these ideas.

Drive prospects to owned media

The eMarketer report indicates that branded travel websites are the second most common source travelers use when researching and booking travel online. That means your branded website, blog, and other owned media are the most important resources you have to help customers and influence a positive reputation.

Use a strong, comprehensive search engine optimization and paid search strategy to drive traffic to the media you own and control. Publish lots of unique, useful content on your website, social channels, and other owned media to help them appear high in search results.

Incorporate ads and reviews

Paid media such as search ads, Facebook ads, and promoted tweets can be the catalyst that introduces travel researchers to your brand and inspires engagement. Use them in conjunction with strong SEO and reviews.

Earned media, especially reviews and positive social mentions, increases your credibility and is the online equivalent of word-of-mouth marketing, making it very powerful. Use the following ideas to generate positive reviews and mentions:

  • ask for reviews on social media
  • host a contest or giveaway with the prize going to a randomly selected reviewer
  • use email to encourage customers to talk about their experience

Use social media aggressively

According to iProspect, the very first thing travel brands should do to control their reputations is claim brand presence on social platforms. The biggest social media–Facebook, Twitter, Google+, TripAdvisor, and various listing sites–are the perfect channels for generating powerful reviews and recommendations and spreading awareness of your brand.

Lots of updated content and the judicious use of ads on all these platforms can make a huge difference to both your bottom line and how you are perceived.

Make your media more visually appealing

Like the food and real estate industries, travel depends on visual elements to perform well. Using beautiful, high-resolution videos, photos, and other multimedia impacts your reputation in a few ways:

1      If you invest the time and money to create appealing visual media, your services are more likely to be high quality as well.

2      Great multimedia are more likely to be shared, increasing your brand’s exposure and creating indirect recommendations.

3      Visual media are easy to publish across many different platforms (e.g., YouTube, Vimeo, Pinterest, Flickr, etc.), making them more likely to show up in a video or image search.

Having an appealing and easy-to-use website makes a big difference, too. It encourages reviews, makes it easy to research and book a trip, and is more likely to show up in search results thanks to better navigation and user experience.

Focus on your customers

Your online reputation directly reflects your reputation in general. Take ownership of your reputation in all its facets by making customer experience as remarkable as possible.

Filed Under: Online Reputation Management Tagged With: , ,

The difference between owned, earned, and paid media in ORM

March 18, 2013 by

Online marketers today know the value of owned, paid, and earned media in brand awareness, customer acquisition, and customer retention. But a brand’s online reputation management also depends on these three types of media.

So what are owned, earned, and paid media, and how can you use them to manage your reputation online?

Owned Media in Online Reputation Management

Owned media are channels you control. Your website and blog are the two biggest players in this type of media. However, channels you partially control, such as your social media accounts, can also be considered owned media.

Other types of owned media include:

  • microsites

  • “business card” homepages such as About.me

  • mobile apps and notifications

  • webinars

  • press releases and news

Channels you own and control are an important part of your managing your reputation online. They often do very well in organic search results, and they promote what you want your audience to think and know about you.

Paid Media in Reputation Management Online

Paid media are channels you purchase, such as campaigns on Google AdWords or Bing Ads. Other types of paid media include:

  • Facebook ads

  • promoted tweets

  • sponsorships

  • banner and other display ads

  • TV and radio spots

  • print advertising

Paid media is most often used in marketing and advertising campaigns, but it can also support an online reputation management strategy in two ways.

First, purchased media drives visitors to your owned media, where you have more control over perception and conversation. Second, paid channels act as catalysts to drive more engagement with your brand, and more engagement leads to higher brand awareness and more earned media.

Paid media works best in conjunction with owned and earned media, because, as Mashable notes, many individual channels can be considered all three.

Earned Media in Reputation Management

Earned media is any channel you get by merit. You don’t own it, and you don’t pay for it. Someone else online, such as your customers or partner companies or industry thought leaders, mentions your company, shares your content, or publishes content you created just for their audience.

One major goal of owned and paid media is the opportunity to get earned media, especially by customers, who then become evangelists for your company and products.

A few examples of earned media include:

  • word of mouth

  • reviews and recommendations

  • anything that goes “viral” such as YouTube videos

  • guest blog posts

  • research published on other websites

  • your content being shared (i.e. LinkedIn groups, Facebook, Twitter)

  • your content being rated (i.e. Digg, StumbleUpon)

  • anyone talking about your company (i.e. forums, Q&A sites)

The downsides of earned media are that it can be negative, difficult to measure, and hard to scale. But even negative earned media has a benefit by showing you what processes or products you can improve.

Earned media is the most credible of the three media types, so you definitely want it to appear in search results and other places online to influence your reputation. To ensure searchers see positive earned media, follow these basic steps:

  1. Offer great products and customer experience

  2. Create unique, useful content for both owned (i.e. blog) and earned (i.e. guest blog) media

  3. Spark fresh earned media with paid media and word of mouth

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5 Steps to Controlling Your Personal Online Reputation

March 11, 2013 by

Personal reputation management is a growing trend, and has been for awhile as corporate professionals and business owners continue to realize the power of building their own brand.

Controlling your personal reputation online depends on what you’re trying to achieve and how much time and effort you have to put into it. Get started managing the brand of you with these basic steps.

1. Register your name across all major social media accounts.

Thanks to the advent of social media, potential employers and anybody who wants to learn more about you can find you pretty easily. Control what appears in search results by owning your name in all the major social platforms, including:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Google+
  • Pinterest
  • YouTube

If you work in a field with an industry-specific social network, register your name there too.

2. Set up privacy controls.

Most social platforms give you privacy options, so only yourself or connections can see certain information on your profile. Set your privacy setting to the equivalent of “Friends Only” or “Friends of Friends Allowed.”

Additionally, you may be able to adjust the privacy setting of individual updates. But a word of caution: privacy controls don’t stop your friends from sharing your posts, so a photo you thought was between you and the guys could suddenly affect your job search if the guys are sharing it publicly.

The best way to make sure no one sees anything you don’t want them to see is to never let it go online in the first place.

3. Be active enough.

If you’re not active on your social accounts, they won’t show up in search results, leaving lots of room on the first page of Google for other things to appear. Sharing, commenting, or posting something new at least once a week on the major social platforms should be good enough for basic personal reputation management.

If you are an executive in your company or trying to build thought leadership, you need to be a lot more active–at least one post on each network and plenty of shares and comments daily.

4. Own your branded domain name.

In addition to social media accounts, exact and partial match domains tend to show up well in search results. So when people search for “John Smith” they are likely to see results like JohnSmith.com, JohnSmith.net, and JohnSmith.wordpress.com as well as John Smith’s social media accounts.

If you’re just trying to control how you appear online, you don’t necessarily need to add any content to the website. You want to own your own domain name so no one else can use it. But if you have the time, it doesn’t hurt to create a blog or portfolio on your site to show off your skills and build your brand.

5. Use personal homepage sites to pull everything together.

Buying domain names, getting hosting, and setting up a website costs money. If you don’t want to spend much to manage your personal online reputation (or if you’re a college student and don’t have much to spend), you can use personal homepage sites like About.me or Flavors.me to create a hub for all your content online.

These free pages tend to rank very well and include a short bio, a photo, and links to your social accounts. You can even attach your branded domain name to the personal homepage to give it more weight in search engine results.

And here’s a new video I did with Online Reputation Management Tips:

Filed Under: Personal Reputation Management Tagged With: , , ,

Unethical Corporate Online Reputation Management Tactics to Avoid

March 8, 2013 by

Just like some forms of search engine marketing are considered spammy and unethical–known as “black hat” SEO–some tactics you might use as part of your corporate online reputation management strategy are also spammy and unethical.

While brand ethics vary from business to business, unethical online brand management tactics prevent the transparency you need to gain trust and encourage sales. To become a corporate online reputation management wizard, avoid the following spammy techniques like the plague.

Creating Fake Reviews

Publishing reviews under false personas is the same as lying. Creating fake testimonials and success stories is wrong too. Both will make customers, stakeholders, and others close to your business upset.

While creating your own positive reviews about your brand may help push negative content down in search engine results, once the search engines figure out what you’re doing–and they usually do–you can be sure your site will be penalized.

Instead of creating fake reviews and testimonials, call or email satisfied customers and invite them to leave a positive review on a review site you would like to influence, such as Yelp. Regularly reach out to your audience on social media and through email to gather success stories and happy testimonials, and make sure customers know you might use their words elsewhere.

Buying Links

Natural inks help indicate a website’s relevance and authority by telling search engines that other audiences find your content useful. The more links you have, the theory goes, the more relevant you must be.

When you buy links, you interrupt that process and abuse the power links should have.

This black-hat corporate online reputation management tactic has gotten many corporate websites penalized by Google before. It will get your penalized too.

Creating great content and spreading positive content about your brand around is the better way to get links to your main website. Instead of paying for the link, you put in the work yourself. Owning the content linking out and the content being linked to is honest and gives you more control anyway.

Creating Fake Social Media Accounts

Corporate online reputation management has become so crucial in the last few years because social media has made it easier than ever for anyone to say what they think about a company. Because of this, many brands may be tempted to create fake social accounts praising the company to try to balance things out.

Like writing false reviews, this tactic is the same as lying.

If you came across a social account that did nothing but praise a certain company, you would probably be suspicious. You wouldn’t want to follow or connect with them because you know you couldn’t trust anything they said.

Because social networks are designed to help people connect remotely and express their true opinions, they definitely frown on fake accounts and do everything they can to remove the account and ban the user who created it. Social media can be powerful. Fake accounts aren’t worth losing access the social networks where your target audience hangs out.

Instead of falsifying praise for your company, create official accounts for the brand and for each major executive. Be so honest on your official brand accounts that it almost scares you, while being true to the brand voice and message. Encourage employees to include their employment information on their accounts and to share positive things about the brand. Doing these things is the right way to harness the true power of social media.

Filed Under: Corporate Reputation Management Tagged With: ,
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