RMV Episode 26
Online Reputation Management Part 1
Welcome to Resort Marketing Vids. I’m your host and resident marketing expert, Michael Grimm, here for the Resort Developers Association to help you navigate the world of online marketing.
Today we’re introducing a three part series covering online reputation management, or ORM. We’ve covered bits and pieces of this in the past and now, by popular request, we’re going to dig in to more detail about managing the reputation of your brand on the internet.
There’s nothing more painful than discovering you lost a sale to a prospective member because they researched your resort online and found some negative feedback.
Whether or not it’s true, today we are all defined by what appears about us online. Because when it comes down to it, perception is reality to a lot of people.
The good news is, as long as you operate honestly and ethically, with the right knowledge, tools, and guidance, you can resolve these issues quickly and easily.
This three part series will show you how.
There are three areas of online reputation management. Think of ORM like a tripod, use only one or two legs of the tripod and you’ll fall. You have to actively engage each of the three areas. Fortunately they’re all fundamentally simple and relatively easy, so it shouldn’t be a problem.
The three areas are: Number one, monitoring and tracking any reputation threats, and what’s going on with your brand. Two, analyzing information and how it affects your brand, keeping an eye on the social conversation. The third area is suppressing offensive content by joining the conversation and producing positive content to take its place.
We’ll cover the first area today, monitoring and tracking your brand, and any threats to it, online.
Setting up an early warning system of preemptive alerts is always your first line of defense. I’ve seen firsthand, instances where resorts were in the dark for years about offensive content that appeared right next to their website in Google search results. This can be extremely damaging to your brand, your business, and your profits.
There are several robust paid services that will monitor and track everything on the whole internet for you and analyze the information. You don’t need that. In fact, you don’t need anything other than a few free tools to get an early warning system set up.
The most important of these free tools is Google Alerts. It’s free, you just have to have a Google account and you can receive notifications of any new content on the internet. You can schedule the alerts to come to you as new information appears, once per day, or once per week.
My preference is to receive daily notifications.
You can set up similar alerts via Yahoo Alerts. It’s a similar system that may produce some overlap, but utilizes different search algorithms.
Another valuable set of alert tools are twitter alerts. There are two good services for this: tweet beep dot com and tweet alarm dot com. These services notify you any time somebody send out a tweet, or twitter message, with your selected keyword in it.
If you want to set up an advanced early warning network, you can set up RSS feeds to gather information from related industry blogs and websites.
There are plenty of good RSS tools, a few that I like are: Google Custom Reader, Snarfer, or Yahoo custom RSS feed.
To learn more about setting up a custom RSS feed, just do a Google search for “How to set up a custom RSS feed†and you’ll find a plethora of information.
Join us next week as we dive into part two of online reputation management. I’ll see you later.