Your Brand’s Reputation

12.07.2017 |

Episode #1 of the course Digital PR made easy by Marco Capra

 

Welcome to Digital PR Made Easy!

My name is Marco, and I’ve been working in the media and communication fields for over 10 years, living the switch from offline to online and helping brands reach more people in the most effective way.

Do you have a business, or do you work for one? Over the next 10 days, you’ll learn how to find, reach, and engage an audience online.

Today, we’ll talk about reputation. If you want to improve, you need to start by assessing where you’re at. Is your brand liked or disliked? Are many people commenting on it? Does your brand arouse strong feelings? Do people trust you? You need to find out—and not just once, but regularly—so you can adjust and improve your reputation.

The first step here is to “listen” to what people are saying.

You should start by looking for:

• Mentions. Who mentioned your brand? Where? When?

• Backlinks to your site. Who linked to your site? When? What do they say about it?

• Likes and shares on social media. Who liked and/or shared your posts? Do they have a strong following?

Where do you find this information?

• First, obviously, google your brand. And when you search, use filters. You can filter by date, language, country, type of content (like video or image), and more. You can also use Google Alerts to get results directly in your mailbox.

• Social media. You can search on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks to see if your brand was mentioned, and where. Even better, some tools, like Social Mention, collect information from a variety of social media, social bookmarking platforms, blogs, and microblogs, so you can see everything in one place.

• Review sites. You can see how your brand is ranking on sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor, or Glassdoor, depending on the type of business you’re auditing.

• Tools like Google Analytics, Alexa, or Keyword Tool. They show you, for example, what keywords brought people to your site.

• Other search engines. Don’t limit yourself to Google. Use Yahoo or, if you feel adventurous, a minor search engine like MillionShort, which interestingly removes the most popular websites from its index in order to give you less popular results.

Now, let’s say you found out your brand’s reputation is good. Maybe you found a few very positive social media posts by happy customers. Why not join the conversation by thanking who created the content, commenting, or even sharing their post? You could even build a relationship with them and maybe get them involved in your future promotion.

And if you found something negative? Take some time to analyze. For example, say there was a negative blog post. How many people saw it? Is it really serious? You can reply to the author and try to fix things, while remembering to keep an eye on them in the future to prevent similar issues.

It’s also important to look at your competitors and see what they are doing and what their reputation is, and to keep up to date with the latest news in your field. Use a service like Feedly or any other RSS reader, and consider setting up one or more Google Alerts for this purpose too.

Whatever you do, keep your ears and eyes open.

Tomorrow, you’ll learn what it means to have a strong online presence and how you can create one for your brand.

Talk soon,

Marco

 

Recommended book

Brand against the Machine: How to Build Your Brand, Cut through the Marketing Noise, and Stand Out from the Competition by John Michael Morgan

 

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