Marketing Pilgrim

In Radically Transparent, we talk about the importance of finding your “centers of influence.” This is particularly true when it comes to online review sites.

Those that are unhappy with your products or services will find their way to an influential review site, without much difficulty. Those that love your service, tend to just accept that you met their expectations and move on–they rarely take the time to leave a review.

So, if you’re facing a poor score on a review site, what should you do? Well, you should follow the lead of photography accessories company Steve Kaeser. I recently ordered some equipment from them and used Amazon.com, because I knew that if I had any problems, there would be a resolution system in place, that I trust.

Not only did the order arrive on time and meet my expectations, but as a reputation management consultant, I was impressed by the two notes that accompanied the order:

I hesitate to share my PubCon presentation with you. You see, it includes all of the sneaky things I do to keep track of my competitors.

Well, actually, the presentation isn’t going to give too much away, because I tend not to go text-heavy with my slide decks–preferring to let my vocal chords do the heavy-lifting.

Fortunately, two awesome bloggers were on hand to capture the advice I spilled at about a 1000-words per minute.

For those of you who couldn’t get to PubCon, here are my slides:

Next up is Andy Beal.

He says if you like what you hear, tweet about it. His name is @andybeal. If you don’t like it, he says his name is @lisabarone. Harsh, Andy. Harsh.

There’s a growing interest in online reputation management. Over at Wildfire Marketing, I answered some reputation management questions for their Thought Leader Thursday series.

Here’s a taster…

What are some of the biggest mistakes you’ve seen people make when it comes to responding to a reputation management crisis, and how someone salvage the situation if they’ve already made one of these mistakes?

The biggest mistake is simply not having official channels in place to allow your customers to complain. Most disgruntled customers post to blogs and Twitter because they feel like they are not being heard by your company. They get frustrated with your lack of customer service and they think to themselves, “I’ll show them, I’ll post a negative review on Yelp/Twitter/Blog.” If companies would simply look at how they’re listening to their customers, and how they escalate and resolve customer service complaints, many of the reputation problems you see would never make it to the web.

There’s not much going on in the internet marketing industry this morning. I suspect everyone ate too much candy.

While they recover from their belly aches, I’m going to do a little "belly aching" myself.

I’ve noticed–as have others–that there’s a growing number of people referring to themselves as social media "gurus," "experts," and "geniuses" (OK, maybe I made up that last one). What’s interesting is that many–note, I said "many" not "all"–of these self-labeled gurus have achieved nothing more than fame for being famous. In other words, peel back that first layer and you discover that they’ve not actually accomplished much in their social media guru career.

In fact, many of them remind me of Lovelace from Happy Feet. He was in the right place, at the right time, and managed to convince his peers that he was a wise and gifted seer. The same goes for many social media penguins.

The other day I clicked a link on Twitter to a blog post everyone was talking about. I did like everyone else and read the post and then left a snarky comment. But then unlike most everyone else, I right clicked the margin and selected “view source”. Why did I do that? I am not really sure, I honestly did it without thinking. Looking at other people’s code has become something of a habit for me. I find myself sometimes getting more out of analyzing the blog’s HTML, than the post itself!

It’s a good day for reputation management consultants everywhere–we just got Google’s official endorsement!

Yep, Google has come off the fence and wholeheartedly endorsed the creation of positive web content to try and outrank anything negative. In the Google post, the search engine does an admirable job of creating a primer for Google Reputation Management which includes this endorsement of creating positive web pages:

Instead, you can try to reduce its visibility in the search results by proactively publishing useful, positive information about yourself or your business. If you can get stuff that you want people to see to outperform the stuff you don’t want them to see, you’ll be able to reduce the amount of harm that that negative or embarrassing content can do to your reputation.
(emphasis Google’s)

I remember once hearing someone say, “you are your business card”. Essentially, the idea is that the way you present yourself in public defines who you are–more than any piece of paper ever can. I think this is extremely true today, now more than ever. Think about it this way, if you are always there to help others, provide good ideas and contribute to the dialog in a positive way, then you become the guy/girl that helps others, provides good ideas and contributes to the dialog in a positive way. In the same tone, if you are obnoxious and annoying then you are the obnoxious and annoying guy/girl. Or if you dress in a creepy unicorn costume, then you might be that creepy guy that dresses in a unicorn costume. We define ourselves through our actions.

Late last week, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Jennifer Lindsay to discuss online reputation management, Trackur, and, well, life in general.

Mid-way through the interview I give up the secret to my success.

You can listen to it via the player below: