Marketing Pilgrim

Online reputation management isn’t always about big corporate brands. In fact, half of my book Radically Transparent is dedicated to building and managing personal reputations.

Just in case you’re not convinced that you need to worry about your personal reputation online, you might want to check out the interview I did with WCCO Radio:

Listen to the Radio Interview

In it I discuss three important themes:

1. How your social networking profiles can hurt your career and job hunting.
2. How debt collectors are tracking people down via social networks.
3. How scammers and thieves are praying on the naive.

Over the past few weeks I have been watching the Toyota recall fiasco out of the corner of my eye. It began as a news story (which is different than its actual start date) and it has not gone away. Well, you know the online “you know what” has hit the fan when you can go to Comedy Central’s site and see this

Now, it appears that Toyota has really done some serious long-term damage to one of the most respected brands in the world. How? By being slow to react and being aloof enough to give enough fodder to someone like Jon Stewart to skewer them. Sure Jon’s not NBC, ABC or CBS but he’s more influential

A new study commissioned by Microsoft is about, of all things, googling yourself. I guess that if someone had used the phrase “binging yourself” there may be laws about that in many states but the irony of this is not lost on me. At any rate, the study shows that there aren’t as many people keeping an eye on what their personal online reputation looks like. Consider the people who are googling other people as a part of their job (ie. human resources types) this could be something that comes back to bite you.

Search Engine Land gives us some of the background

Every couple of months, we can reliably count on a big brand to help us learn a lesson about online reputation management. Today, we give thanks to P&G for today’s lesson:

The conversation starts when your customers say so, not you!

As AdAge reports, P&G has launched what it considers to be the most significant improvement in its Pampers line of diapers, in 25 years. Unfortunately, the company decided to start shipping the new diapers in old packaging, without explaining the benefits of the new pooper-protector.

According to its 7th annual survey, Alterian suggests that 66% of marketers plan to invest in social media over the next 12 months, but only 36% plan to monitor and analyze the success–or failure–of their efforts.

In fact, when you look at the breakdown, 40% of the 1,000 marketers surveyed plan to steal 20% or more of their traditional direct marketing budget to feed their new found social media marketing habit.

Considering Alterian recently acquired Techrigy, I’m sure they share my surprise–and maybe concern–that compared to the amount of spending planned for social media marketing, more is not being allocated towards actually monitoring and measuring that ROI.

Two weeks ago, it looked like Google might have been . . . well, fibbing. Back in June, the search engine announced that they would no longer redistribute “link juice” around nofollowed links, effectively deprecating the practice of PageRank sculpting. But late last month, it looked like the technique was still effective when SEOmoz published some research to that effect.

Not so much, it turns out. Today, Mozzer Danny Dover revisits the tests he used in the original post and shows that the results were, in fact, inconclusive.

While it’s easy for us to predict the decline, and ultimate death of mainstream media, I wonder if we know what we’re letting ourselves in for. Take, for example, the recent incident that involved a Washington D.C. detective and a “tweetup” snowball fight.

Mashable alerted me to the story. With a couple of pics and a video, it’s easy to believe that the cop overreacted and should lose his job:

Now, I’m certainly not bashing Mashable here–they took the social media angle that appealed to their readers–but let’s look at the “citizen journalism” side of this. Viewing the photographs and cell phone video, you might confidently predict that there’s not much the police officer can say to defend his actions.

There are few email newsletters that I can recommend marketers subscribe to–we live in an RSS world these days–but Dr. Ralph Wilson’s Web Marketing Today is on the list!

If you’re not familiar with Dr. Wilson, then I suspect you’ve entered your marketing career in just past the few years–Dr. Wilson is the grandfather of internet marketing advice. Hopefully, he’ll take that as a compliment

Anyway, when Dr. Wilson asked me to jump on a video interview with him at SES Chicago, I made time for him in my busy schedule. The result? The video below will take less than 7 minutes of your time and hopefully give you a few tips for your own online reputation management efforts.