Today most of us, whenever we get into anything new or meet someone interesting we would often Google it to find more about the person or the business. What if you see..

1. You are not able to find much information about the person on web
2. Google throws up a list of results including some blogs / review website / other social media pages where someone has talked trash about the company or the person.

In first case it would make your job extremely difficult to find more information about the business or person. Also you will probably give a second thought about doing any business with him given the fact that today most reputable businesses have their online presence.

In the second case you will probably never again think of doing any business with that company or individual in your life.

Truth or otherwise, every business would have some negative thinkers about them but it becomes a real problem when this negative views starts to surface in a Google search for your name. Companies realizing this have been spending tons for reputation management but here we will discuss a few easy and effective ways in which you can saturate search results for your name and do a good job at online search reputation management.

1. Make sure your official website is optimized for your brand name. You would typically like this to be the first result when someone searches for your name
2. If you have a blog – that’s great! Again focus on your brand, and make sure it shows up above the scroll for a brand name search. If your blog is your main website like in my case, make sure it is the first result people see when they search for your name.
3. Twitter – The entire world is going ga-ga over Twitter how can you stay away ? Join the bandwagon, make sure your Twitter profile has your Company name, also from branding perspective it is advisable to have your company name as your Twitter ID. Participate regularly and you will see your Twitter profile shows up for your brand name search ( Twitter has optimized its structure and Title for that – you don’t need to do the hardwork , just participate)
   If you have a really long name like me ( @rishi3211us ), Twitter might truncate it, however, if you can push a few links here and there you will still get it ranked for your name.
4. FaceBook – Another extremely powerful social media platform. The same principle applies as in Twitter, participate more – Google and Facebook would take care of the rest. One thing that you would need to do is go to Settings > Privacy > Search and check the box that says “Create a public search listing for me and submit it for search engine indexing”.Take advantage of Facebook’s vanity URL policy and get a nice URL like http://www.facebook.com/Saptarshi.Roy.Chaudhury
5. Linkedin – A great place to be and definitely a great help if you are planning to display a clean picture of yours in Google. Create a complete profile with all necessary details. Remember it’s a professional networking website, so make sure what you write on your profile and the way you network depicts a professional image about yourself and your company. You just need to create the profile and be active in the network Google would do the rest.
6. YouTube – How about displaying a video commercial about your company in Google first page? Yes you can do that easily these days. With most major search engines adopting Universal Search model and given Google’s preference for YouTube, upload a nice infomercial about your company and put your company name in Video Title and description. Most likely the video would show up for a search on the company name.
7. Press Releases – Send out a few press releases to online PR networks. Make sure you include your company name in Title and the same is sprinkled across the content generously. Once it gets picked up by some good news website, it is likely to get displayed on the first page.
8. If you are an industry expert make a few guest post in some of the authority blogs in your industry. Don’t forget to mention your company name and these are also likely to show up in Google results.
9. Also once you can establish your status as an industry expert and if you are doing at least some bit of networking, you might be getting some offers from other bloggers who might like to interview you. These are golden opportunities to increase your reputation and authoritative value and also when they show up in search results it adds a lot to your credibility.
10. While the above 8 options are pretty helpful you can also get good help from some other websites like Flickr, Plaxo, Naymz, Pipl ( people search). Create a profiles, put in some good info, participate in the community and most likely your profile would hit the first page in Google.

While all the above points can be effective in saturating your search results and helping you to keep away any negative publicity about yourself – one of the key things that you need to keep in mind is what goes on the Internet stays there forever. So be extremely careful about what you post on your profiles or anywhere else about yourself. While it might look fun to post a lucid comment about one of your ex-colleagues, mind it that your present colleagues might not appreciate your thoughts once they find it.It is extremely important to ensure that anything published on the Internet about yourself or that relates to you is something that you really want the world to know.

While I have received a few such requests before and ran a few campaigns successfully, this days there are also niche companies that specializes in this type of online reputation management services. Recently I had a quick chat with Kaurik Raj from http://www.weboostu.com/ whose key offering is Internet reputation management. As Kaurik pointed out, the easiest way to maintain your internet reputation is to create positive content and effectively use them to bury any negative content.

With increasing power of content creation with the people, I am sure negative reputation / reviews would be a part of life for every brand very soon and that would actually create an increasing demand for online reputation management professionals or companies like Weboostu.

The post 10 Ways for Online Search Reputation Management appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.

Dell is offering exclusive discounts to its Twitter followers. It was reported by Internetews in December that Dell generated more than $1 million in revenue over the last one and half years through sales alert via Twitter.

All who follows Dell on Twitter gets an alert every time there is a discounted sale at the company’ Home Outlet Store. They can either purchase the product themselves or forward the offer to friends and family.

To take its Twitter campaign to the next level Dell announces discount for the 17,727 people who follow @DellOutlet. It would provide product links and when the users click the link it takes them to the specific product page on Dell.com

All these 17,727 people receive the marketing message from Dell on regular basis. While many corporates has been trying to explore Twitter as a marketing channel Dell is probably the most successful one. Also the irony is , Twitter is yet to find a way in which they can monetize the platform whereas others are getting their fortune out of it.

The post Dell Boosts Revenue With Twitter appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.

Now Britney Spears joins the list..

Pop princess Britney Spears is planning to improve her Social media presence and enhance her brand online by hiring a Social Media Manager. Not just her blog and website but she is also planning to enhance and manage her presence in popular social media properties like Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, and MySpace with the help of “Britney Spears 2.0 Media Manager”. Here’s a copy of the ad placed on a Harvard jobs board, Britney is looking for an ivy leaguer to manage her high-profile brand online.

Click Image to see Bigger Image

Source: WebGuild

The post Britney Spears Hiring Social Media Manager appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.

The traditional methods of measuring success of any internet marketing campaign can be put into two points

1. Increase in Unique Visitors and Page Views
2. Increase in ROI

However, with Social Media Campaigns none of these seems to be the perfect parameter to measure success. Social media is about people and building relationships. Social Media campaigns develop by fostering connectivity between people and developing communities. It is therefore powered by collective knowledge and gives a closer reflection of the real life., which makes it very difficult to quantify the success of a social media optimization campaign.

Eric Peterson puts up a more logical view to calculate effectiveness of Social Media Optimization by measuring how “engaged” a visitor is when they come to your website.

Eric defines an engaged visitor as one who involves in

1. Reading my weblog
2. Reading other user generated content on the web site
3. Participating in a truly social activity facilitated by my site
4. Joining a social network of web analytics people
5. Contributing content directly to the web site
6. Submitting a comment to my weblog
7. Emailing me directly

Now considering these points, we need to agree that visitors who subscribe to some type of “push” feed are more engaged compared to the ones who view content sporadically. Also, it can be concluded that a visitor who just reads the blog has got moderate level of engagement, while someone reading the content and contributing to the content has got a higher level of engagement.

Now what do we get from this “engaged” visitors? Do they actually contribute to your sales and improve your ROI ?

As Jeremiah Owyang says:
“Some folks tied measurement back to hard ROI: (Does Social Media shorten the sales cycle/reduce cost, and does it increase revenues). For other companies, business blogging is about thought leadership, or building better products, how could you apply these models to the Wells Fargo blogs, that are designed at reaching out to communities?”

Your Social Media Campaign can actually help you to create :

1. Thought Leadership
2. Provides a platform for two way communication with the consumers for the companies
3. Get valuable customer feedback that contributes towards improving your existing product ideas
4. New product ideas can generate through user contribution
5. Increase your credibility
6. This “engaged” users can be a great media to spread the word about your new products and service.

So, though not directly contributing to the sales, SMO has actually become an extermely important marketing weapon for the corporates and can effectively contribute to brand building and also gives them a direct access to understand their consumer reactions.

The post How to Measure Success and Benefits of Social Media Campaign? appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.