Grapevine Consulting

Online Reputation Management

Still at MediaCamp London. Have been reading SEO chicks a bit over the past few months so came along to finally hear Judith Lewis talking her thang, live.

Why monitor?

• You need to be aware of the kind of things your customers may be reading about you
• refine your messages, take it as feedback, find out what people are thinking and interested in hearing about you
• Judith shows the Google results for “Starbucks” which I also recently showed to an agency as well as Landrover Discovery
• In summary, it’s all about search (I just spotted Brendan Cooper’s post ‘own your Google page‘ this morning discussing this)

What to monitor?

• Everything related to the company
• Industry news

How to monitor?

• Google & Yahoo search (inc Alerts)
• RSS feeds
• Professional firms or paid for services [disclaimer: I work with social media monitoring service Attentio]

Press Releases & PR

• Good for search
• Paid for and free press wire services – don’t use them all! Pick one or two for distribution
• newswire today is a useful free service
• Write the content you put on your corporate website different to what your official press release (varying content)
• Be careful, don’t spam journalists or the free press wires. Think through your distribution strategy

Corporate blogging

• Authentic voice (check out my previous post on is ghost blogging wrong which achieved a bit of feedback)
• Make personal connections, even if you’re a big business, people love it so personalise your posts in a way which is appropriate to yourself and your company
• Engage outside of your own blog e.g. Twitter, leaving comments

Over all? When stuff goes wrong, change it.