NET-TECH REPORT: How To Manage Your Online Brand

Net-Tech Report with Chris Kauza

Readers of this column know that there are many ways to enhance your brand by building a stronger online presence. Following some of my previous tips, you should be starting to see some positive results – at least in terms of connecting with others who know and like you.

But what happens when you run into people who don’t like you? How can you be aware of them, and what can you do to mitigate their impact on your Brand?

Recently, I had the opportunity to hear Andy Beal relate some ways you can manage your brand online. While there are a number of tools and techniques you can use to “listen’ to what is being said about you, these are four simple tools you can start using right away:

1. Google Alerts – if you have nothing else set up, you can set this up to monitor Google Search, Google News, Google Blogs, Images, Groups, etc. You can even have alerts sent to your email.

2. Technorati – this is a great tool for tracking mentions in blogs and other Social Media. It’s an opportunity to answer questions and engage others in your Brand. If you find someone who is bad-mouthing your Brand, this gives you the opportunity to engage with them and see if there is something you can do to fix the issue. If they are supporting your Brand, then you have a great opportunity to thank them for their efforts, and reward them / turn them into a raving fan.

3. Twitter – if you’re online with any kind of presence, then your customers and peers are already talking about you, and they are probably doing so on Twitter. This is a good thing. But, if you don’t want to sit and monitor a Tweet Stream all day, you can log onto search.twitter.com and do searches on keywords that are important to you – your company name, your product or service name, etc. Simply subscribe to the RSS feed on each search in which you are interested, and you will be alerted when those terms come up in Twitter. Reach out to those who are speaking about what is interesting to you and engage them!

4. Brand Protecting – if you do any kind of selling online, you want to make sure you are protecting your brand. Just type in your brand name and it will check all of the popular social media sites and let you know if it has been registered or not. If the are not registered, you should go ahead and register it, so you have it under your control. Don’t think this is an issue? Ask Wal-Mart if they mind that walmartsucks.org / walmart-blows.com / walmart-really-sucks.com are online. These sites are great examples of a large company not effectively managing or engaging with their brand…

By using these four tools you can start creating and managing a stronger online presence, right now. Feel free to follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ChrisKauza.

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NET-TECH REPORT: How To Manage Your Online Brand

How to Use Technorati for Website Networking

Networking Your Website with Rita Wilhelm

Technorati is a website designed to highlight latest blog entries and user generated media such as photos, videos and music from around the world in various categories. This means that at any given time the latest news, special events, products and opinions from users around the world are featured in one convenient place for anyone to see and to link to.

Currently, there are nearly 113 million blogs that are featured and 250 million citizen generated media entries. Found on the Internet at http://technorati.com/, this site can be a highly valuable tool to use in networking and increasing traffic to your personal or professional web presence.

If you have a blog site or other media you want to share with the world, Technorati is the ideal place to feature it. In order to get started there is some basic information you will need to understand.

The use of tags is the primary method of getting your site categorized correctly for feature on the site. There are different ways to use tags within your content in order to get it featured properly and the method you use will depend on the type of software you have for your media as well as what programming experience you have.

If you use one of the well known blog software types such as WordPress or Moveable Type, you already have built in tools to use tags, typically called categories within the programs. Make sure when you publish your content on your site that you always use categories that suit your topic. These will be read by Technorati and filtered into the appropriate tags. If you do not use blog software that supports categories or tags automatically, you can still get Technorati to categorize your site appropriately with the use of some simple HTML links within the body of your post.

For example, if you have a post that pertains to pop music you will add in a link such as: pop music. If you have two pertinent tags such as pop music and Britney Spears add in a plus sign between the tags. For example, pop music Britney Spears.

Once you have your posts correctly identified, you need to tell Technorati about them so they can be posted. This can be done in two ways. First, most blog software can be configured to automatically notify Technorati upon publishing. Or, you can manually ping them by going to http://technorati.com/ping/ and entering the URL of your particular post. Using Technorati is quick and easy and can highly benefit your site by exposing millions of users to your content and allowing others to link to you site. This will increase your traffic and refine your search engine optimization processes.

Rita Wilhelm is founder and president of SnapMonkey Inc, which is a company that provides both online marketing consulting to businesses, as well as easy-to-use web-based technologies to help businesses effectively promote themselves on the web.
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Posted to THE NATIONAL NETWORKER. To subscribe for your free newletter, go to http://www.thenationalnetworker.com/. For the complete National Networker Relationship Capital Toolkit and a free RSS feed, go to: http://thenationalnetworkerweblog.blogspot.com/.

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How to Use Technorati for Website Networking