Do you know what the world thinks of you?
It’s not just a rhetorical question.
Because in today’s Internet-driven world, your reputation could change in a flash.
You online reputation, even if you don’t think you have one, is as essential to you and your business. After all, there’s nothing more damaging than negative comments about you and your business.
What would happen to your business if one of your competitors started bashing you online and their posts started showing up above yours? What would happen if a disgruntled consumer started attacking your skill set or a your products on a blog or other site?
You see, most business transactions are preceeded by some sort of online search for your company name. If you have a tarnished reputation online, you are likely losing business.
So you need to keep tabs on what’s out there. I use a few tools to do this for myself and my clients:
- Google News Alerts – Put in the keywords you want (like your name or business name) and get emailed results as much as you want.
- Serph – Tool that searches for all web mentions of a keyword.
- Technorati – Pop in a keyword, and it delivers the top blogs that have it
- TweetLater – It send a report on the Twitter activity for the keywords selected.
All of these are great free resources.
But the key is to monitor it daily. Because when you don’t, you might just miss the day when someone does say something negative and hurt your reputation.
