Stephan Spencer – Ask The Reputation Management Experts

Stephan Spencer has become a name that is synonymous with the word “SEO.” He’s even written the book on it (“The Art of SEO“)! In addition to SEO, Stephan is also well trained in the world of reputation management. As much as people would like to think that ORM and SEO are the same, they are two completely different sectors. When they are used together it’s the best of both worlds, and they compliment each other well.

I recently had the chance to catch up with Stephan Spencer while at Pubcon in Las Vegas. I grabbed him for a quick interview to get his thoughts on today’s best practices in reputation management. Be sure to check out the full interview below, as you will be learning from one of the great masters in ORM and SEO.

1 – Please tell us a bit about yourself and how you got into the reputation management business.

In the mid 90′s, I founded a web design and marketing agency called Netconcepts, which over time I morphed into a leading SEO firm. In 1999, on a whim, I moved to New Zealand and lived there for almost 8 years. I wanted to see if I could own and operate a US-based agency from the beach halfway around the world; turns out I could! I moved back to the States in 2007 and sold my agency to Covario two years later. I wrote a couple of books about Google and SEO, one called Google Power Search and another called The Art of SEO. I have a third one coming out early next year called Social eCommerce. I am currently an independent SEO and ORM consultant and am developing an online coaching and training program called the Science of SEO. The way I see it, SEO and ORM are two sides of the same coin; one naturally feeds into the other.

2 – What are some of the best methods for a person or brand to find out what people are saying about them online?

I would suggest subscribing to an online service that monitors mentions of your brand. Trackur is a great option. It costs $97 per month, and it does the most extensive monitoring of mainstream media and social media and search results. Google Alerts only monitors Google, but it is free and you can set alerts to occur daily, weekly or in real time. Brandyourself.com is another service that tracks positive and negative mentions in the Google search results for your name.

3 – How would you recommend companies deal with negative reviews and customer complaints that are currently public?

ORM is like a chess game, but one in which you actually move your opponent’s pieces as well as your own. Specifically, you move your opponent / detractor down the results and ultimately off of page 1 in Google. The ultimate objective is to build a positive brand reputation online for yourself while reducing the impact of any negative comments made by detractors. You cannot afford to be passive. A damaged brand online can cause both online and offline financial impact, as customers use the Internet as a way to research products and services prior to purchase. Negative reviews, hate sites and anti-campaigns against your brand ultimately influence customer purchase decisions.

Develop a solid ORM strategy, which includes analysis of weaknesses in detractors’ web pages, tactics to exploit these weaknesses, and strategies and tactics to occupy as much of the “shelf space” of the first page of Google results as possible with pages you control (such as social profiles) or innocuous websites.

One simple way is to create and optimize content that will compete for the same Google searches that your detractors are targeting. Build out profiles on social sites that have a lot of trust and authority in the eyes of Google. Don’t just target the obvious big networks like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Google+. Also set up profiles and upload content to less popular ones that nonetheless pack a powerful punch in Google, such as: SlideShare, Scribd, Crunchbase, Pinterest, Flickr, web.stagram.com, Ustream, Vimeo, TwitPic, Tumblr, Instagram, Quora, Squidoo, Lanyrd and Meetup.

You can’t control if people search for the review or complaint, but you can control, to an extent, what they see. Keep on top of where and when people are talking about you, so you can issue a public response to the complaint or negative review. Do not feed the trolls; confronting the haters will only lead to more of a mess. Keep your responses succinct and professional.

4 – What are some of the best ways to proactively prevent your brand from online attacks?

Participate in social media, and build your brand on social networks as I described above, so you can occupy as much “shelf space” as possible. Try to own the first two or three pages of the Google search results for your brand name.

Make sure you have claimed your brand’s username across all of the social web. Namechk.com can help you do this. Don’t neglect the lesser-known services.

Engage a PR firm or consultant to help get you interviews and positive brand mentions in mainstream media.

Make your brand encyclopedia worthy if it isn’t already, and work to get it into Wikipedia. That means meeting Wikipedia’s stringent notability guidelines by getting featured in mainstream media, and not violating Wikipedia’s conflict of interest guidelines by creating or editing your company’s article, but instead persuading unbiased Wikipedians to work on your article. More on navigating this minefield in my Search Engine Land article.

5 – In your opinion, what do you think are three hardest attacks to suppress and why?

Ripoff Report is certainly hard to recover from. With some good ORM you can probably push its Google listing to page 2 or even 3, but to truly make it go away you have to pay ROR their $15k extortion, umm, I mean, fee.

Even trickier is negative Google suggestions. For example, if you type your brand’s name into Google, and Google autocompletes it as “(your brand) scam” and “(your brand) lawsuit,” that will perpetuate the negative online sentiment more than anything else. People are obviously going to search that if it’s one of the top suggestions or related searches. And it will inevitably bring up negative crap. To combat that, you have to get searchers to search for something else related to your brand. Easier said than done of course. A black hat ORM tactic is to hire people offshore to do these positive sentiment searches (a tactic that I, of course, don’t condone). Less black hat is to rally your fans to conduct specific brand-related searches on Google.

Another tough attack to suppress is if a trusted media outlet wrote a negative article. That will almost certainly occupy the first page in Google.

6 – Can you recommend three useful reputation management tactics that will help people control what people see when their Googled?

Turn them in! Submit DMCA Takedown notices to Google, Bing and Yahoo (and optionally their web host, too) when people are violating your copyrights. Note that “criticism” is fair use, so this is really more for blatant theft of your content. And when they are spamming or buying links, submit a spam report via Google Webmaster Tools. Fight spammy YouTube videos by flagging them, especially if they are just using your name and keyword-stuffing to sell their own product.

Build links to others’ positive and neutral content, such as YouTube videos, blog posts, articles, photos, etc. Many folks forget this and only work to build links to their own content; that’s a real missed opportunity. A black hat ORM tactic (that I don’t condone) is to buy links to others’ favorable (or neutral) YouTube videos to push the negative ones down. Surprisingly, even low-quality links can help when it’s a trusted site like YouTube.com.

Do not underestimate the power of a classic linkbuilding campaign. Create viral content (personality tests, quizzes, infographics, viral videos, comics, top ten lists, how-tos, etc.) and seed it, with the help of power users, into social networks and the blogosphere. This is ultimately among the most effective ways to improve your online reputation, because then you have a lot more Google juice (PageRank) to play with.

Thanks again to Stephan Spencer for taking the time to share is wisdom and insights in the world of branding and reputation management. You can learn more about Stephan through his website at StephanSpencer.com, and be sure to check back often as we feature new online reputation expert interviews weekly.

via Business 2 Community http://www.business2community.com/expert-interviews/stephan-spencer-ask-reputation-management-experts-0664125?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=stephan-spencer-ask-reputation-management-experts