What impact will social media have on business?

September 14, 2008 By 1 Comment

Delta7 Propaganda image

It will make what your customers say about your business really matter

Social media is turning the world of marketing and PR upside down. More and more people are turning to what your customers have to say to make their buying decisions. Why? Because the internet means that they can – and because they trust what your customers say more than what you say.

Social media channels and tools like blogs, forums, review sites, Facebook, Twitter, Technorati, Digg and many others now elevate other peoples’ opinion of your products and services to the top of the Google results – often above your own website. Whether you like it or not, what customers think about you is increasingly what your prospects will find and take notice of.

If the social media revolution means one thing for business, then it’s this: what you say about yourself is propaganda. What other people say about you is the truth.

[image © Julian Burton at Delta7.com]

Filed Under: marketing, ORM Tagged With: , , , ,

How to write good blog post titles

September 13, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Don’t miss out on your blogs most powerful aspect – the post titles!

If you’re a newcomer to blogging it’s all too easy to get swept up in the excitement of publishing – and overlook one of the basics of blogging – the role of your blog post title in getting found in Google.

There are two kinds of bloggers: those who understand the part the post title plays in Google visibility and want exploit that and those who don’t (or do understand it but choose not to exploit it). [Read more...]

Filed Under: PIGs Tagged With: , , ,

Online reputation management podcast – TigerTwo

September 11, 2008 By Leave a Comment

New podcast from online reputation management specialist Nancy Williams of TigerTwo

Nice to hear Nancy putting out a weekly podcast of online reputation and social media news, ideas and hints. You can find it here. I’ve spoken to Nancy a couple of times about online reputation and I really respect her approach to the subject.

If you’ve got an iPod, 20 minutes of commuting time and an inclination to understand how social media can be used to help manage your business reputation this is definitely worth a listen.

I have to say that a few times I’ve taken the first 6 or 7 podcasts out with me on a long drive and had to stop listening after a single episode because I’ve got hot under the collar and started frothing at the mouth over some of the issues Nancy raises. There’s so much stuff (and a lot of it news to me too!) in Nancy’s podcast that I find I need silence to process it. Sign of a good podcast, I reckon.

Clare and I are going to be podcasting about online reputation management soon – and listening to the TigerTwo podcast is a great help to us. I think the difference between the two will be that our focus is less on the social media technologies and more on feedback and the skills needed to handle it and use it to create a good reputation. I think, too, we’re also more critical of social media than Nancy – but I have to say that where she DOES nail her opinions to the door things is where the podcast gets most interesting.

Highly recommended.

Filed Under: ORM Tagged With: , , ,

Delta7′s ‘visual dialogue’ – seeing the bigger picture in business

September 8, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Pictures make difficult things make sense – quickly

Propaganda thumbnailWe’ve been lucky enough to have had Julian Burton of Delta7 working with us tonight to create an illustration for our Business Life magazine feature for October.

Delta7 is a London-based change consultancy which uses pictures to help people in organisations explore the way they feel about change. (Click on the thumbnail to see the full-size image).

I’ve known Julian for over 10 years now – and it’s great to see the business getting the recognition it deserves.

Tonight’s picture started with a conversation earlier today, evolved through a couple of emails, finally becoming the image you see here illustrating one of our maxims about online reputation: ‘What you say about yourself is propaganda; what other people say about you is the truth‘

Delta7 has a huge range of powerful images that chart every aspect (good and bad) of the world of business – and we hope to feature more here on this blog.

Filed Under: news, ORM Tagged With: , , ,

Adwords account phishing scam

September 8, 2008 By Leave a Comment

If you’ve got an Adwords account, watch out for these dirty phishmongers!

Phishing thumbnailLike most people, I’ve had millions of scam emails in my time. This one (received today) however I think deserves a mention.

Why? Because it combines a number of things together which I think makes it more compelling than many such scams.

1) The email address doesn’t look too suspicious

2) The login address looks right(ish)

but more importantly

3) It capitalises on the fact that Adwords billing IS a complicated-looking pile of stuff to the Adwords newcomer. It leaves me uncertain whether or not I’ve actually succeeded in turning off all my campaigns. In fact it makes about as much sense as my mobile phone bill.

First principle in scams is this: do not use a link in ANY email that asks you to go update billing details. A credible organisation would ask you to log on as normal if anything needed reviewing or changing.

And additional give-away in this one is that the URL in the email goes to an non-secure server (http:// not https://).

And finally, Firefox flagged it up as having been reported as a scam site. Click on the thumbnail (above) to see the content of the email and Firefox’s response to the link it points to.

Nice try.

Meantime, Google, you could maybe simplify your billing / campaign control with a big red ‘STOP’ switch – i.e. give your customers a clear indication that all activity is OFF?

Out of interest, why is this site still up?  Does it take days or weeks to decide a site is scamming?  Or is there, perhaps, no-one to make that decision?

Filed Under: feedback, GRRRR!!!, news

Online reputation management suicide

September 5, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Tags of death5 steps to reputation suicide – a real life ORM case study

Here’s how to single-handedly destroy your online reputation and squander your considerable potential.

First of all, create a great product that a lot of people want and will pay for. Something like a plugin email newsletter & email list management system for WordPress. Wow. Fantastic. Jackpot!

Then do the following:

1) Don’t document your product (a sure-fire way to get paying customers to feel very bad about you, very quickly)

2) Grudgingly set up a ‘support’ forum and make sure you let people know how hard-pressed you are and how much trouble supporting your product is.

3) Be rude to people and get defensive wherever your product is mentioned online

4) Don’t apologise or admit you were wrong under any circumstance

5) Withdraw completely - but leave your forum and tags visible for prospects to see exactly how unhappy your customers are when they research you in Google.

How exactly has this guy has managed to turn a pot of gold into a crock of shit? No communication skills and no awareness.

Sorry to be blunt, but it’s commonplace and a growing problem – especially in the online world.

And if that was the nail in the coffin, then this could be the stone sarcophagus.

Filed Under: feedback, ORM

How do I hide my WordPress blog until it’s ready to go live?

September 4, 2008 By 12 Comments

Maintenance Mode graphicMaintenance Mode plugin is how you hide your blog until it’s finished

Now we’re getting busy with site designs, it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to be able to build a site ‘offline’ as it were.

So I went looking for how to do that and found… (yes, you’ve guessed it) – yet another ‘how to’ shaped hole in the Googlesphere.

I was about to give up when a Canadian schoolteacher blogger caught my eye, and led me to ‘Maintenance Mode‘ from German developers Software Guide.

I laughed, I cried, I danced around the room with joy. This is exactly what I need; so simple and yet so bloody invisible. Here’s how it works – and you can have fun and make it look anyway you want!

Thanks, guys, or should I say vielen danke, Ich totally like liebe dich. Go there, don’t mind if you don’t speak German as good me, just press the buttons until the plugin downloads :-)

(BTW, don’t mind that it messes up the Flash image uploader in WP 2.6 – you can just use the Browser uploader instead)

Filed Under: how to, WOW!

Why doesn’t text flow around my images in WP 2.6?

September 1, 2008 By 3 Comments

PIG CssHas upgrading to WP 2.6 made it suddenly impossible to wrap text around images?

Here’s the ‘mu:kaumedia PIG-simple guide to what’s probably happened (many thanks to Otto42 in the WordPress Codex):

WP 2.6 has a new image uploader.

This creates different code (or something technical and complicated) for aligning images than the old one did.  If your blog theme’s CSS file was written for WordPress 2.5 then it won’t recognise the alignment instructions given by your new image uploader.

CSS imageResult? Text won’t flow around the image no matter how many times you click the alignment buttons.

Solution?

Go into your Theme Editor in your dashboard and copy and paste the code shown in the pic (right) – available to copy and paste here - into the end of your theme’s ‘style.css’ file and save.

Magically, your images will fall into place and the text will behave itself just like in the good old days.

Filed Under: PIGs

How easily can I damage (or boost) your business?

September 1, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Wake up to the power of blogs and social media in shaping your online reputation!

Scenario: you offer a service to business, one that requires an up-front cash investment. Your prospect likes the sound of it, but it’s still risky – an unknown. What do they do?

They go online to find out what other people think.

They go to Google and type in something like… “Is Bartercard any good?”

It took me 10 minutes to write a post about Bartercard and for it to appear at the top of Google globally for anyone typing that question into Google just by using the power of a WordPress blog.  It’s since temporarily vanished (don’t ask me why – like many posts before it it will probably reappear in the search results!).  That’s the mystery of Google.

Think of the damage I could do to your business if I was unhappy with the service and couldn’t get satisfaction. Think of the good I could do for it, too if you’d thrilled me with the service you provided.  Either way, you need to know what’s happening to build and maintain the best reputation possible.

If you’d like to discuss what this means for your business, then call us on 01822 610841

Filed Under: ORM
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