What Makes An Online Reputation?

May 25, 2010 - PRLog -- In order to make millions of dollars on the internet (or any money at all) you’re going to need to build a secure brand identity by making sure that as many people as possible have heard about how great your business is. As part of this process, you’ll need to find out who your potential customers are, and what they think of you. This article will give you some ideas of the sorts of places where you firstly might want to advertise your products and services, and secondly might want to keep an eye on to see what other people are saying about you. This is reputation management.

If you want to be really great at reputation management, you need to be aware of how the public feels about your own business, that of your competitors, and about the market in general. To do that, you need to monitor the following sources of information:
Popular Websites
Monitor the sites of your competitors, or the sites of people who sell comparable products to you, in order to see what they are currently offering. They will also be monitoring the way their market is changing, so you may read something that you need to investigate, and they may even give you some ideas about how to promote your own site.
Collaborative Sites
Any site that allows people to add to it or edit it (such as Wikipedia or Yahoo! Answers) is a great place to find out about people’s concerns or opinions. Although Wikipedia is intended to be objective, you may learn something by reading up on your product or others like it.
Social News/Bookmarking Sites
These are the ultimate source of market information, if you know how to harness them! Consider using Facebook, MySpace, etc. to find out what people are saying about the world, and what products they might need or want.
Forums
Like collaboration sites, forums can tell you how people feel about a certain subject. Many business owners intentionally start a new topic about their business (as an anonymous poster) in order to see what kind of response they get.
User-generated Content/Consumer Generated Media
Any site that allows users to share their content with the world – for example, youtube – is a great way to find out how people feel. Keep up to date with the most watched videos every month in order to stay ahead of market trends (and find out what people are becoming more interested in, so that you can structure your business around that information)
Blogs
The blogs of people who write about subjects related to your market (for example, technology blogs if you sell DVD players) are a surprisingly good source of inspiration for business strategy. You will be able to subscribe to these, so that you get email updates whenever there is a new post. You can subscribe to this blog in order to stay up to date with the latest online business strategies!
As well as monitoring these sources, you may want to interact with them and create a few waves in order to draw attention to your business! This is guerrilla marketing, and is a great path to becoming a more well known presence on the web.
In the next post: Learn how to get started with reputation management.

http://www.reputation247.com

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Reputation 24/7 is a web-based service which provides real-time data to SME's on how their brand, intellectual copyright and overall reputation are portrayed on the internet. By scanning the internet for target words or phrases, the name of business, product brands and the name of key individual a report based on the positive or negative nature of how the business is perceived is returned.