I read this rather interesting post on Kara Smith’s blog the other day. She did a great job researching and reporting what happened, it’s worth checking out. In a nut shell, Kara uncovered a situation where someone had assumed the name of a law firm through social media profiles and was directing traffic to sites that posted negative comments and articles about the firm. These articles were getting picked up by journalists and being re-published on additional sites, furthering the “vicious circle” as Kara explains. Most importantly, she goes on to tell us that the firm has no social media presence or blog and appears to be doing little to combat the attacks to their reputation.
This brings me to my main point. Is your firm paying attention to what people are saying about you online?
How are you building your reputation online?
Ok…you have an informational website up there. Do you blog as well? Do you contribute articles to your blog or does your paralegal write most of the content? Is your blog just designed around building keywords and SEO to get a good ranking for your site or do you put time and effort into building your reputation and marketing message? Does your blog help to build your online reputation? Are you active on LinkedIn and Twitter? These are all questions to ask yourself and examine how you are branding and marketing your firm, how you are building your online reputation. Don’t you want to be in control of the messages you are sending out?
What tools are out there to help monitor what people are saying about you?
There are some good free and paid services out there that will help you to monitor what people are saying about your firm on the web.
Google Alerts: This free tool from Google allows you to enter keywords to monitor. It will then scour the internet looking for new instances when they appear. You can then have the results emailed to you or connected through RSS to a reader such as GoogleReader. I monitor my name, the name of my company, my twitter account name, and so forth. This way you can get a handle on what people are saying about you, delivered in real time as it happens. You can respond appropriately and help to better control your online reputation.
Trackur: This is a paid service that offers features included with Google Alerts and a whole lot more. There is a 14 day free trial, so it’s worth checking out and seeing if it’s extra features are a better fit for your needs.
Post your comments and let me know if there are other reputation management tools worth looking into.
Photo by Jin T
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I’m a big believer in Google alerts. Great article, I will check out Trakur.