I was having lunch with some of my networking group friends and we were talking about marketing to prospects and different ways of doing so - direct mail, email introductions/referrals, etc. when Tom Van Cleave of Data Dash Inc. blurted out "People don't give a damn about who you are!" Laughter ensued all around; however, if you really think about it, people really don't care who you are. They care about what you can do for them first and foremost. If you can solve their problems or immediate need, then they will take the time to look further into you, your company or your brand. But until then, you might as well give it up talking about you first or who you are. So honor what your customers/clients care about - THEIR PROBLEMS. That's how you grow business ...

So in the first and second parts of this series, you learned the basics of online reputation management and how to respond to bad publicity. This last part of the series directs you to some of the top monitoring tools you need to listen, learn, and interact with others about your brand. Even if you are one of the tiniest companies around, online reputation management (ORM) is one of the most important tasks you need to definitely add to your planner/calendar on a consistent basis. Monitoring Your Blog

• Technorati – Technorati is the leading blog search engine indexing more than a million blogs. It goes one step further and keeps track of influence, authority, and popularity of blogs.
• Google Blog Search – Google search engine for blogs.
• BlogPulse – BlogPulse is a search engine for blogs and an automated trend discovery system.

In our previous episode, I briefly discussed the basics of Online Reputation Management (ORM). Go ahead; I'll wait for you to read that article first in case you haven't yet... : - ) Now that you have the basics out of the way, let's discuss responding to not so good news/reviews/publicity. Even if you've done your best job on a project or put your best foot forward in the customer service department and have done everything right, there may come a time when you face negative publicity. This could stem from several reasons like a misunderstanding, a mistake made by either you or the client/customer, different points of view, the customer just doesn't like you after all, the list could go on and on - unfortunately! So what do you do when you receive bad publicity? 1. Process Before Reacting Before you get ...

Regardless of what business you're in, how large or small your business is, or what services and products you offer, you will most likely at some point be on the butt end of bad, sometimes ugly, publicity. We love it when we are talked about positively, but what if it's negative speak? How should you respond? What is Online Reputation Management (ORM) really? In this three part series, I'll give you the basics of Online Reputation Managment, or ORM as it's sometimes referred to, some tips and advice on how to respond to negative reviews/bad publicity, and finally, some free tools to help you monitor and manage your reputation online. What is Online Reputation Management (or Monitoring) (ORM)? Wikipedia defines ORM as "...the practice of monitoring the Internet reputation of a person, brand or business, with the goal of suppressing negative ...

As much as I love Facebook, it seems that everytime they do an update, they don't address what people are asking for and/or they take away things that were cool. For instance, in my last Facebook video review of the new profile pages (December 2010), I noticed several items that were gone or location changed and/or were added that didn't make any sense at all.  During my research, I saw many people were not happy with the new profile. Of course, we get used to it and keep moving. It's like they are just testing all types of crap to push the limits of Facebook regardless of what users request or how we feel about it! Probably not true but I'm emotionally charged on this issue right now However, my latest pet peeve with Facebook is with their business fan pages. You can't change your business ...