As the good folks over at Distilled mentioned last week, aggressive reputation management puts your business ahead of the game. There are several levels of ORM campaign commitment. We’ll briefly discuss each level and then revisit each later (future posts) in greater detail. Keep in mind that in 90% of all indsutries or sub-industry categories, your company will be light years ahead of the competition by engaging in Beginner’s Level One, let alone the Intermediate Level 2 or Expert Level 3. Let’s take a look at each, starting with the beginner.

LEVEL ONE (Beginner)
Level One consists of on site reputation monitoring, corporate blogging, corporate forum responses, and press releases. The reason this is considered Level One is that every aspect of this program looks only at the corporate website. You receive questions, comments, and complaints via email, blog comments, forum posts, and telephone inquiry. But all of these comments come to you, and you make the effort to answer each one through your corporate network: site, blog, forum, press release. Each of these can be posted on your domain, and the customer or interested party must return to you to get an answer or explanation. Under normal circumstances, Level One would be named “Superior Customer Service”. But in the world of Web 2.0 (sorry Mystery SEO - had to use the term), this level of reputation management will make you look really good to the people who want to be customers but have complaints.

LEVEL TWO (Intermediate)
Most reputation managers fall under the category of Level Two management. A Level Two approach consists of external reputation monitoring (Google Alerts or special RM software), well-written comments on external blogs and forums, guest blogging on relevant sites, Digg / Reddit submissions, plus all the internal responsibilities listed under Level One. The purpose here is to seek out negative press wherever it exists, address those issues, and promote the company in a positive manner. Whereas Level One campaigns involve customer service, Level Two takes the fight, so to speak, out there on the battlefield. If a celebrity is quoted as saying something negative or even scandalous about your company, find the most equal or superceding method of responding and promoting on that same site. Most websites love traffic, and will allow both sides of a dispute to voice their opinions if it means more visitors and notoriety.

LEVEL THREE (Expert)
We sometimes blur the defining lines of responsibility for Level Three activities between reputation manager and SEO specialist. As a reputation management expert, you aggressively pursue rankings by generating fresh content before anything negative has been said. Look to fill the top 10 search results for your names and nicknames with positive articles, blogs, press releases, guest blog posts, forum comments, etc. On top of that, follow the advice of the folks at Distilled and seek to rank for in the #2 or #3 spots for your competitor’s name, product, or service. Use this valuable real estate to promote your prices, quality, or reputation over theirs.

The Dark Side of Level Three involves creating blogs and forums online that appear to be run by customers. This fake UGC (user generated content) boosts the apparent credibility of products, services, and corporate reputations. Organizations such as Wal-Mart have attempted to promote themselves in this manner and been caught, thus further damaging their reputations (who wants to shop at a store that has to impersonate rave reviews?). Hundreds of companies still do this, however, and are not discovered. Successful black hat reputation management depends on the thoroughness of the campaign approach (or so I’m told).

I don’t encourage anyone to pursue black hat ORM. To fail in the process is to damn the organization even further than it already is. There are grey tactics in which you can pay for positive posts in blogs where the post is marked as a sponsored post, but there are drawbacks (how much authority would you give a blog post that is sponsored?).

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B. L. Ochman brought up an interesting point this morning: who is monitoring your company’s online reputation over the weekend? Plenty of executives and PR professionals have returned to work on Monday to find a snowballing issue covered in blogs and forums all over the Web. With two and a half days of unhindered momentum, it’s a daunting task to respond and diffuse a problematic situation on Monday morning.

Ochman mentions that as long as someone is monitoring over the weekend, a simple phone call can be made to those in charge of responding to negative press. Sure, that means that your online PR person would essentially be “on call”, but working out on call pay rates and compensation shouldn’t be too difficult as long as you maintain the mentality of rewarding your people for protecting the company.

You may also find that you’d rather not have an employee on call (or perhaps such an employee does not exist). In that case, hiring an agency or consultant to handle all or some of your reputation management is a necessary move. When your company responds immediately to a crisis and diffuses the potential nightmare, you’ll know how valuable the service is. Millions of dollars of made and lost because of the press. Don’t be caught unaware.

As a professional reptuation manager, I cannot stress the importance of monitoring your reputation seven days a week, weekends included. Whether you do it in-house or through a consultant, you’ll be hard pressed to find a wiser spend. Whether it’s for an entire corporation or an individual, the results are invaluable.

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Most of the “professionals” would scoff if they heard a potential client say that they used Google Alerts to monitor their online reputation. They would be full of it, however. Most monitoring tools I’ve seen advertised on the Web offer nothing more than Google Alerts with a custom face. You can pay the fee if you want, but all your getting is someone else arranging the Google Alerts info for you.

The truth is, more than 40% of the English speaking world uses Google’s search engine to find information online. In some industries, that number is actually more like 80%. Will Google Alerts catch everything on the Web? No, but it will catch anything on the Web that is indexed in Google, which means it’s results are relevant and comprehensive enough.

The first step in a viable reputation management business is to monitor the space and find what is being said that affects perception of your brand. This step is both easier than you might think and more detailed than most people think. If you are Wal-Mart, for example, you might think that all you have to track is the term “Wal-Mart” spelled a dozen different ways, the names of a few executives, and you’re done. This will probably inform you of 60-70% of what you need to be monitoring. What about popular slang, or product names that don’t require “Wal-Mart” to be recognized as Wal-Mart products?

The larger the corporation, the more likely you are to have earned a few nicknames from the consumer. You need to track everything.

There are several more steps to Reputation Management, so make sure this step is handled thoroughly, as it affects everything that follows.

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It’s been a month since the last post. Work picked up and writing has become a daily ritual as I 1)ghostwrite an article per week, 2)write website copy and press releases at work, and 3)do some odds and ends projects in my own free time. Check out my latest CultureFeast blog about Neil Patel’s recent comments on personal branding.

Patel brings up a great point in one of his QuickSprout posts. He says that you have to think strategically in order to make your 15 minutes of fame last longer.

I’ve already passed up my first 15 minutes of fame. Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz decided to chastise me in front of the world last October for an article I wrote nearly a year before. My CultureFeast website jumped 150 daily visitors just because of that. Unfortunately, I didn’t make the most of my 15 minutes and I faded from view. I had a good excuse, really. I was concerned about how my responses might affect the company I worked for, so I kept my responses mellow and more good natured than they would have been otherwise.

Of course, my traffic dropped back down after a month, and I experienced the equivalent of a speed freak’s morning after.

All is not lost, though. According to Google Analytics, CultureFeast is now at an all-time high with more than 8,000 visitors this past 30 days. I owe it all to my wife, who has a Papaya Clothing store addiction.

Because of my writing about all things Papaya Clothing related, I should be the company’s online marketing manager. The company doesn’t even have a website and I’m working on presenting them with my analytics and comment results to show them how I can drive business to their website if only they will build one.

Something big will happen. Either Papaya Clothing Co. will heed my warning and use me or someone to build and optimize their website, or their reputation will be damaged online when all the potential customers start bashing them for not giving customers access to their products and store information. It’s a tense situation. I don’t know which way the company will choose to go.

I am available to help if only Papaya Clothing will wake up and smell the house burning down.

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