Very few people seem interested in proactive reputation management. The big bucks are often reserved for cleaning up a mess. However, being proactive is not only cheaper, but can result in preempting any negative issues that might get raised. Setting the scene is a crucial tactic that more businesses should follow.

And, if a little town in North Carolina can do it, so can you!

The email below was sent to me 48 hours before the start of ukulele legend Jake Shimabukuro’s concert in Clayton, NC. I’m a huge fan–don’t get me started–but I have never been to Clayton before and, to be honest, considered the trip a minor inconvenience in order to see one of my favorite artists. After receiving this email, I now know what to expect when I arrive, where to park, where to eat, and even how to get Jake’s autograph!

We look forward to seeing you this Saturday, Jan. 28, at The Clayton Center for the Jake Shimabukuro concert. We wanted to make you aware of a few things so that you have the best experience possible at The Clayton Center.

The show has sold out, so we are expecting a full house. Showtime is at 8:00 p.m. The Clayton Center will open at
7:00 pm, and seating in the auditorium will begin at 7:30 pm. Concessions, including beer, wine, mixed drinks, soft drinks and coffee, will be available throughout the evening. Cash and credit cards are accepted at all of our bars except the coffee bar (cash only) and beverages are allowed in the auditorium.

Parking at The Clayton Center is always free. There are two parking lots — one is located behind the building (Horne Street entrance) and one is on the corner of East Second and Fayetteville streets. Once parking in these lots is full, you may park on the street as long as you park legally. Please avoid any “No Parking” areas marked by signs or “yellow” zones.

Prior to the show, we encourage you to enjoy dinner at one of the following independently operated downtown Clayton restaurants — Clayton Steakhouse; Mulberry on Main; Lucky Chicken Peruvian Restaurant and Festejos Mexican Restaurant. But be sure to save room for dessert – we serve homemade whoopie pies fresh from Clayton Bakery and Cafe at our coffee bar.

You may also want to stick around post-show for an opportunity to meet Jake and have him sign a CD or other merchandise!

If you have any questions about this performance or about The Clayton Center, please feel free to call the Box Office at 919-553-1737, Monday-Friday, 10 a.m.-noon and 1-5 p.m.

Peace, Love and Ukulele!

The Clayton Center Staff

Again, this is an excellent example of proactive reputation management, from a small theater, in Clayton, in North Carolina. Does your hotel send out a similar email to guests before they arrive? Does your restaurant email reservation holders with the night’s specials? Does your auto repair shop send out reminders of oil changes?

Take a look at your business and ask yourself, what questions might a new customer have before they [fill in the blank]. Preempt their questions or concerns and you’ll create a positive environment from the get-go!

Did you know that when you tweet, people can generally read each of your 140 characters?

Not sure if the, now former, Leicester City player Michael Ball realized that or not, but his attack on homosexual British actor Antony Cotton just cost him a £6,000 fine, and apparently his job.

Ball messaged the Coronation Street actor Antony Cotton, who is openly gay and plays the factory worker Sean Tully in the long-running soap opera. Cotton was at the time appearing in I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! “That ******* queer,” Ball wrote. “Get back to your sewing machine in Corrie you moaning *******.” The message has since been deleted.

Being somewhat “high profile” Ball’s Twitter feed likely didn’t need much in the way of expert monitoring, but your business is likely not as lucky. Are you keeping an eye on your employee’s tweets? Of course, you don’t want to sit and watch every single tweet they vomit up each day, but you should be aware of any tweet that mentions your brand, right? You should know if they talk badly about your clients, their fellow employees, or your own products.

Trackur’s social media monitoring includes Twitter (and Facebook, and Google+) so you don’t have to stand over the shoulder of each and every employee. If they’re talking about your company–good or bad–you’ll know about it.

(hat tip Simon Heseltine)

I have a rule when it comes to customer service. I don’t privately talk about a customer in a manner I wouldn’t feel comfortable them seeing or hearing. That means no “Mr Needy” or “Mrs PITA” references–not even in a private CRM note.

Not only is it disrespectful, but that internal note could easily present itself to the customer. Case in point, Exhibit A:

Yeah, not good. Take the stance to not belittle your customers, ever! Not even those vague Tweets you think are just a harmless way of letting off steam. Even if the customer is not following you, potential customers may avoid your business lest you bad mouth them too!

So, to recap. Papa John’s? You need better ingredients, better pizza, and better manners! Corporately you may be in shock at this behavior, but the customer doesn’t interact with “corporate” they interact with the local store. Time for staff re-training methinks!

Thanks to Minhee Cho for tweeting and Ed for sharing.

UPDATE: Kudos to @PapaJohns for a swift and sincere response:

From everyone at Trackur, we wish all of our wonderful customers a very merry Christmas!

We hope you and your family have a very blessed Christmas and New Year.

Have you ever gotten in trouble for missing a birthday?

Fortunately, I’ve never forgotten my wife’s birthday, but I did forget to share with you all Trackur’s 4th birthday! Shame on me!

Seriously, the expression “time flies when you are having fun” has new meaning to me, thanks to Trackur–especially in 2011 which has seen our strongest year yet! We’re almost at 41,000 registered users and our growth looks set to exceed 100% for the fourth consecutive year!

Reading David Lee’s post “What We Look For” had me reminiscing about what caused me to launch Trackur 4 years ago and embark on this incredible start-up journey. Lee writes…

Our preference is for founders solving a problem for themselves…Another advantage of a founder building a product or service to solve her own pain point is that she doesn’t have to do market research or focus groups—she is the target market.

Which is exactly how Trackur started. Let me tell you the story, in case you’ve never heard it.

After finishing my book Radically Transparent: Monitoring & Managing Reputations Online, I looked over the chapter on monitoring tools and felt so much frustration and dissatisfaction. You see, you had Google Alerts (free) then you mostly had the big boys of monitoring–all charging thousands of dollars per month. There was no stepping stone. In fact, looking at my own needs, I realized there was no affordable option that allowed me to graduate from Google Alerts, manage multiple reputations in one place, and, most importantly, fit my stingy budget.

So, I decided to build that option.

The vision included a dashboard that drew inspiration from Google Reader and Gmail, but tailored to the monitoring market. I wanted to be able to quickly edit and update searches, see reports on discussions about my brand, and do so without any flashy eye-candy to distract me from my task. That was our goal, and I think even the first iteration of Trackur achieved that.

Once I had that concept, I figured that this might be a tool that others would find of use too! So, the next step was to build a brand for it. I wanted something short, memorable and easy to spell. Well, two out of three ain’t bad! I tried dozens of domain names, but just about everything was taken. I settled on the name Trackur for two reasons. One, it could be said phonetically the same as “tracker” and, if Flickr could be a success even with a completely missing vowel, Trackur could be too!

As an aside, Trackur ended up being a little less phonetic than I had envisioned. Even to this day, some folks believe our company name is “TrackUR” as in “Track You Are.” That’ll teach me to make the “u” and the “r” a different color!

With the concept and brand in place, I set about to build it. Being more of a marketer than a programmer, I worked with a small but talented team to build the first version and launched just a couple of months later–in February of 2008.

It was a modest success that first year. I was still consulting a lot on reputation management, so Trackur mostly stayed as a side project. A good friend asked me at the time, “What is your financial goal for Trackur?” I replied that if I could sell enough accounts to make back my small financial investment, I would be happy. Boy, have we done that, and then some!

In 2009 Trackur started to take off and, by the end of that year, I decided to start winding down my consulting and focus on Trackur. I’m starting to get long-winded here, so to cut a long story short, we decided against selling the company in 2010, completed a major overhaul the early part of this year, and are tremendously excited about Trackur’s growth in 2012.

So, there’s the back story. Trackur’s now in its fifth year–our birthday was November 12th–and so I want to take the time to wish all of the Trackur team, customers, and friends a belated happy birthday!

PS. Watch for new announcements after Christmas as we’re not done with the upgrades and hope to announce some cool new stuff in the New Year!

So, how early did you get up today?

Slept in? Yeah, I don’t blame ya!

There’s still a chance for you to make out like a Black Friday bandit, thanks to your friends at Trackur. For today only, sign up for any paid Trackur plan and we’ll refund 75% off your first month. Simply forward a copy of your PayPal receipt to help AT trackur.com and we’ll take care of the rest.

Oh, and don’t forget, you have just five more days to take advantage of our fantastic annual plan promotion. Pick up an annual Plus plan and get a free iPad 2! Grab an annual Premium or Ultimate plan and get the iPad 2 AND an iPod Touch, Nano, Shuffle and Apple TV!!!!

All these amazing Black Friday offers from the comfort of your computer chair.

We want to take time out to thank everyone that has signed up to use Trackur.

Thanks to you all, we have just surpassed 40,000 users–making Trackur arguably the largest social media monitoring vendor in the world!

2011 has been a great year for Trackur. We’ve added new features, charting, and generally improved speed and response times of the Trackur dashboard. We’re not done….not by a long shot. Expect more great news, features, and improvements over the coming months.

If you’re a fan of Trackur, please leave a comment so we know who you are. And, just in case we don’t get to thank you individually, know that you have the sincere thanks of the entire Trackur team.

Thank you!

If you’re considering monitoring your reputation in social media, don’t even think about it until you’ve covered these six important foundation steps, given by Trackur CEO Andy Beal at the recent Pubcon Las Vegas conference.

Of course, we’d love for you to use Trackur for your social media monitoring, but no matter what tool you use, make sure you heed our advice.

Christmas is fast approaching and to help you give the perfect gift this year, Trackur is offering free Apple iPads and iPods with all annual Plus, Premium, and Ultimate plans.

While we’ve had a long running iPad 2 promotion, for the month of November you can get a free Apple iPad 2 with just the annual Plus plan. That’s right, for $1056 you get one year of amazing social media monitoring and insights AND a free 16GB iPad 2 worth $500!

The iPad is brand new, and you get to choose black or white. It’s not engraved, so you can give it to a loved one as a Christmas present and they’ll think you rock!

But, it gets better! If you prepay for our Premium or Ultimate plans, you’ll get not just an iPad 2 but an iPod Shuffle, iPod Nano, iPod Touch, and an Apple TV! Keep them all for yourself or give them as holiday gifts. Either way, someone better call the sheriff  ’cos this offer is a steal!

Interested? Just fill out the form below and we’ll send you the full terms/conditions and get you set up!

Hurry, this offer must end November 30th! This offer has now closed.

Yikes, it looks like Trackur has been hacked…

…by a rather mischievous vampire named Count Trackula.

In addition to changing the Trackur logo, he’s also taken over the Trackur Twitter account!

And if that’s not enough, he’s trying to put us out of business by offering our Plus plan for just $31 for anyone that signs up today. Simply sign-up for our Plus plan and you’ll pay just $31 for your first month (send an email to help AT trackur.com after sign-up, to get the price adjustment).

I know it’s Halloween, but I hope Trackula doesn’t stick around too long. Still, it could be worse, it could be zombies!