There are literally thousands of articles out there expressing the importance of having a social media presence in this day and age. With the mobile market absolutely exploding and social networking becoming the biggest thing to ever happen to the Internet, it’s vital that brands—especially smaller and startup brands—get involved in social media. But what’s not spoken about enough is the importance of consistency with your brand.

Just because you’re getting your brand name out there often enough doesn’t mean that it’s sending a cohesive message. It might appear sporadic and sloppy from one social network to the next. So it’s crucial that you focus on brand consistency in social media.

1: Make Sure Everyone’s on the Same Page

If you, John Doe Businessman, have a plan for a new marketing approach, then other people within your company need to know about it. Unless you’re all on the same page, different departments and people with different duties are going to paint a completely different brand picture. James Smith Employee is bound to use what he “thinks” is wanted, but if you and Susie Q Partner had a different idea, then you’re at complete odds with one another. Consistency starts within.

2: Stay Open and Transparent Inside and Out

As mentioned above, it’s important that everyone inside of your company is on the same page. This is so nothing makes it out there in the public eye that you wouldn’t approve of. And the only way to avoid getting wires crossed, either with your employees, coworkers, partners, or with your fans, is to always stay engaged about the brand and what it is everyone wants and expects from it.

3: Strive for Consistent Engagement

How you interact with people is what puts a personality to your brand. You’re hoping for a happy face, of course, but what you don’t want is multiple masks. You don’t want people thinking that your brand acts differently in Facebook posts than in a Twitter reply. You want to come across as the same cohesive brand across every platform.

4: Be True to Your Business

A lot of brands end up appearing inconsistent because they’re going against their brand principles to placate an audience on popular social networks. They end up with a Twitter account that’s garbage and a Facebook account that’s nothing like their LinkedIn profile. This is an obvious side effect of trying to be a people pleaser instead of a legitimate brand. By remaining true to your brand, you can show consistency across different platforms.

5: Understand Your Market

Another great way to ensure consistency is to understand the market you’re catering to. When you have no grasp of the niche you’re targeting, you’ll be more inclined to try a wide range of marketing options, many of which are going to fail, but all of which will be available to the public eye. So, of course, you’re left with a lot of material that doesn’t at all represent the brand image you’re attempting to put forth.

6: Don’t Be Afraid to Hire Out

Professional writers and others you can outsource work to make it their business to keep your theme consistent, no matter what the product is. So if you’re having any trouble in the consistency department, for whatever reasons, outsourcing might be a good way to go here. Looking for a skilled writer can help you put out a consistent theme.

Most brands suffer a lot of ups and downs over the course of their lifetime, but brands that prove to be inconsistent will die on the vine long before their life span is up. This is particularly true with brands on social media, where a new startup is creating a Facebook brand page every hour of every day. So if you’re unable to appear consistent and reliable, you might not be competing for long.

Use the information provided above to help you maintain a consistent brand image.

Craig Robinson. A freelance writer from Qwaya.com – a facebook ad management tool and helps advertisers organize their campaigns. Craig also loves to participate at some social media communities and forums.

Negative domains are nothing new to the seasoned reputation manager. A quick and easy way to explain them to a C-level or business owner is something I haven’t been able to find, so I thought what better place to write one up than trackur.com? After all, Andy Beal wrote the book on the subject of proactively defending your brand’s reputation online.

Kristine Schachinger mentions the need to buy all the yourcompanysucks.com domains, but what about key stakeholders or representatives in the company? What about specific products?  In the realm of public opinion, some C-levels are subject to having their personal character attacked because they are the face of a company. Interestingly, I really couldn’t find a good quick guide on buying negative domains to protect your business that I could share with a business owner.

With hacktivist groups like Anonymous and WikiLeaks operating under a directive of their own terms of justice, many larger corporations have begun to buy domains to protect not just their brands, but key members of influence who might face public scrutiny. B of A was smart to snatch up domains preemptively, anticipating an onslaught from one of the groups in 2010. They purchased several negative domains including several exact match negative domains for their CEO, Brian Moynihan.

While it is true that the internet generation is clever enough to come up with better, why leave the low-hanging domains to the safeguards of the unforgiving public? When you’re the largest bank in North America, the backlash target on your back is much larger than it is for a soul food joint in North Beach. But isn’t it wise to take action before you get hammered by a consumer who feels he’s been slighted and takes his own form of justice out on you? ORM is about being proactive, and you can never possibly please everyone, even if the customer is always right.

In Outspoken Media’s Online Reputation Management Guide, there is an assessment section that details all the pertinent items for which your company may need to buy negative domains. I paired it with the given easy-to-spot negative qualifiers.

This covers most of the main negative qualifiers that could be easily wrested from the clutches of those who desire to do you harm online. But to make things easier, there is a way you can search and purchase these domains all at once with KnowEm. KnowEm provides a domain checking service for free, and I use it quite often to conduct thorough research into negative domains. If you don’t have a preferred registrar, you can click on the “Available” next to the domain and purchase it right there on the spot. If the domain is not available, click on “Not Available” and you’re directed to SEDO, where the domain owner can be contacted for purchase.

In the interest of having a ready-made template for reputation managers, I have put together what I have deemed to be the most important negative domains to consider purchasing. I put them into tiers so the value of each can be easily assessed.

Key: ^ should redirect to page on main site, $ should be purchased as brand integrity/future endeavors

Until you’re knee-deep in the hoopla of a full-bore online brand attack, the results of having procured negative domains in your registry is a thankless task. But what I’ve learned over the years is when you’re in the position to do something proactively helping defend the brand of the company, you should do it. I get a couple laughs and an expected collective face-palming in the board room when I ask about negative domain assets.  Instead I tell the tale of one instance where I was called in for damage control. I saw a room full of C-levels released as stock value was destroyed at the hands of a curious consumer. This person launched a personal crusade against this company after her mother’s investment portfolio was mishandled by one employee. The investigation shed light on the larger problems within the company and poor oversight of the advisors. In the end, this investment firm had bigger issues than what the consumer first suspected, but it was her negative domain of the company that garnered support of many others burned by them. So much that it garnered the attention of the local news investigative team.

One common objection that many business owners tell me is that they stand behind their product/service and therefore don’t need to defend their reputation. Or, “I’m not doing anything shady, so I don’t need to buy negative domains”. That may be true, and I believe you. But reality sets in when I ask them to think of their favorite brand, and then think about how they may not please everyone. Think about how if they hire someone to manage their social media that the responsibility of the brand’s message is in the hands of a human, and we all make mistakes. Sh*t happens! Even to the best brands. If your business is on the level then happy consumers will respond and advocate for you. If you’re doing something you shouldn’t be, worry less about negative domains and worry more about the ethics of your practices.

Don Rhoades is a SEO Manager and reputation management consultant in Raleigh, NC. He has used trackur.com to monitor conversations about his clients since 2009.

Managing a reputation, both online and offline, is incredibly important to any business whether you’re just starting up or have a long history of good feedback. Now that social media is so easy to use and guest contributing has become so common, it’s easy to have a slip up here and there. The important thing, however, is to understand how to solve this slipup and make sure it doesn’t happen again. Reputation management is always going to be an important part of running a successful company, and it should be at the top of any priority list.

In general, following a few of the basic rules will get you a solid reputation that you can count on, but why not get a little bit creative? It’s the companies that step out of the box and take a risk that really end up on top, and while reputation management might not be a place to “take a risk,” it is certainly a place with room for creativity (something your competition is surely lacking).

Top Reputation Management Techniques and How to Bring in Some Creativity

Below lists a few of the basic ways you can manage your online reputation as well as some tips describing how you can take these efforts to the next level:

1. Know how to ask for anchor text links. Earning backlinks to your website is obviously incredibly important for SEO reasons, but obtaining these backlinks can sometimes hurt your reputation if done incorrectly. You don’t just want to ask for a link back without offering any type of content, or something else of value, because this will come off as unprofessional. This has helped guest posting become as popular as it is today.

• How to Get Creative: Most companies either guest post or ask another company to link back to their company, but you can’t forget that you are able to pay it forward. Get creative by putting a link back to their company website first. After all, if you want them to link back to you, chances are they have some great information that will help your readers. This could backfire and they might not be interested in returning the favor (which is why this works best if you’re talking with a compliment-type company and not a competitor), but if this is the case you can always either take the link out or just see it as a way that you helped your readers understand a difficult topic. Just be careful to not go over-board with reciprocal links.

2. Have a varied web presence. It’s important to diversify your company across all different types of online channels—social media, blog posts, YouTube and video, directories and listings, etc.—because this looks good in the eyes of Google and gives you a better chance of ranking for a specific keyword.

• How to Get Creative: Creating profiles on different blogs and social accounts will surely help you push negative results off of the first few pages. Instead of focusing only on links, understand that profiles are often put to the top of Google search results.

3. Monitor your search results once per month. Part of managing your reputation means always knowing where it stands. One of the most popular ways to monitor your reputation is to simply Google your company name and look at several pages (the first five to seven is usually a good number) or use Google Alerts so you know when your company is mentioned in the SERPs. Check to see if there is anything negative that you might want to get removed. Another way to monitor your brand is through reputation management software, which we will discuss later.

• How to Get Creative: Consider setting up Google Alerts for not only your company name, but also any authors associated with your company. It’s important to remember that authors are also a representation of your brand, and they may not show up if you’re only monitoring your company.

4. Use reputation monitoring software. This is probably one of the most important parts of reputation management because it helps make sure you don’t miss anything. Part of creating a brand is increasing visibility online, but this makes management more difficult. In a nutshell, reputation monitoring software (like Trackur) helps give you numbers for your rankings and social media. This data often shows you who is engaging with your content, where that engagement is happening, where he/she found the webpage, and even if that person is influential in the industry.

• How to Get Creative: Many companies have a few people who look at one set of data from one set of software. Consider having others in your company take ten minutes out of their day to gather data from another free reputation management software. This will help you cross-reference your analytics and will make sure you’re going toward the “problem area” first.

Do you have any ideas about getting creative with reputation management? Were you successful? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

Photo Credit: thesocialinnovation.com

Amanda DiSilvestro gives small business and entreprenuers SEO advice ranging from keyword density to recovering from Panda and Penguin updates. She writes for Highervisibility, a nationally recognized as a top SEO company that offers online marketing services to a wide range of companies across the country. 

Your company’s branded keywords can be a meaningful source of traffic and good rankings if you utilize them effectively. Branded keywords are those words or phrases that are associated with your specific brand–your reputation.

Your continual use of them on your website, blog posts, and social media pages renders them highly valuable for your search engine rankings and PPC marketing campaigns. Harness the power of your branded keywords to improve your online marketing efforts and shore up your rankings.

Benefits to Your Campaign

Adding branded keywords to your campaign can double their impact; You already receive traffic from them organically, and now is the time to assertively use them in your campaign to maximize their potential.

These efforts will work to benefit your search rankings by increasing your credibility and brand perception. “Click through rates increase for terms where you have both an organic (SEO) and paid (PPC) presence,” explains Amplify-Interactive.com, so they have a lot of potential for positively affecting your campaign.

• Your campaign benefits through the increased credibility offered by having your brand show up in multiple places in a search. Increased credibility means greater authority on the web.
• Your campaign gets more impressions through your branded keywords by showing up in multiple places in a search.

Placement Tips

Your branded keywords function best when they’re distributed throughout your online campaign and have the budget behind them to push them to the top of search rankings. Luna Metrics suggests the following strategies for incorporating your branded keywords into your campaign:

• Brand yourself for your customers by using the right verbiage to associate yourself with your keywords.
• Increase the budget for your CPC to keep your branded ads front and center and easy for your customer to associate with your brand.
• Divide your keywords into different campaigns to make sure they get the most face time.

Bidding Pros and Cons

Bidding on your branded keywords might bring you increased traffic, or you could end up paying for clicks on specific keywords that you were going to get anyway. Your branded keywords are hyper-specific to your brand, so there’s a chance that anyone searching those terms already knows that your business is the one they want.

• Avoid bidding on your branded keywords if you’re already getting a considerable, steady volume of organic traffic. Bidding is unlikely to change that rate, so spend your money promoting your unbranded keywords instead.
• Know your budget, and make sure it can handle the number of clicks resulting from your bids on your branded keywords.

Branded keywords are often taken for granted because they generate so much traffic organically. However, knowing how to put your branded keywords to work can greatly benefit your PPC campaign and search rankings. Examine your branded terms to find out how they can help you maximize your profit.

Megan Webb-Morgan is a web content writer for B2B lead generation resource, www.Resource Nation.com. She writes about small business, focusing on topics such as holiday business marketing.

When businesses get started, senior executives often spend time determining what type of culture they want to create. The people hired take part in creating culture and culture can influence nearly every aspect of your business. A new hire could be chosen due to a better “cultural fit” when qualifications are similar. Culture can also influence the efficiency of a sales team when a certain pace is established. Furthermore, culture impacts how your brand is perceived, online and offline. While it may be the employees as a whole who create culture, your brand reputation is determined by customers and clients. Believe it or not, culture impacts your brand reputation and it’s worth paying attention to just how it does that.

Culture’s Impact on Brand Reputation Online

It’s rare for job seekers to walk into an office looking for employment in today’s society. It’s also unlikely that a customer will buy from a company that has a reputation of poor customer service or products that don’t last. Your brand reputation online can affect the actions of those who apply for a job online, read Yelp and other review sites. While the design of your business website, logos and motto are part of branding, they aren’t your brand reputation. Your brand is your culture and how outsiders view your company.Your culture impacts your brand reputation online in a number of ways.

• Your people and the culture they create are a key component of your brand. Advertising only goes so far and culture can pick up where ads leave off. With information just one search away, when campaigns fail, your culture can be the pick-me-up of your business online. Whether you give back, treat employees really well, or both, build a good culture and see the discussion of it, and therefore your brand, online.
• Aside from online discussions, culture can impact your brand online every time someone visits your site. While external discussions of your brand’s reputation and great culture are beneficial, the ultimate goal is getting customers to your site to make a purchase. Customers won’t want to support a company known for bad service or a poor work environment. Whether it as an employee or charity you’ve just worked with, good brand reputation can drive online sales, just as a poor brand reputation will deter them.

Culture’s Impact on Brand Reputation Offline

Your employees should be your biggest advocate. Your company culture affects your brand reputation every time one of your staff members discusses their workplace. Whether they are at a coffee shop, bar or a sports league, your employees, who ultimately create the culture of your business, are the key players in determining how culture impacts your brand reputation. A great culture creates happy employees, drives customer loyalty and leads to a profitable business.

• If an employee likes where they work, they’re going to talk about it and recommend your business to others. Having employees and those who visit your office talk about culture impacts your brand reputation. People trust word-of-mouth recommendations more than online reviews and ads, so offline discussions about your culture and your business are going to have an impact on your brand reputation.
• A great culture impacts your brand reputation in more than a few ways. Just as online discussions about your culture, and your brand reputation, can impact a job seekers decision, offline discussions can too. Applicants won’t be interested in a company who doesn’t treat employees well, give back or has a bad brand reputation. Your culture builds your brand reputation so as candidates enter your office, businesses need to make sure both are up to par so that you recruit the best, or at least leave a positive and lasting impression of your business.

Brand and culture become more and more similar as time goes by. As people begin to think about the values of the companies they work for and what their working environment will be day-in and day-out, the culture of a business is taken into account when it comes to applying to or accepting a job. Your brand is how others perceive your business and culture plays a big role by either creating a brand reputation of high or low quality. Businesses need to pay attention to culture as it plays a big role in brand reputation, online and offline.

Erica Bell is a small business writer who focuses on topics such as outsourced hiring firms and HR software solutions. She is a web content writer for Business.com.