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Monitoring your brand online is important. You need to be able to keep track of what is being said about your brand, where links are posted and what people think of your product in order to build up and/or maintain a good reputation both online and offline. The internet is so widely used for communication, personal and work related, that a business must be informed of their presence and maintain control of their persona and credibility online because it can easily transcend into the business world on the streets and affect their credibility thus decreasing sales and setting a chain of events into motion that only lead into a downward spiral. Because the internet has made news and communication so easy you have to be especially aware of your brand monitoring online to be able to detect the rumblings of someone, like a competitor, trying to ruin your image or a descent in brand trust and loyalty. Monitoring is fairly easy and really only requires some basic research and tracking. These are some things to consider and places to look when monitoring your brand online.

One of the easiest, though not necessarily the most effective ways to monitor your brand is to create a Google alert account. How this works is you enter keywords and every time your brand name is mentioned or one of the other keywords you receive an email regarding this sending you a link to the destination online where the word was mentioned. This is all fine however it’s not the most effective way to really monitor your brand online because it doesn’t provide a full scope of what your brand is doing and the breakdown of where your brand is being discussed online in terms of percentages and so forth. For this you need to hire someone to track the figures or an advanced software that can do this for you. The best way is almost always through human work because they can determine the validity of a mention of your keywords or brand and analyze the context whereas a computer cannot or will make more errors in this regard.

So first you need to develop a list of keywords. This should of course include your brand name and trademarks or copyrights you have associated with that name as well as clients, competitors, the names of spokespersons, high ranking executives, stock symbols, products, abbreviations of your company name or products as well as common misspellings that a person might type in a search engine looking for your brand or products.

People talk to others about brands and products all over the internet from reviews to consumer news to blogs, forum posts and emails about things they like or dislike. So there is a lot of ground to cover in tracking and monitoring your brand online. Every day you need to look through blogs, Twitter, social networks, social media sites, wikipedia, message board, forums, consumer news, article directories and the tags on video and photo sites. Track these mentions whether they are positive, negative or indifferent and the frequency of these mentions in order to monitor your brand.

The first things you would typically look at when trying to measure a brand are the online revenue, total leads, average value of each order placed, conversion rates, cost per acquisition or transaction and the return on the investment of the online campaign. While these are all very valuable things to track and analyze that’s not all there is for online management. Since the online world can also correlate to the brick and mortar sales world and vice versa you have to look at how they influence one another and other units of measure to evaluate in looking at your total online presence and marketing.

Views of online advertising spots
How many times were your advertising commercials, videos other ads clicked on and watched? This will show you whether or not they were worth the page impression and later sales that they generated.

Visits to online store
How many people went to your online store? This is simple. Look for the number of unique visitors over a given time period and you have your answer.

Total page impressions versus sales
There may have been a million page impressions but how many turned into actual sales and what was the value of those sales? You need to see the average order total so you can make a numerical representation of sales versus page impressions and how that figures into the cost you spent in advertising and marketing to bring those sales in to begin with.

Duration of content viewing
How long did a person spend on each page of your site? Looking at the amount of time spent will help you see whether they were just popping in to look for freebies or actually shopping and learning about your products.

Traffic to web address from an offline ad

If you have specific web addresses that a person has to type in not be connected to through a search engine you can track this. Understanding how many hits come from an offline source can help you see how known your company is that a person can type in your website without searching for it or how well your outside campaigns are going.

Offline influence
The most important perhaps, how your online presences leads to offline sales. Look at how the online marketing and store increases or decreases your physical store sales.

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Online Reputation Management

has become an important part of any company’s marketing strategy today, simply because purchase decisions made by your customers are influenced by reviews, feedback and other forms of information about your product or company found on the internet.

What is Online Reputation Management?

The act of monitoring, addressing or mitigating undesirable search engine results or mentions in online media for a company or product. Techniques include generating new content and creating posts on existing content. – Defined by Anvil Media in their Search Engine Marketing Glossary.

Everybody has an opinion on just about anything. Thanks to Web 2.0 and Social Media, anyone can make that opinion public over the internet, and a majority of these are not journalistic or editorial in nature but posts by the ordinary Joe on user generated content websites.  Some of those opinions might not be too flattering, which in turn can affect your sales.

For this reason, businesses need to manage their reputations online by being a little more proactive on social sites, and would need to make time for search engine reputation management. Of course that also means, you also need to make sure your customers are happy by providing them good service and observing good business practices.

But reputation management is not simply about managing damaging or negative commentary, but ensuring that you are able to get your marketing messages across and they are received accurately by your audience. This will help establish or reinforce your company or product brand, and be key to achieving your marketing and sales goals.

If you have questions or comments about Online Reputation Management, please post them in the comment section below. You can also send me questions through the Contact Form.

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is actually easy to do, much easier to do than traditional brand management. Primarily because monitoring and metrics are so easy to acquire and more accurate in the online marketing space. You can also make faster changes to adjust your campaigns according to data you are able to instantly get.

So what are the 3 ingredients that are going to ensure the success of managing your brand identity over the internet?

Social Media
There are so many blogs, social networks and online forums and communities out there today that people use regularly, and where a lot of consumer often talk about a product, company, a service, a BRAND.

In a recent article on GirlsInTech.net entitled , the author mentions that a lot of negative feedback from consumers typically appear on these sites and while it is impossible to control negative commentary, the best thing for product owners to do is be in touch with their market, be ready with a plan or a set of responses to deal with specific issues, and if something catches you off guard that you did not prepare for, respond quickly.

This is usually how online reputation management professionals deal with these situations, but if you want to really build your brand identity online, don’t simply be reactionary but be proactive, adhere to good business practices and make customers happy. Prevention is always better than cure.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
A few weeks ago I wrote a post about and how a key element was developing a set of keywords that you may use consistently as part of your offer or positioning in order to successfully associate your brand with those keywords.

SEO knowledge will help ensure that your publicly viewable correspondence or communications about your brand on social sites will get top visibility on search engines to build a healthy search engine reputation. This is brand reputation management specifically targeted at search engines, where keyword searches for your brand coupled with other keyword modifiers yield results that help prospects who are researching your brand, decide on buying you.

Tracking and Documentation Skills
Each online marketing strategy has specific goals and those goals are evaluated based on very specific quantifiable data that you need to acquire, measure, track and use as basis to further tweak whatever you are doing for brand reputation or brand identity management efforts.

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Step 1: Defining your Brand

Defining your brand could be the most important step to do when developing your Online Branding strategy, get this wrong at the start and you get a toppling domino effect for everything else that you do. One can define their brand by identifying or clarifying what it is that they are selling or offering to their customers. You must always make sure that you are clear about what your brand is and what it represents, or you will fail to achieve the desired association or value perception you want to develop in a consumer. There are three key questions that need to be answered when defining your brand effectively and they are; what sort of value or benefit you offer, who the potential customers are, and how you use the internet to reach your customers.

Determine and use a unique selling proposition with your brand, and do so consistently. Your brand should separate your company from your competitors so that your customers remember the company and the product offered. Knowing what customers you serve guides you in choosing your wording to use. Since we are discussing Online Branding, your obvious medium is the internet, which means you can use email newsletters, online advertising, article marketing and forum posting to reach your clientele.

Step 2: Articulating your Brand

Articulating your brand is not the easiest part of an effective Online Branding campaign because choosing your words wisely can be extremely difficult to do. Your words will appear on your website, in press releases, in emails, in newsletters, on online advertisements like banner ads or pay per click ads, in articles and a lot of other places across the World Wide Web. Once you have chosen your words wisely, you can begin to put together a campaign for Online Branding. When developing an online brand it is important for you to become repetitive for the purpose of getting your point across to your customers. You can be repetitive with your slogan, your target keywords in your articles, and much more.

In order to articulate your brand properly, ask yourself these 3 questions: what should I be saying, what other things should I be talking about or writing about that is going to be of interest to my audience, how can I encourage my audience to take action.

“What should I be saying?”

Two things; your brand and benefits or your unique selling proposition (USP).

“What other things should I be talking about or writing about that is going to be of interest to my audience?”

This is where online keyword and market research comes in. Here are the steps.

1. Do Keyword Research; to identify specific words used by search engine users to find information

• go the Google keyword tool
• type in a word or phrase that relates to your brand or offer
• the results will show you what keywords people are using on Google, and the average monthly searches for each… online markets are defined by keywords used and quantified by occurrence or the number of times a word or phrase was used in a search query

So how does this knowledge help you?

• the words and phrases you find will guide you in creating more content on your website, pages specifically discussing topics that you find would be of interest to your potential customers
• some of these keywords will be good to use as part of your press releases where you announce new benefits, dated promotions, company or organizational news
• keywords you find will help you write and structure your broadcast messages for your mailing list or newsletter
• this will also help you develop the right words and phrases to use in your banner campaigns
• if you plan to advertise on Google AdWords, you have an idea what keywords to bid on, and include in your campaigns

2. Do market research; to verify topics of interest as popularly discussed

• go to social sites like forums and bulletins, networking sites like Facebook, help websites like Yahoo answers, and blog sites like WordPress or Blogger; and see if the keywords you found above that relate to your brand or offer are often mentioned in conversations or threads
• what makes a keyword even more valuable is if you find that a keyword is used in a specific problem situation discussed on these sites, this would be good material to use for article marketing, where you can write articles that include the target keywords and discuss how a much talked about problem or issue can be solved, and connect it to your product or service…and have a link on that article that points to your product website

How can I encourage my audience to take action?”

Always end an article, ad, press release  or any form of communication with a call to action, whether it be a number they can call or a link they can click to go your website. Use this with a motivating factor that further prompts them to take action.  Ever notice those ads which end like “call within the next 30 minutes to receive a FREE whatever….”. Whether they call or click a link, the next step for them; whether someone answering their call, or a web page they land on should also mention that special quick bonus AND reinforce the USP in order to make the prospect even more warm to perform the conversion you expect.

Step 3: Communicating your Brand

Communication is part of almost any business transaction. If you cannot communicate your brand effectively, your product will not sell. Strong online communication includes the construction of a website, operating a blog or multiple blogs, participating in forums not on your website and using social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Communication also involves online advertising.

This last step is so important because it combines takes all the tips in Steps 1 and 2, and puts them into action. The most difficult aspect of communicating your brand is to gauge the customers’ interest and then sustaining that interest so the customer will take action and purchase your product or service. Even if your website has a forum on it, you should join other online forums or communities to join so that you can reach out to other customers by talking about their problems and how to solve them and then suggest trying your product. Do not hard-sell to other people on forums because you will get shut out, or even banned, people hate ads, but people love valuable and helpful advise from someone who knows what he is talking about, and has a product or service that is borne out of his expertise on the topic. A blog, separate from your website, is important because here you can post content you typically would not see on a business website. This content includes reviews of your products from customers, press releases, articles about the products, videos featuring the products, audio podcasts and other information about the company. When used with the correct Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies, communicating your brand to your audiences will be a lot easier and more effective because of the visibility SEO can give you on the search engines.

Facebook and Twitter are two social networking sites that should be used when creating an online brand. Facebook gives businesses the opportunity to create a page on their network that is dedicated to your company. This is where you can post breaking news, product reviews, link to your website and interact with fans of your company. Twitter is another social networking site that has really taken off in the business world. Twitter allows for individuals and companies to post short messages, 140 characters in length, about their products and services. Just like Facebook, you can post status messages and build a following. Twitter also allows you to post links to your website for customers to click.

Follow the steps enumerated above, and take the tips to heart and you will be on our way to crafting an effective Online Branding strategy that would ensure that what your customers perceive your brand, service or offer to be is exactly similar to how you perceive it to be. “If you sell shovels that can dig a 3 foot hole in 3 minutes, your audience should know that can be able to dig a 3 foot hole in 3 minutes with your shovels and only your shovels alone.”

If you have questions or comments about Online Branding

, please post them in the space provided below. You can also send me questions about online branding or Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Reputation Management through the .

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