Previously we have written about protecting the image and reputation of your business. As reported by Bnet, in a world of social media which has led to the blurring of the lines between our personal and professional lives, it has become increasingly important to take steps to protect your personal reputation. It doesn’t take much for a smear campaign against you to quickly spread across the internet which can be seriously damaging to your career.

You can use the following tips for tracking and repairing your online reputation:

Tracking your online reputation

* Make a list of the most likely places your name would appear online to begin monitoring your online reputation. Identify blogs, forums, and social networking sites, such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, which anyone within your professional circle may also use. You can even track your company’s corporate site and previous places of employment.

* You can then set up your own individual Google alerts for the sites you want to frequently monitor at www.google.com/alerts. Other monitoring tools include Twinbox, which tracks comments made on Twitter through Microsoft Outlook.

Repairing your online reputation

* Although the above tips are useful, unfortunately they will not prevent online attacks. The first thing to do is examine what has been said about you and whether it is accurate or not. If not, you should correct them immediately. If it is true, you should apologise via the same medium as the message.

* If your professional realm is under attack, consider advising your employer as well as the legal department – especially if the comments made are defamatory.

Other useful information

An important aspect of creating your own personal brand online is to separate your business and personal social networking contacts. For example, you could use Facebook for personal networking and LinkedIn for business networking.

You build and maintain others’ brands every day, why not start doing it for yourself?

Create your own PR that reflects the real you – the professional you. By circulating positivity around your name, the likelihood of negative commentary being regarded is reduced.

We came across this article by Lee Odden, which is a guide to assessing if your PR agency is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and social media ready.

We are pleased to note that we have been implementing the suggested SEO and SMO strategies for our clients for some time now.

So how do you know if your PR agency is SEO and social media ready? Odden proposes a six question quiz. The main points are below.

* You need both social media and SEO strategies.

* As discussed previously on our blog, Social Media Optmisation (SMO) can be integrated with SEO strategies to increase your business’ online visibility, particularly through organic search on search engines such as Google.

* When it comes to SEO keyword optimisation, the keywords you have been optimising for on your web pages and in your blog posts should also be optimised for in social media content, along with links back to your website pages on these particular topics.

* You need to get to know your target audiences so that you can customise online content to their interests. A good way to do this is by conducting a survey including questions such as: what social media sites do you visit and how often? What type of search do they use for story research? etc. This should ideally be the first thing you do, in order to assist with developing a blog content plan.

* Develop a blog content plan that not only includes content on your company but also industry specific topics that will be of interest to your target audiences, including journalists and bloggers. Ideally, you want blog content to reach social media news and bookmarking sites and this is where providing quality content can help.

* Have good quality, keyword optimised blog posts on your website as well as interesting and useful content on your social media profiles.

Odden also speaks about establishing your PR agency’s true core competency: traditional or digital PR. We believe that with a highly qualified team with experience in varying fields, it is possible to have a PR agency that can operate competently within both areas.

You may have heard of Search Engine Optimisation (learn more about SEO) but SMO is slightly different.

SMO is fully leveraging the marketing potential of social media channels.

What does this mean for you?

Due to their individualised and localised preferences, social media sites such as Facebook allow you to be creative and interactive with your marketing activities.

E.g. You could produce a short video that is topical to your business and perceived by others as genuinely useful information, and post this on your You Tube channel, in your Facebook group and tweet about it etc.

Including a link back to a landing page on your website during such SMO activity, assists with SEO by driving traffic. Hence, SMO can be part of an effective overall SEO strategy.

In order to fully utilise SMO and provide your business with the best results possible, we’ve pulled together a few tip on ‘best practices’. These include:

* Be Participative - Web prospects like to participate in communities. You can encourage them to do this on your web pages, blogs and social media outlets through posting compelling content and providing advice that addresses genuine concerns.

* Converse instead of advertising – The average person will view 3,000 advertisements in one day, which leads to overload therefore in order to reach out to consumers, engaging web conversations should be utilised. Being able to have ‘personalised’ conversations with your customers and respond to customer complaints in real time also helps to build your brand.

* Be Transparent - Trust is important when communicating with online consumers. Being participative, sincere, open and 100% accurate and truthful is extremely important.

* Belong to Communities – Social media thrives on the feelings of community belongingness fostered by web conversations on mutual interest and niche-communications that are based on typical content. SMO is a great way to utilise social media to bond people with similar preferences and tastes to provide helpful advice on various products and services.