Avoid These 5 Common Reputation Management Blind Spots
If your digital monitoring doesn’t include these platforms, then you may be missing red-flag mentions that could be damaging your brand.
Social monitoring and reputation management go hand-in-hand, as customer conversations about your brand on social platforms can have repercussions for sales, marketing, and public relations. Most monitoring services and agencies generally focus on the major social platforms, especially Twitter and Facebook, as this is where the most impactful consumer chatter is thought to occur.
Certainly the importance of the big two (plus Instagram) can't be overstated, but the social web does extend beyond these platforms. Effective reputation management—whether done in-house or through an agency—should capture your brand or business's entire digital footprint, including the sites discussed ahead: Wikipedia, Glassdoor, Google Images, Quora, and LinkedIn.
Why should you monitor Wikipedia?
A Wikipedia article can be the single most authoritative source of information about your business or brand. Wikipedia averages 18 billion pageviews per month, making it one of the most visited sites in the world. And when you search for a company with Google, Alexa, or Siri, language pulled from Wikipedia is likely the top result.
Just think about how often you pull up Wikipedia articles to find answers or information. Customers, fans, and journalists are doing the same thing with your page, so it’s critical that someone on your team is paying close attention, as anybody can edit information to your page at any time.
A few other key considerations:
Wikipedia is especially important when a news cycle (positive or negative) drives a burst of traffic to your article. If the information on your page isn’t up-to-date or accurate, any errors or misrepresentations will suddenly be magnified.
Negative news cycles are likely to generate edits and additions to your article that reflect criticisms detailed in news coverage.
Inaccurate information of your page may be referenced by journalists and then included in articles or other news coverage. Once these errors are repeated in mainstream sources, they can be difficult to correct.
Why should you monitor Glassdoor?
Nearly 50 percent of job seekers check Glassdoor at some point during job searches. That's great if your business or company has a stellar score and overwhelmingly positive reviews, but even a few negative or highly critical posts can significantly impact your reputation among potential and current employees alike.
Any business with a Glassdoor profile should be proactive in monitoring and responding to reviews (whether positive or negative). If used correctly, Glassdoor can be a tremendous asset for communicating company values and collecting honest employee feedback. But first you need to familiarize yourself with the platform and understand what's being said about you and what options you have for responding.
A few other key considerations:
The average company rating on Glassdoor is 3.5 stars (out of 5) and the average CEO rating is 73% approval. If your score on either of those metrics is low, you should consider taking steps to improve.
Once you claim your profile, there are numerous opportunities to optimize your presence, including updating the general information about your company, adding imagery and photos, and providing further details about benefits.
According to Glassdoor, 62% of job seekers say their perception of a company improves after seeing an employer respond to a review.
Why should you monitor Google Images?
Every single Google search (from "Augustus" to "Coke Zero") will prominently feature image results, either in the knowledge panel or in a separate image section. Searches related to businesses and brands usually return images of company logos, products, website graphics, social imagery, and personnel.
Google image results are thus a projection of your brand, and it's important to be aware of what imagery customers are seeing when searching for you. For example: Is your newest logo or branding popping up on the first page? Are images that could be considered problematic or out-of-date appearing next to current assets? An audit and ongoing monitoring will help you answer these questions and maintain an optimized digital presence.
A few other key considerations:
Even though it's not featured as prominently on the search bar, Google Video results are worth exploring for many of the same reasons as Google Images. Results here will include results well beyond YouTube, including videos embedded on your website and social accounts and videos from platforms like Vimeo and DailyMotion.
Google Images provides "related search terms" at the top of results pages to help users narrow their searches. These buttons include top keywords that Google's algorithm thinks are closely related to the entered search term. This information is useful because it indicates what image descriptors Google associates with your company.
Image search results for Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, and other search engines are generally similar, but there can be key differences that may be worth investigating.
Why should you monitor Quora?
Because your customers may be on the site asking questions (or simply reading responses) about your products or services.
Quora is a social platform (meaning user-generated content) that serves as an answer database for nearly every conceivable question, from "how to survive falling in a volcano" to "how to buy Bitcoin." You may be surprised to find that your business or brand is already mentioned in a Quora response somewhere.
You may also see that competitors are already using the platform to promote their services or establish subject-matter authority. Many Quora questions are worded in such a way that brands can respond with detailed answers that either directly or indirectly mention their own capabilities. When this is artfully done, the response may be upvoted by other users and become the top response.
Frequent monitoring can keep you updated on any brand mentions on the site and help you identify any opportunities to engage.
Two other key considerations:
More than 300 million unique users visit Quora each month. That's a lot of visitors, and a good reminder as to why Quora is such valuable web real estate. (Also worth noting that users on Quora spend an average of nearly 4 minutes on the site per visit.)
Links from Quora are nofollow, meaning they don't impact search engine rankings (or pass any "link juice" to your site). This nofollow tagging is likely meant to discourage promotional linking. That said, adding links to Quora answers can still drive high-quality traffic to your site while establishing you as a subject matter expert.
Why should you monitor LinkedIn?
You may think that you already are monitoring LinkedIn. After all, LinkedIn notifies you every time someone likes a post, leaves a comment, or… really does anything at all, as the platform's notifications are notoriously out of control.
What LinkedIn isn't doing, though, is monitoring for fraudulent accounts (people purporting to work for your company who really don't) or inaccurate listings (people who work for company but don't provide correct employer information). It's probably not necessary to make daily sweeps to identify these kinds of issues, but it's definitely something you should be looking for periodically.
Two other key considerations:
You can use monitoring as a way to identify opportunities to engage, especially in group conversations. Joining groups and contributing to discussions is an important way to expand your LinkedIn network.
By monitoring for relevant industry discussions, you can find timely topics for LinkedIn Articles, which are a great thought leadership complement to your company blog as they help expand your SEO and organic reach on LinkedIn as well.
