People Are Talking About You - Do You Know What They Are Saying?
In the past, people used to talk about you and your business either person to person, over the phone or perhaps in letters. If you really had a problem you may have hit the TV news.
With the boom in social media, people still have the same conversations - but now they are taking place in forums, blogs, social networking sites, online video sites and wikis. This is both a brilliant thing and a real challenge. In the past the spread of the information about your business was limited by the number of people who were watching or reading at that particular time.
"Yesterday's news is today's fish wrapping" was a popular saying suggesting that you didn't have too much to worry about if something bad was said about you or your business as people would forget.
With the boom in the net and social media, people are having exactly the same conversations BUT the internet never forgets. One negative comment out in the ether sticks around longer than gum on a shoe. And given the millions of people who use the net - one comment attracts another comment which attracts another comment. Pretty soon you have a whole bunch of negative stuff just hanging around waiting for people to discover when they search for your product or service.
The other challenge is social media ranks the pants off much traditional media. This means, comments on Facebook or Twitter for example appear higher in search engine rankings than un-optimised websites.
Imagine - when someone looks up your business or service on Google and when they hit the search button the first few lines of results are all negative comments. What would they do?
One of the fascinating things about human nature is gossip is fascinating to many people. People love to hear the dirt on other human beings, so of course they will check out a few of the comments to see what is being said. How likely are they to buy after reading these comments? (This is why the headline "Don't buy XYZ until you have read this review" works really well at attracting people to read the content).
Of course the reverse is also true - imagine if all the social media comments said great things about you and your business. How fantastic would that be for your sales?
So what do you need to do to manage your online brand? You need to understand that social media is now a fact of every businesses life. You can't run away from it - you need to learn to live with it and work with it. You need to take active responsibility for managing your brand - both offline and online.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Ingrid_Cliff
With the boom in social media, people still have the same conversations - but now they are taking place in forums, blogs, social networking sites, online video sites and wikis. This is both a brilliant thing and a real challenge. In the past the spread of the information about your business was limited by the number of people who were watching or reading at that particular time.
"Yesterday's news is today's fish wrapping" was a popular saying suggesting that you didn't have too much to worry about if something bad was said about you or your business as people would forget.
With the boom in the net and social media, people are having exactly the same conversations BUT the internet never forgets. One negative comment out in the ether sticks around longer than gum on a shoe. And given the millions of people who use the net - one comment attracts another comment which attracts another comment. Pretty soon you have a whole bunch of negative stuff just hanging around waiting for people to discover when they search for your product or service.
The other challenge is social media ranks the pants off much traditional media. This means, comments on Facebook or Twitter for example appear higher in search engine rankings than un-optimised websites.
Imagine - when someone looks up your business or service on Google and when they hit the search button the first few lines of results are all negative comments. What would they do?
One of the fascinating things about human nature is gossip is fascinating to many people. People love to hear the dirt on other human beings, so of course they will check out a few of the comments to see what is being said. How likely are they to buy after reading these comments? (This is why the headline "Don't buy XYZ until you have read this review" works really well at attracting people to read the content).
Of course the reverse is also true - imagine if all the social media comments said great things about you and your business. How fantastic would that be for your sales?
So what do you need to do to manage your online brand? You need to understand that social media is now a fact of every businesses life. You can't run away from it - you need to learn to live with it and work with it. You need to take active responsibility for managing your brand - both offline and online.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Ingrid_Cliff
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12:56 AM
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