garykamen / blog

11-09-08

Tips for Monitoring and Controlling your Company’s Online Reputation

With the web as open as it is, it has become increasingly difficult for companies to control their online reputations. Power that had once rested solely in the hands of corporate PR groups is now shared among consumers with an internet connection and the will to make themselves heard. If someone has a bone to pick with your product or service, they’ll blog about it, mention it in a forum, or write about it in the numerous consumer review websites out there. This openness can be great for consumers, but only if the negatively is warranted. If it isn’t - and the consumer is either acting ignorant or has a problem that can easily be remedied - then companies should make every effort the contact that person. This not only makes a happy customer, but can potentially create a brand advocate. Of course, you first need to know where to find them…

The Blogosphere: The most unmoderated place on the web tends to have a lot of corporate chatter. Start with a search on Technorati, currently the most popular blog index. Google Blog Search, IceRocket, and BlogPulse are also excellent resources.

Forums: Also known as message boards, these niche websites thrive on community participation. Users have a tendency to speak their minds, often masking their true identities. A popular forum topic can easily lead to hundreds of blog posts, news articles, and Twitter posts. BoardReader is undoubtedly the best place to start your forum search. BoardTracker is also a good one.

Twitter: The most popular micro-blogging platform is an excellent resource to find real-time opinions of your product or service. More importantly, posts made to Twitter often turn into full blown blog posts - so it’s best to catch them early. There’s a great little tool called TweetScan that automatically monitors Twitter and informs you (via e-mail or RSS) when a post is made matching your search criteria. Mark Collier of “Search Engine Guide” wrote a more in-depth article on this topic.

Search Results and News Stories: Google Alerts and Yahoo Alerts both let you sign up to receive alerts via e-mail when a keyword-relevant news article is published or a specific website is updated.

Professional Services: If you don’t have the time (or will) to monitor the web on your own, you can always hire it out to companies like Reputation Defender.

It’s important to note that simply reaching out to your customers online is not always enough. Heavy social media users also like to see companies embracing the same technologies they use. This might include creating a company Facebook page or MySpace profile - or setting up a company Twitter account. Corporate presences on these website can also make a company more visible within search.

Any websites or tools I missed here? I’d love to hear about them in the comments…

11-02-08

Essential WordPress Plugins for Every Blogger

WordPress is a great application by itself, but there are still a number of useful features that it does not natively support. Below is a list of essential tools to help you get the most out of your WordPress blog.

FeedBurner
An analytics tool for your RSS feed that tells you how many subscribers you have, and where they’re coming from.  If you don’t mind a few ads within your feed, the optional FeedBurner Ad Network helps you monetize your blog.
http://www.feedburner.com

Sociable
Automatically adds links to common social bookmarking websites like Digg.com below every post so that your readers can easily promote your content for you. 
http://yoast.com/wordpress/sociable/

RECAPTCHA 
Requires readers to type a jumbled word before commenting, preventing bots from spamming your blog. One of the best, and most popular CAPTCHA tools out there.
http://recaptcha.net/plugins/wordpress/ 

Akismet
CAPTCHA can prevent bots from spamming your blog, but if people are doing it, Akismet adds a second layer of protection by automatically screening each comment, and letting you review the ones that look fishy. 
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/akismet/

WP Google Analytics
Google’s completely free analytics program keeps getting better. This simple extension helps you to add the Google Analytics tracking code to your blog so you can track anything from page views, referring urls, downloads, etc… 
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-google-analytics/

Google XML Sitemaps
Creates a sitemap of your blog, making it easier for the most popular search engines (not just Google) to index it. Additionally, whenever you create or edit a post, your sitemap updates itself and notifies the search engines.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/

All in One SEO Pack
When submitting a sitemap is not enough to get your blog noticed by the search engines, this extension helps you optimize your page titles and meta tags, making it easy for search engines recognize your content as being the most relevant for a given term. 
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

WP Super Cache
Each time a visitor loads a page of your blog, a call is made to the database. When multiplied many times, it can be very burdensome on the server and significantly increase page loadtime. WP Super Cache converts your pages to simple html, making them lightweight and fast. 
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache/

Get Recent Comments
This simple extension displays your most recent comments within the blog’s sidebar.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/get-recent-comments/

10-29-08

Top 10 Twitter Tools

Twitter, as you all know is the most popular micro-blogging platform out there. What you may not know is that a number of applications have been built to extend its functionality and usability:

1. Twitbin - an add-on for Firefox that lets you access Twitter directly from your Sidebar.
2. Twhirl - a desktop application for both Mac and Windows (based on the Adobe AIR platform) that not only lets you interact with Twitter, but also laconi.ca, Friendfeed, and sessmic.
3. TwitterBerry - a Twitter mobile client for BlackBerry (requires OS 4.0.2+).
4. Twitter for iPhone - just as the name suggests, a Twitter client for the iPhone
5. Flock - The ability to view Twitter updates is only a small part of this new web browser.
6. TwitterSnooze - a very useful application that lets un-follow someone for up to 30 days
7. TwitterVision - a very cool website that shows the newest Tweets on a world map.
8. Tweet2tweet - lets you monitor conversations across Twitter
9. Twist - almost like a Google Trends for Twitter. Lets you track the popularity of various keywords.
10. Digsby - a well-rounded app that lets you monitor your entire online social life from a single tool. AIM, Gmail, Facebook, MySpace, AOL, MSN, Linkedin, Yahoo, and of course, Twitter.