Social Media Monitoring Featuring SocialAlert™

Controlling Your Online Reputation

• Create Regular Consistent Content with A Social Media-Friendly Website

• Control Your Image Through Social Media Participation

• Prevent Negative Comments from Going Viral by Consistent Monitoring

• Immediately Respond Honestly & Courteously to Negative Feedback

Have you heard the proverb, "Bad news travels fast?"

On the internet, and particularly through the social media, bad news travels faster than ever before. Your personal or business reputation is primarily spread by word of mouth.  In the past this was a gradual process through people's personal conversations around the dinner table or at the local community center or other social gathering place.  In the age of social media, however, opinions spread at the speed of light through blogs, comments, and status updates.  It can literally take minutes for opinions to spread "virally" across the internet.  Negative -- or worse -- falsely negative attacks, on your business, brand, or personal reputation can easily run wildly out of control in a matter of hours.

Managing your online reputation requires 3 main steps. 

1. Control what is appearing about you in the search engines.  This can be accomplished by consistently adding useful information about you and your business to your website, other websites (through writing articles and commenting on blogs, for example) and participating in the social media.  This way, when someone searches for your brand on Google or Bing, information that you have provided will appear first.  The more information you contribute, the more control you will have over your search engine results.  Alternative Marketing Connections can help your business with this strategy by providing you with our social media management services and social media-friendly websites.
    
2. Your organization must participate in the social media.  Not only does this reinforce your brand consistency, but it also creates additional content for search engines to rank.  Now that Google is indexing major social media sites in real time, this is more critical than ever.
    
3. Prevent negative comments from going "viral."  Inevitably someone will say something negative about you or your business online. There is nothing you can do to prevent this, and once the information has been published to the Internet, it is virtually impossible to remove it. Finding this negative feedback early and dealing with it immediately in a courteous manner can be the difference between reinforcing your good reputation and playing damage control for weeks, months, or years.
   
   As the old football saying goes, the best defense is a good offense. Alternative Marketing Connections can provide you with this offensive tool by proactively monitoring the internet for key terms and names related to you or your business. If we discover anything -- positive or negative -- we will immediately notify you so that you can take action. We can also advise you or your customer relations department on the best course of action to take.  The faster you are able to react, the less likely the negative comments will spread.
    

Alternative Marketing Connections provides social media monitoring and reputation control as part of its SocialStream™ package.