Recently in Online Reputation Management Category

Many email marketers tend to shudder at the words “data append”. The idea of dumping hundreds or thousands of unknown email addresses into a list that you worked so hard to compile ‘legitimately’ can be terrifying.   If that’s the case, where do the benefits lie? Are they worth the risk of numerous Spam complaints, bounces and unsubscribes against your reputation? If done properly, the answer for the client or your company is yes.

The number of new articles on these topics per day is at least 50... 50 good ones.  How do you keep up?  How do you know which ones to read?  How can you filter the god from the bad?

You don't have to.  We do that for you.

Josh Williams, Shannon Sell, and I (Brian Carter) post the best of the best SEO, PPC, social media, and online marketing articles in a special FriendFeed "SEM, SEO, PPC, social media, media placement links, articles" room.  (If you don't use FriendFeed, check that out too- it's a way to aggregate all your most important social networking feeds in one place.)

Get most useful, most relevant-to-the-real-business-world info there.  Check it out!

Naturally, our star this time is not Ramses, but Moses... (Charlton Heston style)

If you read about my SEM 2.0 Pyramid, you may have noticed the references to and picture of Yul Brenner from the classic movie, The Ten Commandments.

It hit me a few days after publishing that, that there's a perfect way to extend the theme of the post and go into more detail.

That's right, it's...

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS OF SEM 2.0

1. Thou shalt test everything everywhere; test thy messages, offers, and appeals in social media, on thy site, in thy ads, and in thy search listings.
2. Thou shalt win friends and influence people via Social Media; thou shalt turn competitors into allies via networking and SM.
3. Thou shalt not beg, cajole, or threaten people to give you links for thy networking and value surely shalt bring thee more links (blessed are the poor in links who deserve more links)
4. Thou shalt create valuable content and useful tools that people will want to use, link to, and share.
5. Thou shalt use analytics to discover which keywords, placements, ads, offers, and audiences get thee the results thou needest most.
6. Thou shalt use lessons from each of these three channels: social media, SEO, and PPC to doest better in the other two.
7. Thou shalt use thy seo wisdom on landing pages to increase thy PPC quality score.
8. Thou shalt re-optimize and re-strategize based on clues provided to thee by thy analytics.
9. Thou shalt monitor what people are saying about thee, stay up to date on thy competition, and watch for new competitors.
10. Thou shalt attain wisdom from pre-internet marketing and PR books and teachers and test them in thy SEM efforts.

And finally, thou shalt not argue about whether there is any sense to the order of these 10 commandments.  Because there ain't.

SMM, SMO, and ORM hath heaved up my SEM department. 

As I wrote elsewhere, web 2.0 messed up my job title.  The crazy thing is how much SEO (search engine optimization) and SMO (social media optimization) and ORM (online reputation management) overlap.  Throw into the mix the PR department at our sister traditional agency, and you've got a logistical juggernaut.

So I went to the cocktail napkin, actually the back of a printout of my previous best visual representation of our services, and started sketching out something new.

The more I thought about it, the more I saw that SEO, SMO, and PPC form an interdependent triangle, or pyramid, since pyramids are generally cooler (see Matt McGee's SEO pyramid). I thought, hey, that was a really successful concept, so I created...

The SEM 2.0 Pyramid:

(I threw in an Egyptian, which Matt somehow forgot, because I thought it was funny- well, at least Yul Brenner as an Egyptian is funny.)

I left out ORM, because I don't see ORM as marketing exactly, and it's a more occasional service- or you could look at SMM as the proactive part of ORM, so that takes care of it- and while you're doing SMM, you may notice ORM issues. 

Besides, the SEM 2.0 Square wouldn't be as cool as the SEM 2.0 Pyramid.

The serious explanation of the SEM 2.0 Pyramid:

It's all about relationships, and what each strategy/channel contributes to the others:

Search engine optimization is foundational, because the keyword approach you learn there penetrates everything;

• PPC uses keywords, and usage of keywords in SMO leads to SEO benefits. 
• Understanding of inbound links, keywords, and anchor text also helps SMO create more SEO value.
• SEO also can help determine which audiences, keywords, and messages lead to business results
• Analytics associating keywords with conversions gives you converting keywords to retarget, and
• Copywriting tests of meta descriptions also provide intel about which messages resonate with warm prospects. 
• These converting keywords and messages can then be tested in SMO and PPC.

Social media optimization is an educational process; conversing with your prospects and interested parties in various audiences leads to

• Discovery of placements you can target in PPC, and
• Alerts you to ORM issues. 
• SMO may also tip you off about why various keywords and messages do and do not work in PPC and SEO. 
• Good SMO inevitably leads to more backlinks for the sites you SEO.

Pay per click advertising:

• Placement targeting research may alert you of important domains to do SMO on- that is, blogs to have conversations on.
• And PPC provides a powerful test laboratory in which to try out messages, keywords, and audiences, which can then be tested in SMO and SEO.

Together these three strategies almost form Voltron, but not really.  They do create an incredible synergy in this new SEM 2.0 paradigm. 

Haha, I had to say synergy, didn't I?  Couldn't help it :-)

Online reputation management is becoming more and more important to everyone online, not just companies.

Monitoring Your Reputation

As G.I. Joe used to say, "knowing is half the battle," and in ORM that means monitoring all relevant online channels for people talking about you, your company, your products, and even your whole niche.

How Do You Monitor Your Reputation on Twitter?

There's a lot of conversation on Twitter about all kinds of topics, but how do you monitor Twitter effectively and efficiently?

My favorite tool is Summize.  In this video I show how you can use summize and iGoogle to do ORM monitoring in the Twitterverse.  This will also work with any RSS feed reader.

Here's a summary of the steps:

1. Do some summize searches, preferably using boolean options (see the advanced search page for more) until you get the concentrated results you want.

2. Copy the links for the RSS feeds for those searches

3. Add those links to your iGoogle or feed reader.

4. Check the feed every day to see what's going on!