April 22, 2009
FYI, over at Monster’s Blog, I just posted a description of how our still-in-development referral fees are going to work. It seems the most recent Spokesmonster cartoon didn’t make things as crystal-clear as we’d hoped…
Anyway, watch this space for more info on referral fees and other upcoming features.
April 9, 2009
After examining a couple months’ worth of comments and complaints from users like you, our greasy-tailed keyboard-monkeys have soldered and screwed together an update that makes StepRep even easier and more fun to use. Let’s go over the improvements:
1. Got a question about how to use StepRep? If it is a question that is asked frequently, perhaps it has been addressed in our new and imaginatively-titled Frequently Asked Questions section.
2. You know how the buttons on each story used to say Good, Bad, and Watch? Well, it turns out people found that kinda confusing. So we’ve changed the terminology to Positive, Negative, and Neutral. Hopefully that makes it a little clearer.
3. There are new filters to allow you to organize stories by date and by where the story originated – websites, images, Twitter, or news.
4. Are you a Twitter junkie? Now there’s a Tweet This link on each story so you can quickly share it with your followers.
5. We’ve added a new category called My Content which will automatically separate out blog posts and updates from URLs you designate. So if you’re a frequent blogger and you’re tired of seeing your own posts show up in your StepRep results, relief has arrived…
6. Now you can trust and endorse fellow StepRep users by clicking a link on their profile in the MyFrontSteps Directory. And, of course, they can trust and endorse you back!
7. There’s a new Executive Report that will show up in your email once a week (or as often as you choose; you can change the frequency in your account settings). The report lets you know what’s going on with your StepRep account – how many new stories have been found, how many users have trusted or endorsed you…and so on.
8. You already know about the StepRep widget, which allows you to broadcast positive links to your website or blog. Well, now there are two new widgets – one to display your Trusted Services and another to display your Member Stats. In coming months, as the MyFrontSteps community grows, these widgets will be increasingly useful for connecting to your fellow service providers and bringing in new business through your StepRep account.
9. Speaking of the widget. If you’ve got a WordPress.com hosted blog – like me – then you might have noticed that the widget, consarnit, could not be added to your blog. WordPress does some hocus-pocus on its pages that erases the code that makes our widget work. Well, now there’s a WordPress.com workaround: You’ll create an RSS feed for the stories on your StepRep widget and paste that link into a blank RSS widget on your blog. We’ll have a detailed how-to up on the FAQ page pretty soon. In the meantime, if you’d like instructions get in touch with us.
9½: Oh, one more wee thing: there’s a new Spokesmonster video that talks about some features we’ll be adding in the near future to allow you to offer quotes and referral fees through your StepRep account.
We’ve been pretty busy, haven’t we? But if there’s some feature you think we’re still missing, don’t hesitate to let us know – post a comment here or on our Facebook group, tweet us, or just send us a message from the StepRep feedback page. We’re already hard at work on the next update…
March 25, 2009
I had put up a tweet this morning on @jtomlin about an article on ZDnet: http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=15143
Twitter has made a subtle change and Wauters is right – it will make a big different for the search results for twitter users. This will make twitter a much more valuable tool for reputation management. Michael Arrington noted that it’s time to starting thinking of twitter as a search tool – indeed.
February 13, 2009
The fellas at the far end of the hall have just wrapped up another round of tweaks to StepRep. Most of the changes they made were in the “back end” – that is, they’re invisible to schmoes like you and me. But they also made a couple of “front end” changes that will affect – for the better! – the way you and I interact with the product.
For instance,
1. In the past you might have created a new search and were annoyed to discover that StepRep didn’t allow you to save it. That’s because, for the present, users are limited to creating 5 searches at a time. Now there’s a handy error message to explain what’s going on when your sixth search gets snuffed out.
2. The numbers next to the menu on the left, showing how many stories you have in each category, used to be a little sluggish to update. Now those numbers will change immediately when you move a story from one category to another.
3. You know your StepRep public profile? Wait, you didn’t know that you had a StepRep public profile? That’s probably because you had to dig around in the settings to find the link. Now the profile link is prominently displayed at the top of the screen, where users are more likely to stumble across it…and maybe now that they know it’s there, they’ll start filling out their profile with information about themselves and their business.
4. Speaking of your public profile, it’s been redesigned. If you’d like to see what it looks like now, I’ll modestly provide my own page as an example. It’s nothing fancy, but the profile page is designed to be super easy for search engines to find and index. For example, as of February 12, if you Google my name, my StepRep profile page comes up fourth in the results. My profile page, in turn, points search engines toward the stories that I’ve chosen to promote using the StepRep widget.
5. One more thing about the public profile: we’ve changed the URL. I don’t quite understand the technical reasons, but apparently the new URL is a little Google-friendlier than the old one. If you’re using the StepRep widget on your blog or website (and if you’re not, why aren’t you?), you might want to re-install it so it points to the new URL. But if you don’t feel like re-installing, no worries, the old link will redirect to the new location.
6. Are you a StepRep user from outside the US and Canada? If so, you were undoubtedly irritated at sign-up time by the fact that your home country wasn’t available in the drop-down box when you selected your location. We apologise for the inconvenience. For new users, we’ve created a comprehensive list of countries for the drop-down box. And if you’ve already signed up using a fake address, you can now go into your settings and select your actual country from the list. So all you users in the South Sandwich Islands can stop with the hate mail, already!
February 10, 2009
Just a quick note to everyone using StepRep(Beta) that we’ll be performing a data migration this morning that will require a couple hours of downtime.
Thanks for your patience and we’ll be back up ASAP.
February 6, 2009
Reputation not just what you say about yourself, but more and more importantly, what others say about you. In the previous 2 posts I discussed building a search profile for yourself. Today, I’ll build on that a bit. If my first statement is true, which I think it is, then it’s not enough to just promote stories about yourself. You need and want people to find stories and comments that other people have written about you.
Today, social media has opened up a new era of transparency. People are cynical about marketers. You know those old testimonials that we used to put on all of our websites from “Bob Jones in Chicago”. Those ones with no link to Bob, his email or any information that Bob was a real guy and his testimonial was real. Those don’t have a lot of impact anymore. Thus it is important to promote verifiable comments, opinions, recommendations and views about you and/or your business by 3rd parties. These are more legitimate when they come from a 3rd party and they are published on a 3rd party site.
So when I promote all of my own profiles to increase their collective search rank, I also link to and mention stories, articles and comments about me on other sites so those rise higher in the search results for my name.
StepRep helps this process first by helping you find comments and stories about you. It helps you find them early and allows you to comment on things in a timely manner. You’ll often want to reply to comment and stories whether they are positive or negative. StepRep further helps promote these stories by putting all of the good ones on your StepRep profile. As you promote this profile, the links to your good stories become more and more valuable. An easy way to promote your StepRep profile is to place the StepRep widget on your other sites and profiles. It rolls through your good stories and it links back to your profile.
In the end, you want a good mix of results when someone Googles your name. You want some of your websites and personal profiles to show up and you want 3rd party comments and stories to show up.
February 2, 2009
In the last post, we talked a little about the basics of linking. It’s important to understand how pages show up in search. So by building your online search profile, we’re talking about making it easy for people to find you and managing what people see when they search for you. If your name is rare, you’ll have an easy time. If your name if John Smith, you have some work cut out for you!
I’ll use myself as an example right now. If you search for Jeff Tomlin, most of the results on the first 2 pages of Google will either be my online profiles or articles about me. I’ve achieved that primarily by linking my profiles together. That is, on most of those profiles and websites, I list all of my other profiles. Next, I link to other articles about me on my blog. This gives rank to those other articles about me. Lastly, I try to list my sites and profiles on other 3rd party sites, directories, blogs and news.
There are a few things to note. Let’s go through the list of link attributes I mentioned in the last post.
1.Page Rank of the Linking Pages
I have about 12 personal sites and profiles that I link together. Each one I add means they will all generate another link. But linking them together isn’t enough. Each profile needs to have independent incoming links. I can’t write for and market all of these profiles effectively so first I syndicate content to some of them. An example of this is friendfeed. It aggregates content that I’ve posted from my other accounts and thus it updates regularly, but I never really go to the site. Secondly, I really focus on building a small number of them. As I market 2 or 3 of them, their individual rank goes up. As they build popularity, the links from those 2 or 3 to my other profiles carry more weight.
2.The Number of Other Links on the Linking Page
To maximize the value of the links I have to each of my profiles, I manage the total number of links on my linking pages. To do this, I simply ensure that I don’t populate my pages with links to too many other websites.
3.The Topic of the Linking Page
I want to maximize the topical importance of my linking pages. This is one reason I’ve created so many different online profiles. Each profile or website is about me, Jeff Tomlin. Thus when I link to all of my other sites, the link is highly relevant. Google now recognizes that these sites are all about the same person.
4.The Text of the Link
When I link to one of my sites or profiles, I use proper link text. The key is to ensure the link is descriptive, yet optimal from a search engine point of view. That is, you want to describe what the link actually links to, and you want link relevant value from the text. So I’ve formatted links to my profiles including a short name of the profile along with my name. An example is: “Jeff Tomlin – Linkedin”. A good clue to use is to try and make the link text similar to the title of the page you are linking to.
5.Reputation of the Linking Site
I always ensure that I don’t engage in linking schemes. I am careful of the sites I link to and I only promote my sites to other reputable sites. This happen naturally when you market yourself with ethical online practices.
January 30, 2009
Today, people Google each other on a regular basis. If you have a job interview, the employer has Googled you. If you offer a service, your prospective customers have Googled you before they phoned. If you have an introductory business meeting, the other party has likely researched you online. This is why Online Reputation Management (ORM) is critical today. While ORM is a broader topic, what we’re talking about right now is managing the Google-ability of your name, or rather, how easy it is to find you on Google and what people will see – your Google profile if you will. Now of course this discussion includes other search engines, but Google has become the verb ‘to search’ now so I’ll keep referring to Google. I’m going to split this discussion into 2 posts and focus on the background that links play in search for this post. The next post, I’ll get into actually building your profile.
The topic on how links work is rather old news to many, but complicated enough to leave many others still in the dark. I’m going to discuss this at a high level. Google ranks the relevance of a page by many factors. In general, a page is ranked based on it’s topical relevance to a keyword search and how many links point to that page. The most important factor would be the links a page has pointing to it. Here is what makes a link valuable:
1.The Page Rank (PR) of the Page the Link is From
The more popular a page is, the more valuable links from that page will be. Google has a patented algorithm that calculates the popularity of a page. You can see the page rank of a page using the Google toolbar on a scale of 1-10. This number is not the actual PR that Google uses, but it shows you the ballpark popularity of a page.
The idea here is that if you receive a link from a well established, popular page, that link will give your site more value than a brand new page or a page with few or no links pointing to it.
2.The Number of Other Links on the Linking Page
The value of a link on a page is diluted by the total number of other links on that page. For example, if a page has a page rank of 5 and there is only one outgoing link on that page, that link will carry a relative value of 5. But if there are 99 other links on that page, that link will carry a relative value of 5/100.
3.The Topic of the Linking Page
This point is simple. If my blog is all about real estate in Denver, a link from another Denver real estate site (or page) is more valuable than a link from a casino site.
4.The Text of the Link
This is a big one. Link text matters a lot. So a link to my Denver real estate site that looks like this: Denver Real Estate, is a lot better than a link that is formatted like this: click here.
5.The Reputation of the Linking Site
This relates to point three. Google gives websites a relative weighting based on the links they attract and the sites they link to. The idea is that they recognize the types of ‘neighbourhoods’ you associate with. So if a link comes from a site with a good reputation, the link will carry more weight than a link from a spammy site. For clarity, if a site is linking to other low value sites and receives links from those sites, its links will carry less value than a site that is being linked to from CNN, Yahoo, educational institutions etc.
Take a look here for a more in-depth discussion on building links:
http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/002357.html
In the next post, I’ll use some more examples of the above concepts and show you how to build out a strong profile to increase the Googlability of your name.
January 21, 2009
There was a story in the New York Times about Belkin paying people for writing positive reviews. This was an interesting story to me. Apparently, a Belkin employee was paying people to write favorable reviews on sites like Amazon. The general reaction was very negative and a general concensus was that this represents very poor reputation management practices. But I began to take a more critical look at this and wondered how it was really different from other forms of advertising.
1. How is the intention different from a company paying for an ad in certain media and claiming a poor product is very good? Consider a company that has consumer reports, community feedback and perhaps even internal research which confirms to them that their product or service is poor.
2. How is this different from an infomercial where a well know personality is paid to endorse a product or service?
3. Is this different from a company paying a subject matter expert for a product review. Consider different types of marketing arrangements. Sometimes an expert is paid money for a review and sometimes there is a mutual co-marketing arrangement in place.
4. Consider companies that pay people to send business their way on a referral basis. Have you ever been to a place like Cancun Mexico and if you ask someone directions to a restaurant or bar, they give you a business card of a place with their initial on the back. They are paid a referral.
5. What about sites that just sell ads and link to ‘great services’.
I guess the key question here, is what actually makes advertising and promotion reputable?
January 16, 2009
This week on SEOMOZ.org, Rand Fishkin and company discussed reputation management in a couple of posts as it pertains to SEO (search engine optimization) strategies. First, I should note that to many experts in the search marketing industry, SEO is a term that describes a much broader set of goals rather than just optimizing content for search; rather it’s a whole philosophy for web design and marketing that balances search, user experience and brand perception.
In a post called “The 6 Goals of SEO: Choosing the Right Ones for Your Business“, he lists SEO for reputation management as one of the goals. First he explains what SEO for reputation management means – basically it involves trying to get positive comments about you or your company ranked in search engines above any negative comments. I should add, for people that generally have positive information about them online, it involves getting the most relevant and desired references ranking as high as possible.
This can be a challenging process and the obvious need in this work is the ability to save and categorize online references about you. This is a simple but important feature that we’ve added to our reputation manager (StepRep). Today, you can set up Google Alerts, but you have no way to save or categorize results in an organized way. Placing the valuable references on your StepRep profile, helps provide crawlable links to those references and thus helps to promote them in search.
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