How Should Physicians Handle Social Media?

March 8th, 2013 by RepOb Blog No comments »

It is possible that you could be destroying your online reputation without even knowing it. In the world we live in today, your online reputation is what defines you both as a business and as a professional. Simply ignoring this fact could potentially put in jeopardy the professional life that you have worked so hard to build. Branding is an important component in setting yourself apart from your competition. The key is knowing how to effectively protect and manage your online brand.

Your online reputation is your brand

For practitioners and providers, a brand is usually the reputation of facilitators, specialists and individual doctors. Their livelihoods are more valuable than large institutions or hospitals when their online reputations are threatened in rating sites, news reports, chat rooms and forums.

Your online reputation can be ruined in minutes

It only takes several bad blogs, posts or comments to destroy a reputation that you have spent many years creating. Nowadays, people rely on the Internet as a means to find doctors. This is especially true for people who do not go to a doctor on a regular basis. This makes it important for facilitators and doctors to manage their online brands and reputations effectively. Even though a doctor with a small practice may not have the manpower or financial resources that large companies have to deal with bad reviews, they still must do their best to make sure only truthful reviews are posted.

Manage, watch and build your online reputation

Do a search of the Internet and thoroughly review all of the information that is floating around in cyberspace about you and your business. Could any of this information be potentially harmful to you? Is this the information that you want out there when people are searching for you or the specialty that you provide? Is all of the information about you correct and true?

Online reputation management means you need to constantly monitor the conversations that others are having concerning you. It also means using online marketing experts and social media to promote your brand in a way that will attract as many potential customers as possible. Here are the steps to do that:

1. Find your reputation online

You can search your online reputation by using Google. Doctors who are not Internet-savvy can us Google alerts to be notified of any blogs or news that pertain to them. It would also be a good idea to monitor Twitter.

International sites like Zocdoc, Healthgrades  in the US or Zahnartzbewertungen in Europe can help

2. Create the profile you want people to see

Once you have discovered where people are talking about your brand, you will need to build your brand profile on those specific sites. Having an effective presence in social media means much more than just having a Twitter or Facebook account. Building a reputation with doctor portals such as ZocDoc will greatly increase a potential patient’s perception of you and your brand.

3. Manage your online reputation and what it says about you

Since you have now established a profile of your own, and can easily read what people are saying about you, it would be wise to manage what people say about your brand.

Reply to reviews and comments about your brand. Respond in a thoughtful way to negative reviews. It is never a good idea to argue online, as this will only serve to make you look bad.

4. Protect your reputation and brand when you are under attack

Since you will not always be able to please everyone, react quickly to slow down a negative comment before it gets out of control. The faster the flames of a bad review are extinguished, the better. Keep in mind who is making the negative comment. If it is just a troll, don’t even waste your time on them. If there is a mistake, do your best to correct it so that the public has access to the truth. Present your facts in a way that is straightforward. Try to avoid preaching to the readers. You will lose them very quickly if you do this.

If the problem is severe, you can always take legal action. However, this should only be done if all other attempts to resolve the matter have failed. The hiring of a person who is experienced in public relations can often help in solving any unresolved issues.

 

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Posted in Physician reputation management

Reputationobserver Country Video

October 12th, 2012 by RepOb Blog No comments »

We’ve produced this a while back four one of our international outposts, but never showed it in the US. Let us know if you like it!

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Posted in Reputation Management

7 Reasons Why Hotels Should Protect Their Reputation

August 18th, 2012 by RepOb Blog No comments »

1. Maintaining A Stable Client Base
Seemingly, the most insignificant details overlooked or ignored by hotel staff are a venue for client discontent. The reality is these clients can and do make complaints known in social media like Facebook, twitter, popular forms and numerous blogs. All of this can seriously damage a hotel’s fine reputation. Once this happens, the mark of instability becomes officially pronounced through loss of hotel clients.

2. Protect Investments In Promotions And Advertising
Hotels annually spend huge sums of their hard-earned profits on advertising and promotions. These financial investments can quickly dissipate under the wrong kind of customer criticism. One disgruntled customer may not be able to do much reputational damage. More than a handful of disgruntled customers all with similar criticisms can make the revenue spent on promotions and advertising seem invalid.

3. Retain Solid Revenue
In order for hotels to capture the largest target markets, they need regular clients. Many hotels do not solicit solely to tourists for business. Major hotels in the largest cities also retain certain types of long-term leasing contracts with business, entertainment and socialite society. The impact of losing these clients as a result of bad publicity or negative notoriety reduces revenue. Reputation management helps retain solid revenue.

4. Remain Ahead Of Competitors
In the hotel industry, keeping a good lead ahead of competitors is part of the business of the business. Fortunately, hotel management is not without some significant assistance. Today, reputation management software is a popular tool to quickly monitor social media and the internet for negative customer hotel reviews. Reputation management has become one of the major issues in many businesses, including the hotel industry. Businesses who ignore reputation management implementation may find they’ve delayed this essential mechanism and the cost to reinvent their reputation may be prohibitive.

5. How Will Reputation Management Software Help Your Hotel?
Reputation management software offers the ability to monitor comments made about your hotel in various social media venues. This is a thorough and completely comprehensive means of quickly determining the damage that’s been done to your hotel’s reputation and what can be done to restore it. Reputation management software provides spin control and determines the level of risk involved to reputation. This software multi-tasks on several levels of social media. It’s been so well received that top level government and political aides use it as a guide to their defensive responses. Hotels can now do the same thing. Reputation management software helps hotels gauge the amount of customer criticisms while it also provides a means to control spin.

6. Don’t Allow A Negative Reputation To Go Viral
If there is one capability social media venues possess that cause the most damage to reputation, it’s the ability to cross social media lines and go viral on large numbers of interconnected social networks. This simply means that a hotel may have a complaint that appears to be on one social network only. The reality is that in a matter of seconds the complaint can be virally transmitted to multitudes of other social networks in a matter of seconds. This has already been witnessed with certain videos that appear on Facebook, as an example and is transmitted virally to a host of other social media venues in the time it takes for millions viewing it to transmit it. The reason for this lightening speed viral transmission of destructive data is worldwide connections via social media.

7. It’s Not Just A Matter Of Reputation
Protecting hotel reputation isn’t just a matter of reputation. It’s a matter of business, employee, staff and management image smeared by social media video clips and tapes. What the public sees about a hotel has lasting negative effects.

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Posted in Hotel Reputation Management

Sustainable Reputation Management

April 9th, 2012 by RepOb Blog No comments »

Protecting a company’s online reputation is necessary to grow a brand in the 21st century. Although a cogent argument can be made that peer to peer word of mouth is still the most effective advertising, the online reputations of businesses are quickly becoming the top determining factor in attracting new consumers. A positive or negative online review will live on virtually forever in cyberspace, swaying the opinions of future potential customers for years to come. A negative online review has a permanence that word of mouth does not. A reviewer might have visited a restaurant and written a negative review because of other factors in their life that day and then visited the restaurant a few more times and loved the food. Perhaps they neglected to go back and edit their original review or post a new positive review. This type of problem presents significant challenges to business owners and is compounded by the fact that consumers are more likely to complain and post negative reviews when they have an unpleasant experience than they are to rave about an excellent product or experience.

Especially for an early stage business, unjust negative online reviews can significantly affect revenues. This is because larger companies have received more online reviews so the damage of a negative review is lessened by the sheer number of voices on the Internet, whereas a smaller company relies heavily on each review and online mention. Protecting online reputations is crucial for small and medium sized companies as they seek to grow.

No company has the time to assign an employee to manually search for online reviews constantly. The depth of publicly available social media conversations, threads and wall posts alone is daunting without even factoring in posts on specialized review sites. There are over 300 million tweets per day on twitter alone. That’s well over 3,000 tweets per second. Companies also don’t have the proprietary software to automate a coherent search for reviews and online mentions. Reputationobserver not only tracks all online activity related to a client company, they also have effective strategies for countering negative reviews and boosting a company’s online reputation. The software can even ferret out obscure reviews and posts related to the company. Reputationobserver’s software has the ability to analyze online mentions and categorize them, adding a useful data metric for executives, one that can be measured daily. This real time tool improves response time to consumer issues in addition to tracking online opinion. Particularly during product launches or other sensitive blocks of time like the holidays, fast and accurate analysis of consumer sentiment is crucial to profit margins. The data provided by Reputationobserver’s sustainable reputation platform is a powerful tool for companies requiring instant feedback.

Reputationobserver also helps protect intellectual property rights online. A company’s brand is its rightful property and can’t be exploited by other companies or used without permission. Affiliate companies could generate negative feedback or take actions that do not mesh with a certain brand’s public image. Copyrighted media can also be stolen. Reputationobserver’s platform seeks out brand abusers and instances of copyright infringement and automatically sends out cease and desist notices. The combination of raw data gathering ability and active reputation protection make Reputationobserver a potent tool for combating negative and harmful online activity.

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Posted in Online Reputation Management

Effectively protect your online name, brand, or product!

February 23rd, 2012 by RepOb Blog No comments »

Anyone who remembers high-school certainly can’t forget the petty name calling, jealousy, and gossip that infects a certain part of the student population. Stories of a student being vilified or smeared are pervasive and common place. Very often, the internet can mirror the same messy social dynamics of a high-school. Personalities clash. Rumors, innuendo, and backstabbing prevail. In a heartbeat, a story can spread like wildfire that completely damages a person’s reputation and image.

For anyone trying to create and market a product online, whether it’s a new brand, business, or even a person’s branded identity, this can become a substantial impediment to success.

With social media sites and internet forum usage growing at enormous rates daily, it has become exceedingly easy for everyone and anyone, including competitors, to instantaneously contribute their two cents in a damaging way. Given how simple it is to access this harmful material, it becomes imperative for the entrepenuer in question to stay on top of, manage, and repair damage to their brand caused by the internet’s rumor mill. Of course, this is a complicated, tedious, and frustrating challenge to take on alone given the scale of the world wide web. In fact, with more than two BILLION people using the internet at this point in time, doing online damage control alone is an impossible undertaking.

That’s why having a platform with which to manage all online aspects of your brand is so tremendously important for success. With our Online Reputation Management software, users are provided with an incredibly powerful tool with which to protect their online reputation. By taking advantage of our online management analysis tools, you can take stock of the effectiveness of your marketing strategies in real-time. By understanding whether or not a specific strategy is producing negative feedback, our users are able to take action and deploy new strategies that are more effective at producing positive feedback instead.

Our software platform utilizes a five-step process to make protecting, building, and repairing your online reputation straightforward and efficient. By continuously monitoring the internet for negative mentions of your name, brand, or business, our software is able to quickly alert and provide you with remedies so that you can prompt;y repair and undo any lasting damage.

Unfortunately, the internet can be a savage place when it comes to maintaining and protecting your reputation. Rather than be like that naive high-schooler who waits until after the Yearbook is released to quash a rumor, be proactive and begin protecting your online reputation today. Damage to reputations can easily snowball out of control. At that point, some parents choose to move their children to a new high-school once they realize it’s too late to undo the harm. As an entrepreneur, you cannot afford to just drop everything and start from scratch when others engage in defaming you online. Instead, you must be attentive and bold if your goal is to succeed. Take advantage of our Online Reputation Management software now and sleep more easily knowing that you have a powerful tool at your disposal to combat the worst of the internet. Success is just a step away.

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Posted in Reputation Management

Reputationobserver Brand Abuse Management

February 4th, 2012 by RepOb Blog No comments »

Brand abuse is a big issue online, and it may be done intentionally or unintentionally. This is when someone encroaches on your brand by making infringing content that can cost you money. Checking for and handling brand abuse online is very intensive, and most businesses that do it alone often fail because of how widespread this can become. Our services will help watch out for your brand, making sure that no one compromises it.

Domain Monitoring
Many people, especially affiliates or competitors, like to make domains that feature your brand. For example, if you are named “Brand” then you might find websites like, “free-brand-products.com” or “best-brand.net.” This is used in an effort to draw traffic away from your main website, and onto these pages.

Competitors use this to sell their own products, and affiliates do it to get a commission when they land you sales. While the latter is less of a problem, it still cuts into your revenues because you have to pay the affiliate for making a sale that your website could have done by itself.

We have domain monitoring tools that will find these domains, ensuring they don’t abuse your brand.

PPC Protection
Along with domain monitoring, we will check PPC ads to see if anyone is using your brand. This allows you to easily decide on what ads are fine, and which ones should receive a cease and desist notice.

Image Tracking
Nearly every business uses images. You might have images of products, or you might just have an image of your logo. Regardless, people will try to steal it, and they may misuse your brand to sell their products or to degrade your reputation.

Our sophisticated image filter constantly combs the Internet to check for these images. We search via watermark, the image’s title and even the image itself. Our image filters are able to easily pick up on low-resolution images that are “fuzzy” and hard to see. If someone is using your image, we will find it to keep your brand from being abused.

Counterfeit Selling
If you have resellers, then there will be licensed people selling your products online. Or, if you are selling a product that can be reused, it will be found on the secondary market with auction websites. Both of these are fine, and they do not encroach on your brand.

But, what about counterfeit sellers? These people are making inferior products that feature your design or logo, and they keep all the profits for abusing your brand. We use auction monitoring software to go through suspicious auctions to find these counterfeit items so they can be removed.

Authorized Usage
Normally when you allow resellers or affiliates to make money through your company, you might give them some special access to your logo or branding to help them sell more products. However, you often assign rules to this usage, ensuring the brand is not abused.

By telling us about your corporate policy on this usage, we can go through reseller and affiliate websites to ensure that your brand is being used correctly. This will ensure that everyone is in compliance with your rules.

Stolen and Leaked Information
People using your logo is damaging, but people stealing and leaking trade secrets or other sensitive information is downright devastating. This can cost you thousands, or even millions, of dollars. To minimize the damage, our brand abuse service has a special filter that will search for these types of documents. This way, we can alert you immediately to any such instance, and it can be quickly contained.

Automatic Cease and Desist Service
Manually issuing cease and desist letters can take hours, and you could even devote an entire team of employees to do this. With our service, we can instantly and automatically issue these letters to infringing parties. This is both cost-effective and time-effective, as it clears away anyone trying to abuse your brand.

Conclusion
Brand abuse is rampant online, but our service helps to mitigate it. We will tirelessly search the Internet for anything infringing on your business’s property, and we will quickly stop and minimize any damage. Try us out today, and we will ensure that your brand has a clean reputation online.

Request a free proposal now!

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Posted in Online Brand Management

Online Intellectual Property Protection

December 10th, 2011 by RepOb Blog No comments »

When starting out online and looking for readership and attention, people can’t get enough of visitors and website traffic. Whether it be a business, individual, or even a blog writer, popularity means more readers and site visitors. Even law offices and corporations enjoy a well-visited website with their name on it. However, when popularity becomes problematic as people start copying and stealing material without even so much as a credit back to the original authority, then the author needs to take action. Protecting intellectual property online is hard. It’s very easy to cut and paste material, and slap a name on it as original work on another website. However, there are solutions.

Authors need to first get a handle on how copyright law works. When a work is published, U.S. copyright law immediately protects its ownership. That said, it’s up to the owner to enforce those rights. The first method is the easiest; add a label with the copyright symbol and name on the written work. This makes it clear the intellectual property is owned to the reader. It helps to make the label visibly clear so it can be seen without much trouble, but don’t be overbearing about it.

The next step involves providing a permission authorization. This involves providing a link next to the intellectual work that goes to a new web page with the terms of use. Maybe the work is allowed to be used but attribution is required. Maybe only a description is allowed and no word-for-word copying. Whatever the case, the permission authorization spells out the allowable uses of the work so the reader is again on notice.

Following the notices try to first communicate with people and websites you find stealing material. Not everyone does so maliciously. Many times such websites are designed by folks are new to the idea of copyright in general, and they simply assume if material is on the web it must be free. A simple notification and request for removal can get most posters to take the stolen material off. Many will just apologize and make amends. A few will be a pain.

If they’re not going to be cooperative, then a demand for immediate removal of the stolen material is next. This involves sending a clear message that the intellectual property is owned, the notice is there for everyone to see, and the material is stolen and must be removed from the second website. If the response does not cooperate, the same message can be sent to the website’s hosting company which usually doesn’t want to be responsible for hosting stolen material. They can arbitrarily kill the violating website if they choose to.

Finally, if all the communication above doesn’t work, a legal action may be necessary. A choice needs to be made whether the cost of the legal services is worth the trouble, but if so, the lawyer instead sends a strong-worded message to remove the stolen material or risk a lawsuit. In 99% of the cases, this last resort option gets a reaction and removal.

However, all this monitoring can take up a lot of time and energy. This is where Reputationobserver’s Online Reputation Management Suite can fill the gap. Instead of chasing and performing all the basic communications to violating websites, our reputation service can instead take care of the daily monitoring and warnings. Reputationobserver provides reports that summarize all the problem sites found and the actions taken.

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Posted in Online Copyright Protection, Online Reputation Management

Protect Your Personal Information

October 29th, 2011 by RepOb Blog No comments »

These days, almost everything is done online. Whether it’s paying your bills, banking or shopping, people are constantly entering important, private information on the web and it only takes one security breach to compromise your personal information. But there are several ways you can protect your personal information when online.

Passwords
Start with a strong password. When you’re asked to create one, don’t type in something you already use for another web site, and make sure to use at least six characters and a combination of numbers and letters. Never use a family members name, your phone number or your birthday, and change your passwords every few months.

Phishing Scams
“Phishing” is when you receive and email asking you for personal information and often seems to be sent by a bank or reputable, well-known business. There is often a link embedded in the email, and when you clicm on the link, it appears to route you to their web site. This is called “spoofing,” and the web site you’ve been directed to is fake. Never click on the link in a email — always cut and paste a web address into your Internet browser. They may also ask for your Social Security number or bank account number, which you should never give out. Call the company who is asking for your personal information to verify that it is indeed the company to avoid being “phished.”

Shopping Online
Always be cautious when shopping online, especially when dealing with smaller retail stores where you haven’t made a previous online purchase. Personal information is stolen from unsuspecting shoppers daily as a result on shopping scams, so make sure the retailer has the Better Business Bureau’s online seal. Most reputable online retailers offer insurance and package tracking on purchases. Warning signs of a shopping scam include them requesting your mother’s maiden name or your Social Security number. If you have any doubts, call their customer service department.

You can also help protect your personal information with software that detects spam and phishing filters for your email accounts and various security features such as virus protection programs. Be sure to regularly check your web browser for updates.

There are a variety of online reputation management services whose sole purpose is to monitor what is published online about you and controlling what people find if they enter you into a Google search. Online reputation management services assists those who wish to control the information about their online selves to others, monitoring the Internet 24 hours daily for any private data. If they find and personal/private details, they will remove it from every search site and continue monitoring to ensure that your info remains private.

In today’s digital world, anything that comes up in a search result can affect your life — it may prevent you from getting a job or just shape someone’s opinion of you not only online, but offline as well. Making sure you protect your personal information is imperative and if by some reason your info is compromised, an online reputation management service can help you through it.

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Posted in Identity Theft, Uncategorized

Keeping Your Identity Safe

October 22nd, 2011 by RepOb Blog No comments »

Reputation management has grown increasingly complex. It used to be that an reputation company had only to do a minimum amount of work to keep the perception of a company clean and narrow.

In the old days, online reputation companies looked for advantages for the company, and made sure that there was just a small gap between perception and what was really happening. This was not such a difficult job so few years ago.

Now there is Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, and a whole host of citizen journalists, which come in the form of bloggers. These bloggers and online media groups have the power with simply a computer and an internet connection to destroy the reputation of a company with just a few clicks of a mouse. The biggest issues is that information can be published without being proven or being true. This is why it is important to work with a great online reputation management company.

While the Internet is an incredible tool and advancement for this world, it is also a dangerous one. While the Internet can build a reputation of a company, give a company advertising, and even rebuild a company, it can also be used to destroy a company.

This is good if a company is fraudulent or neglectful, but it is not so good if you have an employee or customer who just has a beef with you. This is where Reputationobserver comes into play.

10.000.000 Victims of identity theft a year

Reputationobserver.com protects companies and individuals from identity theft. There are over Ten million victims of identity theft every year. Statistics show that one in five Americans has already been a victim of identity theft.

If this happens to you or to your company you could be easily destroyed, again with just a click of a mouse. You could lose your home, you could lose your assets, you could lose everything you ever worked for within a few minutes. Yet if you have the services of Reputationobserver.com, you can have your identity monitored and protected, even fixed if ruined.

Some tips to keep your identity safe:

1. Never give your social security number out to anyone that you do not trust. Many websites will ask for this information. If you value your security, you will not type in your social security number. At the very least make sure that the company has a verified security certificate such as VeriSign. However, be aware that hackers know how to get past this information and can still get a hold of your information.
2. Make sure that your passwords are secure. It is recommended that you regularly change your passwords and that you do not use the same password for every account. Write your passwords down, but do not store them on your computer.
3. When banking, online or in public, make sure that you cover your personal pin codes with your hand and keep track of your banking slips and your signatures.
4. Do not leave important banking information in the car or in your purse. Keep your personal information locked up in a secure or fireproof safe.

5. When shopping online make sure to only use legit vendors.

6. Do not share critical data with third-parties over the phone

7. Keep your Social Security Card safe at home

8. Check your credit report with Annualcreditreport.org

9. Utilize a reputation management company such as Reptuationobserver to monitor your name online.

10. Don’t leave any pins or codes and keys in your wallet. Memorize!

 

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Posted in Identity Theft

Social Media Analytics Book

September 7th, 2011 by RepOb Blog No comments »

There are many books written about how to approach social media and social media analytics, but very few go into the detail that Marshall Sponder has in his book “Social Media Analytics.” Most books only skim the surface of this broad topic, but this book goes much deeper, and tells business owners how to directly measure and implement social media advertising and practices.

Before reading this book, is it good to know the basics of social media. Marshall Sponder offers something for newcomers to take, but a lot will go over your head if you don’t understand how to do beginner-level social media advertising. This book isn’t so much about how to do advertising, but it helps you understand why the advertising is done.

After getting over that speed bump, you will find that Social Media Analytics does a great job of telling you how to perform analytics, and how to extract and measure the information you get. Many business owners already know how to get information from social media, but this book will sharpen your perception of how to mine data and how to best use it in your marketing campaign. Without this book, you can flounder about with tons of data, and not know a thing about how to use it properly. This costs a business lots of time and money, and spoils the advantages of social media.

Another good part about this book is that Social Media Analytics tells you exactly what tools to look for. If you do not want to buy the exact tools that Marshall Sponder suggests, he tells you exactly what features to look for in your analytics solutions, which will help you figure out which programs are good and which ones are garbage. Unlike many social media gurus, that talk about analytics tools like a salesman, Sponder talks like a user, which is very refreshing.

If you are part of a business that only pays for data, and does not personally collect or mine for it, you will still find this book useful. This will teach you exactly how valuable information can be, and what information is useless, so that your business only pays for and gets the best data.

One problem with Social Media Analytics is that it is really only meant for medium and large business, so some small businesses may have trouble doing exactly as the book suggests. However, since this book does such a good job of explaining the large realm of social media analytics, skilled readers should not have much trouble scaling back the suggestions to fit a smaller business.

In short, Social Media Analytics is a must for any business owner and we highly recommend it. A business cannot run without data, and this book teaches you exactly how to get and interpret that data so your business can thrive.

 

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Posted in Social Media Analytics