Showing posts with label Online Reputation Management. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Online Reputation Management. Show all posts

Wednesday, 5 October 2016

Web Development Mistakes That Affect Your Online Reputation

A new business or even an existing business just getting around to developing its website can make some rookie mistakes. Hey, after all rookies and mistakes go together. So, what are some of those web development mistakes to avoid which can ruin a business’sreputation online?
If you browse around the Internet, you will naturally come across websites that you like. Whether it’s a business website like Apple or an informational website such as Wikipedia, it’s obvious to see how clutter-free they are. Also, notice the combination of text and background color on these websites. These websites do not have much color, do they? Below, we will discuss web development mistakes to avoid as they can affect your online reputation.
Avoid Over-Designing & Clutter
For first-time web developers, the cardinal mistake to avoid is over-design. Don’t have too many flashy elements on the home page that are all saying “Look at me!” It’s pointless. Website visitors will only hate a website that has flashing menu elements and other such tricks that go out of their way to attract the attention of the visitor. Visitors will leave the website in a hurry for sure if the website is over-designed.
Go for simplicity. Just as Apple iPhone’s shout simplicity in their form, let your website too attempt to accomplish a certain sense of simplicity leading to elegance and class. Clutter happens when you try to present too much information all at once; hence, overloading the innocent first-time visitor. Avoid that as well. Use as little text as possible and opt for bullet points.
Also, make good use of white space to separate out blocks of text and other information. While space helps people scan the information first (in seconds) and people want to be able to scan the info first before they decide whether want to spend the time on the website to read through it or not. With a good web development company, you can get access to professional web designers and developers who will make sure to avoid this and other rookie mistakes.
 Avoid Usability-Related Mistakes
Usability comprises of many things. Usability makes a website sticky — that is, a website where users and website visitors are likely to stick around and spend time.
 Website Loading Time
One of the key usability metrics is website loading time. Lots of studies have pointed out that people will wait for around seven seconds for a website to load and no longer than that. So, make sure your website is fast loading. This is even more critical as more and more people browse the internet from their mobiles and smartphones.
 Cross-Browser Compatibility
You don’t want your website to act funny just because a user decides to view it on Safari rather than Chrome or Firefox. Your website needs to be tested on all modern browsers while the website is being developed so that it renders equally well on all of them. When working with a professional web development company, they will ensure that this problem never happens.
 Color Combinations
We see without mind and not with our eyes. There are hot colors and there are cool colors. There are colors that soothe one’s mind and other colors that irritate. As you develop your website, it’s important to remember the psychology of colors and how the human mind responds to colors.
The best option is to go for black text on white background. This should be suitably modified if you want to highlight your corporate logo or a particular color theme. Also, the subject of the website and its intended audience makes a difference to your color choice. A website meant for kids clearly should have a different color combination than a website for academic researchers.
Choose your color combinations wisely and use colors belonging to the same color family. Do not have too many clashing colors as that will irritate visitors for sure.
 Avoid Autoplay
This is an amateur mistake that some web developers still make where an audio starts playing in the background as the website loads. Users prefer to have control over whether want audio (and video) to play or not. While you can embed YouTube videos that are relevant to your website, never set videos to auto play on load. While it may be a great temptation for you to let a video play automatically, that will be a great turnoff for the visitor. You have to defer to preferences of your website visitors.
 In Passing
It goes without saying that the text itself should be snappy with adequate call-to-actions whenever needed. The basic qualities of text that engage and hold the attention of the reader are use of active voice in most situations while taking care that there are no language or grammatical errors. Similarly, sentences should be short and to the point.
Conclusion
For great results with web development and design, ensure that you hire professionals to assist you with your development as they will have the expertise and experience to deliver exactly what you need. These above mistakes of web development might seem simple but you would be surprised how the simplest of things sometimes gets missed. If you need any advice or assistance with your web development or anything else, please feel free to reach out to the team at Mind Digital Group.

Monday, 26 September 2016

Online Reputation Management To Enhance Your Online Presence

You have spent years creating a picture perfect reputation for your brand in the market and one fine morning you wake up to find that your brand’s reputation has gone down the drain as some malicious online comments or slanderous illogical remarks have been made about you online. Whether you are a well-known Ecommerce company or even a small business, it would be truly unsettling to find that your sales and brand reputation suffering as a result of your negative online reputation. This is where Online Reputation Management comes in to play and is something that can help. It is a very effective and efficient way to help you solve an online reputation crisis that many companies sometimes face.
Many companies and people are unfortunately ignorant of the importance of managing their online reputation. It might come as a shock to them how an online reputation can make or break a brand image. You might ask, “Why are these people posting bad comments against us?” or “What will they gain from doing it?”. The most logical answer is that they might be your company rivals or lobbyists who are holding an active campaign against you to encourage the sales of their own services or products. These people aim to critically damage a company or even profit by shortening your stock. It might do huge damage to your brand if you neglect negative comments on your company especially during the initial phase. Today, everyone researches companies online and these slanderous comments whether true or not will seriously damage your online reputation. Therefore, it is even more important in this day and age to take Online Reputation Managementseriously.
Is Online Reputation Management expensive or cost effective? As a matter of fact, Online Reputation Management is not at all costly in comparison to the harm that negative comments can cause. Thanks to today’s highly online focused world, any crisis can quickly become an online reputation crisis unfortunately. Even if esteemed publications do not report such crisis stories but a blog or Social Media website does, it can cause serious harm to you. The first thing you should do to prevent any type of crisis beforehand is by hiring an effective Online Reputation Management firm that knows what they are doing. They will keep tabs on your website, Social Media sentiment and other online channels to ensure that a positive brand image is being conveyed at all possible times. Some of the key benefits of working with an Online Reputation Company are as follows:
 You can know what customers are saying about your company, products and services through sentiment and advanced analysis tools
 Ability to benchmark against your competition
 Increase brand value of your products and services by addressing or engaging with customers
 Integrate reviews on your website
 Increase rankings across search engines, online shopping portals and many other credible sites
 Increase your online brand value which will lead to more sales/referrals
Connect With Your Customers Through Online Reputation Management
Communicate with your customers & know they say about you: Online Reputation Management helps you to know what is being said about you on review sites and respond accordingly. It also provides you an opportunity to engage with your potential customers and better understand them.
Listen to & respond to customer reviews: Positive reviews comes from your happy customers but that does not mean that you can simply avoid the negative ones. Consider all reviews, be it positive and negative as an opportunity to start a fruitful conversation. Negative mentions act like guides to improve service at your company by rectifying errors done in the past. Most importantly, you get the opportunity to react quickly and wisely to negative feedback. This shows you respect and value customer feedback no matter what it is.
Increased image & enhanced brand value: Satisfied customers are your biggest assets. Once they are confident that you take their responses seriously, they become loyal to you. While they keep coming back to your site, they also talk about your products with their colleagues and friends which leads to more sales and positive brand image. Make your customers your brand ambassadors; raise your company’s brand value without making a huge investment in marketing.
Some Tactics Used By Online Reputation Management Companies
 Improving the tagging and Search Engine Optimization of company-published materials such as white papers and positive customer testimonials in order to push down negative content
 Publishing original, positive websites and Social Media profiles with the aim of outperforming negative results in a search
 Submitting online press releases to authoritative websites in order to promote brand presence and suppress negative content
 Getting mentions of the business or individual in third-party sites that rank highly in various search engines
 Proactively offering free products to prominent reviewers
 Proactively responding to public criticism stemming from recent changes
Working with a good Online Reputation Management company that knows what they are doing can really help your brand and overall sentiment online. Your reputation online matters and is something that needs to be taken seriously before it is too late. If you are looking for a forward-thinking, reliable and trusted Online Reputation Management company that can help your brand online, please feel free to reach out to the team at Mind Digital Group.

Monday, 19 September 2016

An SEO Company Can Help Your Website

When IBM decided to enter cognitive computing and developed their Watson computer system, they decided to first develop it specifically to answer questions on Jeopardy and famously pitted the computer against former winners Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings. The resulting publicity has made Watson more or less a household name. The Jeopardy match-up resulted in invaluable coverage in the media which would otherwise have cost IBM millions of dollars in publicity expenses.
Marketing and publicity are a key part for any brand or business. Which is why the expensive half-time commercial slots during the Super Bowl cost $4 million for a 30-second spot and yet, there is no shortage of buyers.
In the online world, making a website popular is clearly one of the necessary conditions for website owners and Ecommerce businesses if they want to survive and flourish. One of the ways to achieve popularity is via Search Engine Optimization (SEO) with an SEO company. SEO is at the opposite end of the spectrum from Super Bowl half-time ads. SEO is entirely free and the only investment being the SEO professionals themselves times.
Of course, digital marketing is an ever growing activity and online businesses need to opt for paid online marketing activities such as search advertising, PPC advertising and online video ads. Such paid online marketing campaigns can be effective in the short run and they are typically the preferred method when the intention is to promote a short-term activity such as an end-of-season sale. But nothing beats SEO as the preferred vehicle of online marketing to increase a brand’s online profile in a sustained manner as once you achieve rankings, it’s free traffic.
SEO company
For those who are serious about their online business (which includes all Ecommerce businesses at the very least), there are two essential requirements for enduring success: 1) have a user friendly, functional and simple-to-use website with a great user interface and 2) engage a digital marketing company to help you with the SEO aspect of your business in an ongoing fashion.
SEO is for the long haul
Why do you need to hire an SEO company instead of doing it in-house? Well, that is because SEO is a job for professionals who have gained long years of experience by working in the SEO business. They have in-depth knowledge and perspective about both the past and the future possibilities of SEO.
With SEO professionals at an SEO company are taking care of SEO for your website, you will be assured that all the basics are taken care of: such as on-page and off-page optimization. SEO professionals will also know to avoid the deprecated practices or black hat SEO techniques.
Search engines like Google are taking action against those websites who try to artificially enhance their organic search rankings on the search engine result pages (SERPs). An SEO company that knows what they are doing will ensure that the website is appropriately optimized, no illegal quick fix solutions are tried. When it comes to SEO and website organic search rankings, the smart ones know that ‘slow and steady wins the race’ is the motto to remember and follow. There are no quick fixes. For example, if a site is old, it will a get certain amount of value and weightage in Google’s rankings irrespective of other qualitative aspects of that site.
SEO is a many-splendored thing
SEO is not a single monolithic thing anymore — if it ever was. SEO comprises of many things. Apart from the off-page and on-page optimization mentioned earlier, SEO professionals at an SEO company will ensure that there is no duplicate content on the website. Google chooses to punish sites with duplicate content (since in Google’s view, such sites do not add value to the internet; and Google is right here) and it is better to remain careful rather than seeing your hard-earned position in the SERP suddenly vanish. With numerous algorithm changes such as Google Penguin, Google Panda (not named after the cute animal), and Google Hummingbird, Google is trying to adapt to changes in user behavior as well as trying to provide the best and the most relevant links in the organic search results.
After all, Google’s (and other search engines’) reputation relies on such website providing authoritative answers to users’ queries. The changing nature of audience behavior includes such seismic shifts as the inevitable predominance of mobile devices to access the internet. To cater to these changes, Google is changing its algorithm to be able to better meet the needs of its customers. These are all things that your SEO company that you are working with will need to keep mind.
With the growth of mobile, voice search has grown. And with the Google Hummingbird changes, Google has revealed how it seems to answer truthfully any question put to it. Today of course, Watson is much more than a Jeopardy winning computer server. Watson has morphed from being unbelievably good at Jeopardy to helping cancer specialists make sense of the growing volume of medical literature comprising of endless data from current and old studies, clinical trials, side effects of drugs, drug combinations to avoid, etc.
Similarly, SEO professionals will take the guess work out of SEO. Apart from making sure that the website adheres to all the rules from search engines, SEO professionals that are working at an SEO company will develop and implement long-term plans to improve your site’s SEO. That includes running content marketing and social media marketing campaigns to improve the website’s SEO.
SEO includes content marketing & Social Media marketing
For a website to get good ranking in the organic search results, it needs to have great on-site content which the SEO company you are working with can advise you on. Google gives great weightage to authentic and authoritative content. Hence, SEO professionals ensure that websites have a deliberate approach towards content marketing which includes regular blog posts.
Blogging, email marketing, white papers, Slideshare presentations, etc. are a few of the ways of generating and then sharing great content. If the community of users likes this content and consumes it and shares it, this will give a signal to the search engines that this is valuable content. That will translate into those sites getting good rankings in the organic search results. If the content on a site gets many Social Media shares, this tells the search engines that this is authentic, meaningful and powerful content created by experts or industry leaders.
Search engines will display such sites higher up in the search rankings. Of course, the final rank of a site is determined based on ‘more than 200 factors’ as Google might put it but having good content is one of the most effective ways to enhance your site’s SEO in an effective and long-term fashion. An experienced SEO company can guide you and the do’s and don’ts in this area.
An SEO company specializing in content marketing will ensure that your site has great content. Social Media is the other great battlefront for the modern SEO professional. This battlefront must also be conquered if your website wishes to last for long. Social media — Twitter, Facebook, etc. — is the place where you have to post funny and relevant content which will get widely shared and disseminated among peers in a user group.
When a blog post shared on Social Media gets numerous Likes or Retweets, that gives the search engine the idea that this is a good site with interesting content. Of course, for content to be shareable, they have to avoid the cardinal mistake of being boring. Content can be boring because of many reasons — it can be too technical, archaic, or arcane, it can be presented in a soporific manner, it may lack the factors that make a post go viral such as having images or an emotional core to it. A good SEO company knows the balance that needs to happen in this respect
Social Media is sort of a pressure release valve for many busy working people. Hence, the popularity of cat videos on the internet — or videos of human twins doing funny stuff and so on. An effective Social Media marketing strategy will take into account such rules of the game as when to post content and how often to post content to each of the different social media platforms.
SEO companies with proven social media marketing strategies and expertise will be long-term assets for your company Once you get your ‘content strategy’ honed, you will likely get a pretty popular website which attracts endless unique visitors as well as a devoted band of regular readers. The deep engagement with your community of readers apart from the large number of social shares will give the right signal to the search engine that the website is an authority on that given business vertical. This will help your website rank higher in organic search results leading to more search engine users discovering your website.
Conclusion
For the above reasons, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) by an experience SEO company can lead to greater popularity for your website. If you are looking for a reliable, trusted and experienced SEO company that can help you achieve higher rankings, please feel free to reach out to the team at Mind Digital Group for any of your digital marketing needs.

Tuesday, 16 August 2016

What Is The Role Of An Online Reputation Management Agency For Your Business

In the age of the Internet and Social Media, reputations can be lost in a second. Of course, they take years to build. You cannot build an online reputation in a split second but an indiscretion such as a drunken tweet can cause a lot of damage to an individual’s or a business’ reputation. Information travels at the speed of light these days and even a deleted tweet doesn’t or won’t help you recover the damage caused by it. The stakes become higher as the company and the brand gets bigger or the individual is someone with influence or a senior executive whose reputation can impact the company’s fortunes.
Online Reputation Management & How To Be Smart About It
As with many other things, it helps to be proactive rather than reactive in the matter of online reputation management. If you take care to ensure that your online reputation management plan is firing on all cylinders, then you will see that all the top Google (and Bing and Yahoo) search results related to your business or brand show only links and URL’s that show your company in a positive light and there is nothing that you do not want to be there.
If a rare small business has been careless not to bother with online reputation management, then they might discover to their chagrin that they are losing actual revenue because of their bad online reputation. It’s a bit late in the day when the damage has been done and you have to mount a rearguard action to try and regain your online reputation. But the best online reputation management agencies like Mind Digital are experts at fighting these exact battles.
If you are planning something big such as looking to raise funding from VCs, it is critical that you have a stellar online reputation. Negative online reputation may lead to negative press coverage or even may results in hiring problems for you as talented professionals who have many job options may prefer not to work with an employer with a doubtful reputation.
After all, which job candidate would not Google their potential employer. Imagine the difference in perception such a candidate (or a VC doing the online ‘due diligence’) would have regarding you and/or your business if the Top 10 results are all your official links versus a scenario where 5 out of the Top 10 links contain negative, slanderous or defamatory content and information about you and/or your business.
Examples of Events Affecting Business Reputation
Two recent events amply demonstrate the key role of online reputation management for businesses: one involved the hot new start-up Uber while the other involved Sony Pictures Entertainment. While in the case of Uber, it was a senior executive talking about his dirty-tricks campaign plans openly with media personnel and thus leaking the matter intentionally or unintentionally to the public at large, in case of Sony Pictures Entertainment, it was a double whammy. The company got hacked whereby copies of full-length versions of five yet-to-be-released movies were leaked but beyond that the hackers got access to the company’s HR documents which painted a sorry picture about the pay disparities at its senior management levels.
Consider the Malaysia Airlines tweets which turned out badly given the airline’s multiple misfortunes during 2014. Perhaps they did not “focus group” the tweets enough? No wonder the Clinton administration staffers were famous for focus grouping every little decision to death. Or consider the recent Washington Post article which revealed rather a lot of details about the negotiations between Hillary Clinton’s staffers — or rather the Harry Walker Agency which handles her paid speaking engagements — and the folks at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) who wanted Ms. Clinton to speak there. These are just some examples of why online reputation management is critical in this day and age.
It dents her reputation somewhat — creates a few chinks in the shining armor and persona; but people forget soon enough and most people are too busy to worry about such minutiae. This is in fact a major reason why individuals — whether they be the Clintons who have had a lot of controversies over the last three decade or the unique Toronto mayor or the colorful London mayor — survive reputational crises. This applies to companies too.
Companies such as Apple, Wal-Mart, various fashion clothing brands and GE have been embroiled in a variety of unsavory episodes over the years but they survive these occasional issues. People will forget any such events that do not affect them directly so Apple will be fine as long as its cellphones don’t explode in users’ hands or the laptop batteries don’t overheat. The occasional issues — such as the early issues that affected its maps application, or the one-time bad reception issues that arose as a corollary to its innovative antenna design, and the latest case of the bendy iPhone 6+ —are forgotten by the public at large in days.
Companies like Wal-Mart, Nike, and other fashion brands have had to answer complaints about the sweat shop conditions in which their products are made but these companies take measures to manage their reputation and eventually people mostly move on and the companies prosper.
Mr. Jobs’ emails to other CEOs like Eric Schmidt of Google to operate like a cartel as in agreeing not to “poach” on one another’s employees is another instance that shows Apple in a less-than-flattering light. Apple and other corporates’ habit of hoarding money outside the U.S. as one out of a multiplicity of tax-dodging techniques to avoid paying U.S. Federal income taxes again shows those businesses in a poor light. All of which can be helped by working with a good online reputation management company to help their brand image.
A recent story in The Guardian showed how instead of companies paying taxes to the U.S. government, they were instead getting tax refunds from the government. Major companies who have managed to cleverly manage their tax liabilities in this manner include companies such as Boeing, Ford and Citibank whose CEOs got more than the companies pad in the taxes to the Federal government.
How Can Online Reputation Management Agencies Help When A Crisis Hits
Despite the best efforts, reputation management-related crises are more or less unavoidable. It may be just one low level employee doing something which puts the company in a bad light or something a senior executive might utter in a moment of indiscretion which might get captured by a “hot” mike unbeknownst to the speaker which will inevitably end up on the internet causing a major reputational crisis.
Everyone faces those: individuals, presidents and prime ministers as well as businesses.
Online reputation management will sooner or later end up looking like crisis management and the best online reputation management professionals will show their mettle and prove that they are worth the money they are being paid as the official reputation management agency in such a crisis.
Crisis or reputation management professionals will need to have immediate access to the top management especially when a full blown crisis is on hand. The best online reputation management professionals will deal with the crisis in a steady manner. It will take interaction between key decision makers inside the company and the online reputation professionals to come up with an appropriate response to whatever the crisis is and then push out a uniform message across all the channels. Use all the resources available to the company — press releases page on the website, Twitter and Facebook accounts, etc. — to respond to the crisis and resolve it. Quick response makes the response way more effective than a tardy response as the former makes the company look professional while the latter makes the company look unprofessional and worsens the crisis and the company’s reputation.
Apart from ongoing crisis situations that need to be addressed immediately, online reputation agencies will deal with ongoing reputation-related issues such as negative Yelp reviews for your business.
Take two types of negative Yelp reviews.
A negative review may come from two different sources:
a) It may be posted by a genuine user who had a negative dining experience at a restaurant. If you are the restaurant owner, you should address the genuine concerns of the customer and try to offer something to make things right for the customer. Perhaps offer to host him in the restaurant again while giving him assurance that he or she will have a positive experience this time around. If you make any such promise of course, you have to take the care to come good on your promises of correcting it next time. These are things that an online reputation management company can help you with.
b) It may be posted by a business competitor who merely wishes to malign your business and damage your reputation. In such a scenario, Yelp is supposed to filter out fake reviews posted by anonymous users that seek to skew the perception about a business one way or the other. But these filters may fail at times. If a review is overly emotional or amateurish or obviously false, you may either report it or just simply ignore it as savvy consumers of your business will be able to sense that it is an obviously fake review. If it is not obviously fake, you can respond to the negative review pointing out any inconsistencies that may be there. If it is a fake review, you will find something that will be ‘not right’ with the review. If it’s too general, you can ask the reviewer to be specific and to provide further details of the bad experience so that it may be corrected. If you attempt to counter anyone who wishes to adopt such unethical means, you may succeed in deterring them from continuing to do so.
Social Media Reputation Management & Online Reputation Management
As noted above, a proactive approach works better than a reactive one. From celebrities going on racist rants on Twitter to corporate Twitter accounts committing various other faux pas, Social Media meltdowns and embarrassing incidents and worse are too numerous.
But can companies just choose to be absent from popular Social Media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, SlideShare, and all the rest? No way! Businesses have to learn to harness the power of Social Media and use these to their advantage. If professionals are assigned to be in charge of the company Twitter, Facebook, and other Social Media accounts, the mistakes and melt downs can be minimized, if not eliminated entirely.
Take the recent Twitter exchange between the American Airlines Twitter account and an irate passenger who was complaining about the lack of leg room. The airline initially responded in a manner that suggested that it did not understand the passenger’s problem or approached his problem in a rather cavalier devil-may-care manner. However, the airline eventually realized its mistake and apologized to the passenger. That’s a key lesson to remember in Social Media reputation management — acknowledge your mistakes and apologize. There are actually too many Twitter fails happening that relate to airlines Twitter accounts for some reason.
Blogging is one other activity that is ‘social’ in nature but also helps enhance the company’s reputation by sharing information about its products or services with the public. Blogging also leads to better search engine results page (SERP) placements as search engines give preference to websites that are frequently updates. A company or business blog can be one such website that is frequently updated with fresh content.
Take The Good And The Bad of Online Reputation Management
The reason why businesses should be present on Social Media is so that unscrupulous elements do not squat on your user names. When the founders of Tesla Motors settled on the name for their electric car company long before the participation of current owner and CEO Mr. Elon Musk, they first booked the domain teslamotors.com.
In today’s world, if you are an entrepreneur, you will need to book not only that web domain, but also create the Twitter account bearing your business name or brand name as well as your Facebook and Google+ pages. Pinterest and Instagram are essential weapons in the Social Media arsenal as well.
What you get from your Social Media presence is essential customer feedback — both positive and negative. Customers are inclined to share a positive experience they had with a company, a brand or a business to their Social Media account. Brands should not lose the opportunity to say ‘thank you’ to such grateful customers. But even more important from a reputation management perspective is the need to respond to customer complaints and respond fast. This is what professional reputation management entails.
Businesses can also be proactive in a way in terms of ensuring a positive Social Media reputation. You can search for your brand name on the different Social Media platforms and listen to the chatter happening about your company. This is especially important on Twitter which is a public platform and tweets can be indexed by search engines and can show up when someone searches for your brand name in Google. If you see a problem, you can try to resolve it. Customers may delete a tweet complaining about your business; this will nip the problem in the bud or at least prevent the problem from getting magnified.
How To Choose The Best Online Reputation Management Agency – Effective & Cost Effective
Depending on your online reputation management needs — whether you are doing this in a proactive manner or whether you have an impending online reputation crisis or are in the middle of a online reputation crisis — you should opt for an agency that will show you the path forward in terms of how to counter the crisis and ensure a stellar online reputation.
A professional online reputation management agency like Mind Digital will be able to map out the precise strategy that they are going to adopt to ameliorate the crisis and improve your business’ online reputation.
The best online reputation management agencies will have a professional staff who are well versed in all the Social Media platforms as well as corporate communication professionals. At Mind Digital, we tailor our online reputation management strategy to meet the specific needs of every client. Our strategy is client-specific, industry-specific, and business-specific.