New Social Network platform appears almost every week. Many of the new players are exploring niches or offer alternatives to the major players like FaceBook, MySpace, LinkedIn. Not to mention ClaimID or Naimz that are around for claiming your online identity.

Doppelganger.name published several interesting articles (in French) around online reputation and managing online identity.

The question covered in this article is Simple: Shall I setup a profile on multiple Social Network platforms?

Here is a scenario: You have your friends and professional from real life: IRL contacts (In Real Life). At some point you will create a profile by yourself to invite your friends or being invited from your friends. Here you go you know have a profile on 1 social network on FaceBook. Later you will have an opportunity to connect to a colleague. But he will invite you on LinkedIn. What shall you do? Refuse because the invite came from a different social network platform? Likely not. And here you go you have 2 profiles. Soon or later you will have an invite from MySpace then from Naimz then from Viadeo, then for ... ok you've got the picture.

Having multiple profiles is not wrong. However you need to realise that a certain level of consistency should exist between the profiles.

The social network platforms bring you a value by maintaining a certain level of contact with your connections. This means investing a bit of time for maintaining the info from your profileS, and obviously some time spent on communication with your connections.

Here is where the bottleneck is: maintaining your profiles and the communication with your connections.

The more profile you have the more time you will need to maintain your profile. The more social network platform you use for communications the more time it will cost you.

How can you get around this?

My view is that you shall concentrate on maintaining your profile with details on 1 or 2 platforms. You might have more profile on other platforms but you shall only provide the bear minimum information into them and create a reference back to the profiles you are maintaining with details. This allows creating visibility in various platforms while maintaining a minimum of information.

Tell me what your view is on this?

If it's important to measure your buzz and see if your (online/offline) marketing campaigns are generating reactions on the internet, it's even more important to assess if this buzz is positive or negative.

Do you imagine the impact of negative rumors/conversations on your brand/name/company results? With ORM you'll be alerted when negative buzz will be identified. You'll then be able to react and (maybe) prevent the fast circultation of the bad news via blogs, forums,... You'll be able to protect your brand or influence your consumers' perception.

That's all about reputation!

If the ORM tools are able to gather all online conversations about your company/product/competitors/etc who is going to check all the results to assess if they are positive or negative, to detect communication opportunities...???

If some tools are able to read the conversations in order to alert when there are negative input, are they able to understand all languages? And what about the acronymes, irony or play on words???

When negative buzz is found who is going to analyze it (source, ranking, external links, positioning in Google results,...)? How do we determine what are the best action(s) to take?

Beyond the monitoring of your buzz, the Online Reputation Management is all about analyzis and actions. It means manual work and human consultancy.

First of all most of people talking about Online Reputation Management (ORM) is monitoring web 2.0 media such as blogs, forums, message boards, videos sites, social networks, etc. They just forget to look at the websites. What happens when one of your competitors is critisizing your new product? Are you listening to this negative input about your brand?
Tracking websites pages is a must to manage your e-Reputation!

My second remark is concerning the ORM tools. Whatever the performance of those tools might be they all need manual monitoring to be able to analyse the results. If some of those tools are able to identify keywords to alert marketeers when the buzz is negative. What about irony, play on words, abbreviations, etc?
Besides manual work is necessary to assess the relevancy of the source of the negative input. Based on this assessment you should know how urgent it is to react and what are the right way(s) to respond.

Are you aware of what your customers are saying about you? What about your (ex-)employees? What about your competitors? Information travels very quickly across the internet (via websites, blogs, forums, podcasts, social networks, etc.). Are you listening to the online conversations about your brand/your name/your competitors/...?

The Online Reputation Management (ORM) is a wonderfull service that able us to:

• measure the buzz generated by an online or offline campaign
• identify communication opportunities (when your consumers are mostly speaking about a topic you never stressed in your campaign)
• manage/prevent crisis (dealing with negative comments/malicious information on the net)

Through this blog I'll try to make you discover the all dimension of the Online Reputation Management.

I invite you to join me on this blog to share experience and questions on e-Reputation.

I believe that 4 types of data build your online presence.

1. The profile data that you provide on various platforms such as a user profile in a forum or your Facebook account, etc. These data will subsequently be partly available to everyone or to a limited number of people.
2. The contents that you publish as an author (like this blog), as a contributor into a publication (co-writing) or as a commenter on top of an existing content.
3. The indirect content that refers to your content (those from category 1). It is usually comments or contributions from others that refers to your writing and provide their view about your saying/writing.
4. The indirect profile information that your online friends write about you.

I intentionally discard all the data that are automatically generated and collected by external parties about your online activities (cookies, logging, etc). Why? Because by default they are not published to the crowd and so doesn't fall under the 4 categories described above. As soon as they are published then they wouldfall under category 3 or 4. Michel Bénart, in the comments, proposed to group them as a fith category, the "grey data", and I buy to his idea. The definition of it is:

...data collected during your online activity by third parties through cookies, beacons, and log connexions, to build your marketing profile...

What is your view on this data categorization ?

Doppelganger.name (French site) published a couple of articles that approach Online Identity and Online Reputation.

Here is how I woud map the 4 types 5 types of data. Online Identity is made of type 1. Online Reputation is made of type 3 and 4. I'm puzzled where to put type 2 and my god feel says Online Reputation. Type 5, being the grey data, are not strictly speaking visible Online Identity or visible Online Reputation.

Tell me what you think about this.

Mise en place du fameux tableau où les participants proposent des thèmes, des présentations et des sujets de discussions, le tout dispatché par salles et par créneaux horaires.

Je choisi l'atelier sur l'intelligence collective et la réputation de l'entreprise sur Internet : cas Agoravox, appliqué à l'entreprise.

En gros, ce qu'il faut en ressortir est que l'individu est à lui tout seul un capteur d'information et les outils du web 2.0 lui offrent la possibilité de rediffuser rapidement et facilement l'information qu'il a captée, puis interprétée ou vécue.

Le principe d'Agoravox est particulier : un méga forum, plutôt contestataire, où les contributeurs donnent leurs avis sur un éventail de sujets très divers. Comme tout forum, les sujets postés remontent dans les moteurs de recherche et peuvent nuire à l'image d'une entreprise dans le cas d'un client insatisfait par exemple. On peut penser que ce message face à une communication officielle de cette entreprise ne fait pas le poids. Mais si ce message est mutliplié par 100, cela commence à influer, etc...

Face à ça, l'entreprise ne peut que réagir. Aucune anticipation n'est possible.

Alors quels moyens/solutions l'entreprise peut-elle avoir pour minimiser ce risque ?

Une méthode peut être de travailler à faire baisser dans les moteurs de recherche ces messages en boostant le positionnement des sites "officiels" et par des sites satellites avec des noms de domaines proches.

Une autre solution peut être que si une ressource humaine est dédiée à la veille, l'utiliser aussi pour surveiller ce qui se dit sur l'entreprise.

La meilleure solution est surement de mettre en place un espace de discussions ouvert aux opinions publiques afin de réagir plus vite et plus efficacement. Une sorte d'observatoire d'opinions.

En effet, en interne, à force de trop brider, le salarié aura tendance à se défouler une fois sorti de l'entreprise. En externe, un client non-satisfait s'exprimera sur n'importe quel espace... il vaut mieux dans ces cas là que ce soit un espace créé par l'entreprise elle-même pour d'une part mieux surveiller l'opinion publique et d'autre part pieux réagir face à des insatisfactions...

A suivre...

Je conclu ce long post par l'annonce d'une table-ronde sur ce thème de l'e-réputation de l'entreprise le 26 juin, à la CCI Dijon. Je reparlerai des grandes lignes de cette table ronde très bientôt !

Et c’est sur internet que cette tendance forte explose : à travers l’explosion des blogs (skyblog qui a fait de la France un des pays leaders en nombre de blogs/habitant) et des réseaux sociaux ( MySpace, Facebook, et autre Hi5, Friendster, Orkut, Bebo, Cyworld…

J’existe maintenant sur internet et je montre mes photos, mes photos, ce que je fais et ce que j’aime, je soumets cela aux yeux de tous. Pour exister dans le monde virtuel d’internet, il faut une identité numérique, autrement dit il faut être visible, laisser ses traces et avoir son ou ses espaces personnels. Pour les plus passionnés d’informatique ( les geeks ) , il y a le micro-blogging : le site le plus représentatif étant : twitter. Cela consiste à envoyer des messages très courts de moins de 200 caractères (des « tweets ») pour expliquer ce que l’on fait, ou l’on est, ou ce que l’on a envie de dire et le partager avec ses connaissances. Passionant, non ?

De nombreux sites se développent ainsi à l’image de Pownce, Jaiku, Loopnote, Dodgeball, Frazr , Chronoscope…

Autres variantes : le micro-photo-blogging avec tumblr ou le micro vidéo blogging avec seesmic tout aussi brefs mais axés sur la photo ou la vidéo.

Depuis peu, c’est sur le monde du travail que cette tendance de transparence arrive avec les Réseaux Sociaux Professionnels (RSP, business networking ou encore réseautage) : en France principalement Viadeo (ex Viaduc) , ou 6nergies, Piwie, et pour les anglophones l’incontournable LinkedIn (le N°1 des réseaux de networkingprofessionnel) Xing (Ex OpenBC), ou encore Network2connect, Ecademy , Ryze, buzz2biz, etc…

Le principe est simple, je m’inscris et je créé mon espace personnel avec au lieu de mettre mes photos personnelles mon cv et mes compétences et relations professionnelles. Le but ? enrichir mon réseau, booster ma carrière, découvrir de futurs collaborateurs, partenaires ou employeurs…

Dernières nouveauté : les sites pour promouvoir son identité sur le web : pour être visible et arriver dans les premières réponses lorsque l’on tape son nom et prénom sur google !

C’est le principe de Ziki, de Naymz ,Ziggs, Zoominfo, Spock, Wink : la gestion de sa réputation sur internet (e-réputation, cyber-réputation, ou identité numérique) Je construis et je développe ma marque sur internet (Personal Branding) et ma marque c’est moi, ma vie professionnelle, sociale, personnelle. Ces sites ne sont pas encore très connus en France, mais il est est fort probable qu’ils vont rapidement se démocratiser et exploser.

In that context, search engine returns a set of hits that match the individual you are googling and, for each hit, it displays an excerpt of the page where that individual's name shows.

Let's focus on the results pointing to comments left by the googled individual on the various blogs he has visited.

I noticed that there are 2 kinds of layouts when it comes to comments in blogs:

1. the first line that describes who is the author; then the comment itself.

2. the comment first; then the last line that describes who is the author.

Now how does that impact googling?

For all the blogs that use layout 1, the search results will show the first words of what the individual actually wrote.

But for all the blogs that use layout 2, the search results will show the description of the person and the first words of the next comment (which is very likely to be from a different person).

So limiting your readings on the search result excerpts can be misleading on what the googled individual actually wrote. This could lead to unwanted impacts on the e-reputation for that individual. The reader is likely to set his opinion based on what he sees in the search results before potentially clicking on search result link and read more about what the individual actually wrote.

"Ok, so what ?", would you say.

Well ... Think now about that googled individual being you...

Are you ready to google your name to see if this applies to you?

Regardless of which ORM solution best suits the specific needs of a business, B2Win can take charge of the 3 e-Reputation phases: the monitoring of the buzz; the analysis of the results; and the actions aimed at stimulating the client’s Web presence or influencing users’ perceptions.

Because you can no longer afford to overlook one key fact: while a large majority of consumers still buy offline, they nevertheless connect to the Internet to carry out research, read test results and consult the opinions of other users. And due to the growing number of web 2.0 applications (like blogs, wikis, RSS streams, forums, social networking sites, etc.) whereby information can be rapidly posted on the Net, indexed by search engines and picked up on by the traditional media, it is a phenomenon that’s rapidly gathering momentum. It’s essential therefore that company bosses listen actively to what’s circulating online.

“For over a decade now, I’ve been managing the reputation of companies in the media and, these days, there’s no denying that the world of the media and the Internet are becoming significantly intertwined,” explains Valérie Léonard, B2Win’s Managing Director and PR Consultant. “The creation of our ORM service is consequently a logical step for an agency such as B2Win, especially as we’ve historically specialised in the IT and Internet sector.”

Download the full version (in English, French or Dutch) here