A Clean Start to 2012: Sweep Your Digital Dirt Away

Posted on Jan 5, 2012 in Social Marketing | 1 comment

New beginnings are what this time of year is all about for many people; new commitments to losing weight, exercising more and a variety of other items. As a business owner, every day is a new beginning with commitments to excellence and more success than yesterday.

Yet, success requires planning now and in the future. Therefore, your marketing strategy at the beginning of 2012 should be about maintaining the positive effect and presence of your business. With this being the start of year, it is an excellent time to clean up any “dirt” from the past year so you can build your positive influence through the year.

Yes, your business may be online, but that does not mean you are “dirt” free. Your social media, your blog and other aspects represent your presence online. But they may not have the influence you want. You also have consumers who have their blogs and social media forces which influence your business as well. These are the things you want to check and possibly cleanup for more success in 2012.

Even the best of businesses will receive unflattering information from time to time. Yet, that unflattering information about your business on the web can be damaging to your business. Ignoring it and hoping it will go away won’t help either. With some pro-active steps you can control and even clean up your presence so your business shines, which is why today’s post will help you.

Lee Collins
Managing Director
StomperNet, LLC

“Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any one thing.”
~ Abraham Lincoln ~

A Clean Start to 2012: Sweep Your Digital Dirt Away

By Jorgen Sundberg of jorgensundberg.net

As we all know, the Internet has made information instantly accessible. You can find a customer, business partner, investor or employer quicker than ever before. The flipside is that they are only a few clicks away from finding your entire social life online, for better or for worse.  That’s why you want to start each New Year with a clean start digitally.

A recent survey conducted by the good folks at CareerBuilder UK has revealed that more than half (53%) of employers use social networking sites to research job candidates. Another 12% plan to start using social networking sites for screening. Their preferred methods for looking up candidates are search engines, Facebook, Linkedin, blogs and Twitter.

OK, perhaps not much of a shock there. This is more interesting: 43% of employers reported they have found content on social networking sites that caused them not to hire the candidate. The top reasons were that candidates lied about qualifications, showed poor communication skills, made discriminatory comments and posted content about them drinking and using drugs.

So there you have it; in addition to working on your actual application you now have to sweep the Internet for digital dust bunnies as well. If employers are doing it, we can assume that current and potential customers will be at it as well. You can see why they do this as a quick and easy way to find out who you really are. After all, they will only want to be associated with people that have ‘clean’ online lives as anything else might damage their business.

Here are 10 steps you can take today to check up and clean up your digital dirt:

1. Check your stats

What does a simple Google search reveal about you? And more importantly, are you happy with a prospective customer seeing the result? There are a few ways of checking your online personal brand, or reputation if you will. Google is the obvious one, at the very minimum you should check Bing and Yahoo as well. Use variations of your name, search pictures, videos, and news to really turn over every stone. You can also use Personas, an application that MIT developed, that scours the Internet to get the gist of your online reputation.

2. General clean up

Cleaning before any tender process may seem obvious but can actually require quite a bit of effort. Delete any embarrassing photos, comments, links from your online profiles and blog. You can even disable your wall/comments so that no new information can be added by others during your critical job search period. Sever all ties (remove/unfollow/block) to questionable or unreliable people as well as groups and associations that are not congruent with your professional reputation. All the security settings in the world won’t help you if one person decides to share your content with the rest of the world!

3. Facebook

The bad news is that Facebook is one of the first ports of call when someone is checking you out. The good news is that you simply change your security settings and they will only be able to see your mug shot or nothing at all. First off, you can specify who can find you in a Search, then change who can see what on the Privacy settings page. This should make things secure and you can carry on tagging yourself in pictures and videos with little risk of being seen by an employer.

4. Twitter

The bad news is that everyone can follow and see what you do on Twitter. The good news is that you can set up more accounts, and there is nothing stopping you from adding as many as you like. So if you do under your own name, make sure your content is clean. If you still want to retweet those risqué links, you had better make use of a nom de plume account.

5. LinkedIn

I will assume that your LinkedIn profile is business friendly, as it is a professional network after all. What you could consider is the Groups and Associations you are a member of, whether you want them to be visible on your profile or not. Furthermore, your personal interest field is the only one where you can actually show off some personality so make sure it’s consistent with your personal brand and other communications.

6. Cyber Twins

An evil twin on the Internet is not what you need in any situation. What if there is someone out there with your name that is preaching hatred on their blog? If that person is the first to come up when searching Google for your name, you had better be prepared to explain what the score is. So make sure you know this before you get the question, however unlikely it may seem.

7. Blogging activities

What have you posted on your own blog and other blogs out there? Think back to when you first started blogging, perhaps you tried out a few topics that aren’t perhaps conducive to your new job? Or maybe you left a comment or two in haste that you really shouldn’t have. Use Google Blog Search to find your blogging footprint, as it scours the entire blogosphere on a daily basis.

8. Create positive content

The best way to let the good outweigh the bad is to create lots of new content that will eclipse whatever dirt is still left out there. The Internet handles so much new information every day that the old stuff tends to be pushed down the search results and slowly forgotten. This will take a great deal of time and effort, but will be worth it.

9. Send in the marines

If all else fails and you still have your own digital landfill out there, you might want to call up the professionals. There are a few online services that will seek out your dirt and can annihilate it on the spot. Sites like Reputation Defender and DefendMyName all offer to stay on top of your online reputation for a fee. They will typically identify non-flattering information about you, alert you about it and you can then decide whether to keep or destroy. I believe this option is useful when running for a public office or when you have a few too many skeletons in the closet; however most readers will not have this need.

10. Keep it going

Google Alerts is a very handy tool for real time alerts about anything, in this case yourself. Punch in your name in inverted commas, set it to send you updates as soon as you are mentioned online. This way you will be able to monitor yours whenever your name is mentioned anywhere on an ongoing basis.

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Secret Sauce Checklist

Cleaning your Digital Dirt

• Check your online reputation
• Do General Clean Up
• Check your Facebook privacy settings
• Create multiple Twitter accounts if necessary
• Remember LinkedIn is a site for professionals
• Who else has your name?  What do they represent?
• Check your blog footprint
• Outweigh the bad with good
• Hire professional cleaners as necessary
• And lather, rinse, repeat throughout the year as necessary

Stomper Buzz

Next Week’s Focus: Conversion

Wow Customers and Build Relationships

Posted on Nov 2, 2011 in Business Growth | 2 comments

By Melanie Benson Strick

One of my favorite routines is a walk to my local Starbucks. Sometime before noon, I grab my Ipod, tune it to a success audio program, throw on my sneakers, and trek the half mile to enjoy my favorite pick-me-up – a half caf soy latte.

When I walk in, the barista asks me, “Hot or cold today?”

I always smile when I pull out my shiny Gold Starbucks card with my name imprinted on it. This is how I get my free soy and rack up points to get to my free drink.  I think to myself… Starbucks certainly knows how to KEEP me coming back. I actually cringe if I have to go to another store. I feel like a traitor.

Starbucks understands that the cost to acquire a new customer is much greater than the investment in keeping the ones they have happy.

Check out this statistic from “Leading on the Edge of Chaos”, by Emmett C. Murphy and Mark A. Murphy: 

“Acquiring new customers can cost five times more than satisfying and retaining current customers.”

This Week In StomperNet – October 31, 2011

Posted on Oct 31, 2011 in Featured, This Week in StomperNet | Comments Off

Happy Halloween!

This week we have no tricks for you, but plenty of treats. Marketing is often considered a difficult part of business, yet it depends on how you work with your customers. You probably realize the long term value of keeping your customers and clients close. This is where relationship marketing becomes a benefit that helps your business grow.

Social media is an obvious part of relationship marketing and a valuable component, but this week we are going to discuss tips for building relationships for your business and the importance of those relationships. Nurture your customers and clients, and your business will grow automatically.

Building relationships with your customers now, before the holiday season, will ensure they have solid reasons to promote your business in the future. The more people they bring, the more people will enter that relationship with you and will want to promote for you.

Twitter Lists: Research, Share and Spy

Posted on Sep 23, 2011 in Social Marketing | Comments Off

This week has been full of social media and marketing. You know Facebook, Twitter and other social media formats seem to be growing ever more popular. The Facebook Like button is now on billboards and as you know, Google + is getting into the mix.

Many businesses around the world are learning to use social media as an effective tool to draw in loyal customers. Social marketing is what allows people of similar interests gather together online and share information. I know all the members of the StomperNet staff; myself included, are involved in various ways with social media and special interests. This sharing of information is what brings you here to this blog as well, and why you have been reading the articles and hopefully enjoyed the webinars this week.