Reputation Armor

You may run a squeaky clean business and you may have the best intentions in the world, but there are many risk factors when it comes to your Employees and how they can negatively impact your businesses reputation.

Employees shape your reputation everyday and sometimes in a negative way. It is important to implement an internal “Reputation Management” program that informs employees how their actions at work and away from work can affect your businesses reputation. You must hold employees accountable for their actions that may impact your reputation.

Examples of how an employee can ruin your businesses reputation.

1. Confidentiality: You may trust your employees with a lot of information on how your business is ran internally and they may know your profit margins, bookkeeping practices, your personal issues (Private Life). It is important to require employees to sign a confidentiality/non-disclosure agreement. Include details on what information about your business and management can and cannot be shared. An employee may share information that can tarnish how consumers perceive your business.
2. Employee Conduct outside of the workplace. Employees just like everyone else in the world they can make mistakes. If there is negative media attention targeting an employee, it may trickle down to your business. If an employee has a negative 15 minutes in the media it is best to distance yourself from the media buzz by distancing yourself from the employee. Termination of the employee and a press release about the termination might be the ticket.
3. Are your employees being friendly and not fake? One big issue that ever customer service business has is how employees treat customers in person and on the phone. Fake is not friendly! You MUST teach your employees how to be actual friendly customer service agents, no matter what type of business you are in. Nothing angers people more than a sarcastic friendliness.
4. Employees’ online social network participation can be a concern. What your employees say and do on social networks can impact your company’s image and reputation. Many social networks like Facebook allow users (prompts them) to disclose where they work in the occupation section, which will tie your company name in with their profile. Monitor your employee’s online social networking activities.

You obviously cannot control every aspect of your employee’s life and decide who they are outside of work, you can however lay down certain employee conduct rules within your employment agreement or contracts. If anything make certain your employees are aware that the way they handle themselves at work and away can affect their employment status and your businesses reputation.

Reputation Armor received several calls a week from businesses that are having issues with positive 4+ star Yelp.com reviews being filtered and not viible to visitors of their yelp listing.

The big question is why does Yelp filter reviews and what can trigger a good review to be filtered?

Based off of our (Reputation Armor’s) research it was found that yelp reviews (goos ones and bad ones) can be filtered for many reasons. Some of the reasons are listed below:

-Your company has put “good” reviews on yelp immediately after a bad one was filed on yelp. A good review immediately following a bad one has the characteristics of foul play within yelps eyes.

-A user has flagged your good reviews and yelp looked in to it and feels it may be false review trying to combat a bad review.

-You are getting to many reviews and it does not look natural to Yelp. It you normally get 1-2 reviews a month and then all of a sudden you get 10 in one month, Yelp will filter some of the because it is not natural looking.

- The same IP address (computer) is trying to post multiple reviews. Yelp can tell that your computer has been there before. They will filter duplicate user or IP reviews (Good or Bad).

-The location of your computer might play a role. If you are in Salem VA, and trying to review a restaurant in LA, then a restaurant in NC, yelp may  think they are false reviews since your computer is sitting in VA.

-Too good to be true? Most reviews online are negative in nature. Not many people go out of their way to say good things about a company unless they are pushed to do so. Yelp is not made up of idiots; they are quite smart and have put hundreds of thousands of dollars in coding to ensure real reviews go live. It is apparent that any GOOD review will go through a greater verification process and maybe a live moderator will read it. If your review sounds over zealous it may get filtered.

-Using a proxy (hiding your true IP) might get god reviews filtered. Proxies are shared with others and yelp might stay up to speed with the newest proxies and give them no creditability.

In Yelp’s Own Words:

“Here at Yelp, we’re trying to connect people with great local businesses. Providing consumers with trusted review content is critical to this mission. One question we occasionally get asked on this topic is why reviews sometimes “disappear” from a business page. While the overwhelming majority of reviews aren’t affected, we figured this might be a good time to offer some specifics on why reviews sometimes don’t appear on business pages (and why we think this helps make Yelp the most useful consumer review site around).”

“Yelp has an automated Review Filter that many people are surprised to learn was put in place soon after our big launch in 2005. Of course, it’s evolved over the years; it’s an algorithm our engineers are constantly working on. Its purpose, however, remains the same: to protect consumers and business owners from fake, shill or malicious reviews.”

Conclusion: If you need help managing a yelp review issue please contact us at 1-888-358-2766 x 701

Reputation  Management and social networks like FaceBook and Twitter go hand in hand. What about MySpace? MySpace.com used to be the big dog in the social networking world and was considered the #1 social site in the world. MySpace is still a great website and will remain very popular, however MySpace is not the most professional place to network if you are a business or a business professional.

MySpace profiles are usually tricked out with bling, music, and funky themes, which appeals more to kids and the younger generation. When I hit a MySpace profile it usually reminds me of being in a nightclub full of underage drinkers. When I drop by other profiles like ones found on facebook and twitter, I feel a little less confused and distracted.

MySpace is still a good tool for reputation management in the sense that the profile might outrank something negative. After playing around on MySpace for a few months Reputation Armor has decided not to use the site anymore.

If you are looking to create a social presence for your company try out list of social networks.

Facebook’s latest changes have plenty of implications for reputation management. Likes and recommendations are potentially great for building a good reputation, but even while there is no dislike button (at least yet), a lack of likes/recommendations may reflect poorly on your brand, particularly when your competition is getting all kinds of love from Facebook users.

On the other side of things, you may want to be careful what you like and recommend yourself. Wording of likes and recommendations can come off as inappropriate, but the bigger issue may be liking and recommending stuff that that paints you in a non-professional light. Depending on what you do and the image you are trying to portray, this may or many not be a problem, but for those who wish to be careful about how others perceive them, this is something to think about.

The story below shows how social networks are becoming a universal tool for the Government, social networks like FaceBook are used by Gov. agencies to not only track what suspects are doing but they can also be used to locate people.

Virginia State Police is crediting tips from its Facebook fans for the arrest of a fugitive.

State police had asked for the public’s help in a Tuesday posting on the agency’s Facebook page. On Wednesday, the agency said in a Facebook posting that information provided by fans helped troopers find and arrest a man wanted on a parole violation.

The suspect faces additional charges of felony child neglect and driving on suspended license. State police say he ran and left an 11-month-old child unattended in a vehicle after a Smyth County trooper began following him.

Over the years Reputation Armor has seen the number of Social networking sites grow very fast. Below is list of the top 175 social networking sites. Reputation Armor (ReputationArmor.com) utilizes a majority of these, along with others, in order to deliver our clients a comprehensive social networking base to their reputation management campaign. *Listed Alphabetically*

Reputation Armor understands the importance of Social Networking Sites. So we would like  to share  the Reputation Armor top 20 list. Rankings bases on popularity as of this month

1 | facebook.com

2 | MySpace

3 | twitter

4 | LinkedIn.com

5 | classmates.com

6 | Ning.com

7 | Bebo.com

8 | HI5.com

9 | Tagged.com

10 | myyearbook.com

11 | Multiply.com

12 | friendster.com

13 | Meetup

14 | BlackPlanet

15 | Gaia Online

16 | Piczo

17 | orkut.com

18 | FotoLog.com

19 | Skyrock.com

20 | badoo.com

To learn more about how to use social networking to manage your online reputation,

contact Reputation Armor @ 888-358-2766

Use the “About” text box to place keyword-dense prose near the top of your Page

Reputation Armor suggests that a key SEO strategy that should be employed on your Facebook Page whenever practicable is placing keyword-dense text as close to the top of the Page as possible. Because Facebook limits where Page owners can place large chunks of text on the default Wall tab of Facebook Pages, the “About” box, in fact, represents the uppermost position in the CSS structure of the page to add custom text.

In order to add text to your Page’s “About” box, click the “Write something about [YourPage]” in the box underneath your Page’s profile picture. You’ll then be able to enter custom text in the input box – there is a 250 character limit, so choose your words wisely.

ReputationArmor.com recommendation:

Check  all of your social networking sites account security settings to find out what  information about you others can see.

Example, Facebook : By visiting the search privacy settings page, you can control the visibility of your public search listing which is visible to Google and other search engines. You can turn off your public search listing by simply unchecking the box next to the phrase “Create a public search listing for me and submit it for search engine indexing”.

Facebook has been approved for a patent which in all appearances gives it exclusive rights to the “news feed”, one of the most key fundamentals of social networking. It’s questionable how easy the firm would find it to enforce the patent.

A technique for displaying a news feed in a social network environment, the method comprising: monitoring  multiple activities in a social network atmosphere; storing the numerous activities in a database; generating an abundance of news items regarding one or more of the activities, wherein one or more of the news items is for presentation to one or more viewing users and relates to an activity that was performed by another user; attaching a link associated with at least one of the activities of another user to at least one of the plurality of news items where the link enables a viewing user to participate in the same activity as the another user; limiting access to the plurality of news items to a set of viewing users; and displaying a news feed comprising two or more of the plurality of news items to at least one viewing user of the predetermined set of viewing users.

The problem is that pretty much every social networking site also uses some variant of the feed system. In theory many of Facebook’s current rivals are infringing on the patent.

There is a strong potential that a court might determine the patent can only apply where every detail of the description — which covers issues such as using a drop down menu to filter a particular online friend’s posts from appearing in your feed — is followed by the “offender”. That would give Facebook added protection against people simply ripping off the entire site, but would still allow other sites to use the concept of a news feed.