^{2. Online Reputation: manage your reputation by analyzing the web - Digimind White Paper}

Over 50 pages of practical and illustrated information about Online reputation by Digimind

Introduction - please click here to download for free the complete paper

Markets are conversations, web users are the media: ”If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends. [… ]. If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.” said Jeff Bezos, the CEO of the Amazon.com1 and went on to say that the.essence of the new challenges posed by Web 2.0 to organizations nowadays is encapsulated in the quote (your brand, your products, your company, your employees are now the potential subjects of conversations and attacks, but also of positive rumors broadcast on the internet. Indeed, any individual is now able to broadcast his personal views easily using simple tools, by circulating his own information or commenting on information published by others.

With the appearance of the so-called Web 2.0 media, the web user has become an active player and can create, organize and broadcast content of his own. Expressing one’s own opinion and relaying itto the widest audience possible (web users throughout the world) is no longer the sole prerogative of journalists and technology buffs. Thanks to the availability of ever simpler and increasingly collaborative tools, every user connected to the net is a potential form of media: users may discuss your company on their blogs, post comments on a social news site (OhMyNews, TPM Café, Digg, Newsvine), take part in a wiki, give their views of your product on a consumer opinion platform (epinions, ConsumerReview), create a file about your services on a social network (Facebook), etc. If a company, organization or local authority decides not to communicate on the net, its customers, users and constituents will often do it for them, for marketing purposes or as militants... Think of your latest big buys (vacation trips, a hifi, restaurant…): weren’t you tempted to find out what other internet users thought rather than relying exclusively on the retailer’s shiny sales brochure boasting about his product?

Every business and every individual, therefore, has the potential to become the object of a positive or negative buzz. Rumors, a time-old phenomenon, are now spread on the net at different speeds depending on the individual case. Conversations on 2.0 media need to be carefully analyzed in order to anticipate any possible larger-scale proliferation towards the classic mass media (radio, TV, paper press) and halt potentially disparaging remarks about your organization.

We will see that there are virtually no rules cast in iron in the world of rumor-spreading on the net: a rumor may spring from a blog and then be picked up by a radio station, or conversely begin on television in a program with a small audience and then be repeated on a multimedia platform (YouTube, Dailymotion) viewed by millions. One thing is for sure: traditional media now have to include (or even incorporate through diversification) new Web 2.0 media to cope more effectively with high speed information creation and circulation." (...)

Tags: online reputation management, analyzing the web, digimind, social media, internet reputation, Web 2.0 media, reputation white paper, negative buzz, practical information