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Well, do you care about your personal reputation first of all? Definitely yes! What people think about you really does matter. The old ‘I don’t care what people say’ doesn’t work at all especially when  it comes to your business. The fact is people will base a lot of their conclusions about you from your reputation. This is even without trying your services first. Yes, REPUTATION is the lifeline of your business.

With the increased popularity of online marketing, you have another problem at hand-how to manage your repuation online. If you are a brandname for example, being able to control your reputation should be top priority. Here are some things that online reputation companies can do for you:

• Protect your company from negative comments. When it comes to reputation online, the mechanics are simple: the more negative comments out there about your company, chances are people will choose your competitor instead.  What can be done about this? Countering the negative with positive. Logging into forums and the like and spreading ‘good’ things about your site.
• Higher ranks on the SERPS. With more positive things being said, more people visit your site, more people ‘like’ and ‘tweet’ about you and viola! You’re up on the SERPS.
• Creating the right face. Having a good reputation will create a trust in your target audience. They will then view you as a trustworthy source and will be more likely to support you.

Social media sites are great and easy platforms to use to market your business, but can quickly become detrimental if your accounts aren’t managed correctly. But managing numerous accounts, which is needed to obtain greater visibility, can be difficult, expensive, and time consuming ñ especially for smaller businesses. To alleviate the burden of maintaining social network accounts, blogging, and websites, many businesses are turning to firms offering online reputation management services.

Read more here.

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8:14 p.m. | Updated MySpace, the long-suffering Web site that the News Corporation bought six years ago for $580 million, was sold Wednesday to the advertising network Specific Media for roughly $35 million.

What caused the downfall of this formally popular social networking site?  The statistics show that MySpace used to be the top social media site lost with 20 million unique visitors each month in the United States. This figure even climbed to 70 million but lost to Facebook two years ago.

What happened next? Well, nobody want’s to advertise on a site that’s loosing it’s popularity so advertisers and users in general left. The site then become some what of a liability to the owners who started looking for ways to ‘get rid of it’ .

Still, if the site really was good, users really wouldn’t mind the number of advertisers that the site has. So what do users have to say about why they gave up on MySpace?

Many are blaming the  interface MySpace had. If you compare it to Facebook, you’ll clearly see the difference. MySpace is or should we say ‘was’ just too cluttered. True, you could connect with your favorite artists and share songs and all but the interface was just too complicated. It took quite too much time trying to figure out things. Facebook is definitely cleaner and easier to much more user friendly.

Another reason many give is privacy. Viruses were common on MySpace that people just got tired of their accounts and shifted to Facebook.

Those are a few things the new owners should keep in mind if they plan to get their money’s worth. Design, interface and three privacy badly need to change.

Read more about this here.

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With the popularity of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media sites, many companies are finding it beneficial to create a profile on these sites. Marketing online with the help of social media has lead many to increase their revenue a lot. Would it be wise though to focus all efforts on these sites and forget about your website?

That would be a huge mistake! The fact is Websites and social media should work hand in hand to promote your business properly. If you simply use social media, there is very little that you will be able to accomplish.

Social media sites have a limit when it comes to the number of characters you can post. This means you can’t say much at once. Only on a website can you do this. You can give more information about your business if you have a website.

The key is  balance. Keep your website. In fact, upgrade it and do whatever you can to get its ranks up. Then use Social media to direct traffic to your site. This will be a far better strategy.

What companies should all keep in mind is that social media cannot stand alone. For you to be effective, you have to use other online marketing techniques and bring them together on your social media sites.

In other words, social media needs to support a company’s Web site, and a Web site needs to support a company’s social media efforts. They complement and work for each other as opposed to competing. It’s not an either/or proposition.

More information here.

What’s the connection between Facebook and finding a job in the first place? With the popularity of Social Media, many companies are actually using these sites to carry out background checks on applicants. The information they find on your Facebook can therefore be a huge factor in deciding whether you would make a good addition to the company or not. And how exactly do these companies do this?What kind of things should you ‘clean up’ then?

Social Intelligence is the answer. Many companies hire social intelligence companies to filter out ‘needed’ information that is ‘legal’ for them to access. How about Google you may ask? We all know that a simple search on google will reveal loads of information about any person. CEO of Social Intelligence Corp.  gives the reason:

Because a Google search provides too much information, says Drucker. It can turn up things like your ethnicity, religious background, or sexual orientation – factors an employer can’t legally consider when hiring you.

What kind of information then is considered ‘safe’ to check into? They look for four things:

Racially insensitive remarks

Sexually explicit materials

Flagrant displays of weaponry

Other demonstrations of clearly illegal activity

Whatever information is found in these four areas is then sent to the Company for review. If you have some photo with arms for example, the report will include a picture of this.

Invading privacy?

The question that we may all have now is whether it is even legal to access all this information? The thing about these Social Intelligence companies is that they will only access what you have allowed to access with your privacy settings. Stuff that is only for your friends’ view will stay that way. They won’t ‘break into’ your site just to derive this information-THAT is what is illegal.

Other than that, whenever companies plan to carry out background checks on their applicants, they are informed about this. In short, they already have asked permission to gain access to the profiles but simply get pros to do the dirty job of filtering through all the info.

How long do they keep the info?

Once the company gets the report back from the social intelligence sites, it keeps it for 7 years. Why? Because these social network background checks are as good as criminal records that need to be kept by for 7 years according to the Fair Credit Reporting Act. It’s for the company’s protection. If you get into any illegal behavior while under their ‘wing’ they may use this information to know if there was any hint of this in the past.

Does it matter?

So does this mean that if you have any information on any of the four aspects, you have no chance in getting a job? Well, not exactly. It will really depend on the kind of position that you are applying for and kind of job. The more ‘respectable’ the ‘cleaner’ you ought to be. The bottom line is whatever is on your profile will have a huge impact on your present and future employment prospects.

The message is clear: CLEAN UP THAT FACEBOOK PROFILE NOW!

Read more here.