Here are a few tips on how to select the appropriate activity for your business’ integrated social media strategy:

* Make sure you are where your target market is, to maximise the impact and effectiveness of your message.

* Try to avoid a baptism of fire. It is best to first observe and understand each social media platform so that you can establish the etiquette or unwritten rules, before you participate.

* Make it easier for yourself – there are now many ‘apps’ out there that can assist you in linking your social media accounts – if you update one, the others are automatically updated. However, it is important to remember not to get caught up in ‘blasting’ out the same updates, across all the mediums, all of the time.

* Make sure that your target markets know where to find you. To achieve this you can link to your business’ social media profiles on a new page on the company’s website or to its existing ‘contact’ page, on email signatures, in your corporate or eNewsletter and on your blog. You could also mention your Facebook account on your Twitter profile and vice versa.

So how did they do it?
According to Andy Sernovitz there are three top tips from CME Group’s Director of Corporate Communications Allan Schoenberg.

* Don’t be so self centred – It is best to limit tweets about your business to 30%, using the other 70% for industry information and interaction.

* One of the keys to the CME group’s success was being where its customers are. It knew that their customers were active users which made it worthwhile investing in.

* As well as sharing links to interesting content, CME group has become actively involved in conversation, engaging with its followers and conducting weekly live interviews with influential leaders in the marketplace.

You can use the following tips for tracking and repairing your online reputation:

Tracking your online reputation

* Make a list of the most likely places your name would appear online to begin monitoring your online reputation. Identify blogs, forums, and social networking sites, such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, which anyone within your professional circle may also use. You can even track your company’s corporate site and previous places of employment.

* You can then set up your own individual Google alerts for the sites you want to frequently monitor at www.google.com/alerts. Other monitoring tools include Twinbox, which tracks comments made on Twitter through Microsoft Outlook.

Repairing your online reputation

* Although the above tips are useful, unfortunately they will not prevent online attacks. The first thing to do is examine what has been said about you and whether it is accurate or not. If not, you should correct them immediately. If it is true, you should apologise via the same medium as the message.

* If your professional realm is under attack, consider advising your employer as well as the legal department – especially if the comments made are defamatory.

Other useful information

An important aspect of creating your own personal brand online is to separate your business and personal social networking contacts. For example, you could use Facebook for personal networking and LinkedIn for business networking.

You build and maintain others’ brands every day, why not start doing it for yourself?

Create your own PR that reflects the real you – the professional you. By circulating positivity around your name, the likelihood of negative commentary being regarded is reduced.

We are pleased to note that we have been implementing the suggested SEO and SMO strategies for our clients for some time now.

So how do you know if your PR agency is SEO and social media ready? Odden proposes a six question quiz. The main points are below.

* You need both social media and SEO strategies.

* As discussed previously on our blog, Social Media Optmisation (SMO) can be integrated with SEO strategies to increase your business’ online visibility, particularly through organic search on search engines such as Google.

* When it comes to SEO keyword optimisation, the keywords you have been optimising for on your web pages and in your blog posts should also be optimised for in social media content, along with links back to your website pages on these particular topics.

* You need to get to know your target audiences so that you can customise online content to their interests. A good way to do this is by conducting a survey including questions such as: what social media sites do you visit and how often? What type of search do they use for story research? etc. This should ideally be the first thing you do, in order to assist with developing a blog content plan.

* Develop a blog content plan that not only includes content on your company but also industry specific topics that will be of interest to your target audiences, including journalists and bloggers. Ideally, you want blog content to reach social media news and bookmarking sites and this is where providing quality content can help.

* Have good quality, keyword optimised blog posts on your website as well as interesting and useful content on your social media profiles.

Odden also speaks about establishing your PR agency’s true core competency: traditional or digital PR. We believe that with a highly qualified team with experience in varying fields, it is possible to have a PR agency that can operate competently within both areas.

In case you haven’t heard, users of the social networking site Facebook are now able to register names for their profile pages. These names also act as a URL address extension so that users can to access their profiles directly.

The ability to register became available last Saturday June 13. Three million users have already registered individual profile names – 500, 000 of whom did so in the first 15 minutes of this feature becoming available.  Source.

Connecting Images recommended to its clients with existing Facebook pages to register their business name/s as their individual profile names, so that their profiles became easier for existing and potential customers to locate.  In addition, getting in early could prevent others from inappropriately registering their business name.

The process of poaching a competitor’s name online is not new – think back to the early adopters who registered well known web addresses long before the legitimate brand owner set up a website!

Poaching business names online is quite common and referred to as ‘cyber squatting’. Businesses must be able to establish their genuine presence on such sites, to avoid reputation management issues.

So what can you do to avoid cyber squatting?

Quick tips

- Regardless of whether you are currently engaged with new communication technology, stake your claim anyway, and register your business name on emerging web services.

- Don’t try to get creative! Register your most commonly used business name (the one that is on your website, in your marketing collateral and in your advertising).

- If you find that someone else has already registered your business name as their individual profile name, check it out and if you suspect it is a case of ‘cyber squatting’ take action. Some services (i.e. Facebook) offer the right of appeal.

Want to know more about how your business can best utilise emerging web services? Give Merilyn or Cal a call on (03) 9819 2566 and arrange to come in for a coffee and a chat.