"Google is not a search engine. Google is a reputation-management system. And that's one of the most powerful reasons so many CEOs have become more transparent: Online, your rep is quantifiable, findable, and totally unavoidable. In other words, radical transparency is a double-edged sword, but once you know the new rules, you can use it to control your image in ways you never could before.

Think about how Google works. When you type in a term, the search engine puts the site with the most links pointing toward it at the top of the list (simplistically speaking). That means bloggers and discussion boards are extremely powerful in influencing Google's search results, because bloggers and discussion-board posters are promiscuous linkers, constantly pointing to things they love or hate. Google hoovers up those links and makes recommendations based on them."

That was an excerpt from an exceptional article by Clive Thompson called "The See-Through CEO." It was published in Wired Magazine over a year and a half ago, and what he writes rings true everyday.

Online is where reputations are made now, and image is everything. You can't beat 'em so you might as well join 'em. There are many things you can do on your own to help shape your online reputation, but there are also companies like Reputation.com to whom you can outsource the work.

Penelope Trunk, a career expert, says, "Spend money on image when money is tight. Time magazine reports that Playboy—the grand arbiter of all image consulting—found that in a bear market, centerfolds of meatier women sold better. This makes sense: In a down market you naturally want to be around people who don't seem to be suffering from the financial hardship."

Expectations help to drive economic growth. How your publics believe your business will weather this economic storm has a tremendous impact on the reality of its performance. Positive publicity drives momentum and shapes perception. If you want to belong on a certain level you have to look like you know what you're doing.

Today's downward economy is not the time to cut marketing budgets because it is the best time to rise above your weaker competitors. When business is good, a strong message can be lost in the noise of all the other companies vying for consumers' attention. Today is the time to rev up your marketing budget to steal market share and see actual results.

Rallying the marketing troops can be done without breaking the bank. Volunteering your time offline (schools, government agencies, non-profits) should be streamlined with press releases, link requests, and SEO efforts. Getting creative with blogs and link bait can do wonders for promoting products and services. These efforts can be inexpensive but still bring real measurable ROI and value to the table.

No one likes to hang out with losers.

Tiziana Casciaro, professor at Harvard Business School, which found that people would rather work with someone who is likable and incompetent than people who are obnoxious and competent. She says, "How we value competence changes depending on whether we like someone or not."

Penelope Trunk, an American writer who examines the lines between work and life says, "Most of us have to work at being likeable. Fortunately, Casciaro's research shows that the biggest impediment to likeability is not caring. So if you just decide you want to do better, you probably will. The people who are likeable actually care about other people and care about the connections they make."

In our world where online often converges with offline, it is important to take these workplace principles to a binary perspective. While Trunk and Casciaro are talking about relationships and dialogue in the workplace, the same relationship principles apply to how your consumers relate with your brand online.

Social media and engagement are buzz words that may seem like something only large corporations need to worry about, but it is really something that small companies can easily manage.

If you aren't a loser offline, you can apply the same principles to being likable online.

Online reputation management can be broken down into 3 segments: monitor, optimize, and engage.

Monitor

Monitor the online conversations around your brand, your industry, your products, and your key executives.

Monitor different types of conversation online such as: blogs, news search, tags, standard search results, and forums.

How to monitor your online reputation:

• Google Alerts - google.com/alerts
• Yahoo Alerts - alerts.yahoo.com
• RSS feed subscriptions to search results Technorati, Feedster, Yahoo & Google News, BlogPulse
• Social Media via tags: tagbulb.com, tagfetch.com, keotag.com

Optimize

Optimizing for specific search queries works best as a preventative measure. Displacing search results as a reactionary method does not put your brand in a position of control. Instead, beat others to the punch and cast a large net in terms of where you surface on the Internet. If your customers are talking about a problem they are having with your software, don't leave it up to a forum discussion to get solved. Make sure you have an article about how to solve the problem on your Web site, and be the first one to answer the problem in the forums.

While optimizing doesn't always put your brand in control, it is a great solution to treating the symptoms. Lee Odden explains this well:

"Companies that want to protect their brand visibility on the web would do well to make optimizing their brand content a best practice. Optimizing all digital communications including: PR, marketing, SEO, HR, investor relations and related electronic content that is publicly available on the web as well as social media: text, images, audio, video will produce more branded content in the SERPs. Doing so doesn’t necessarily put the brand in control, but it’s a much better situation than scrambling after the fact."

Engage

Once your monitoring efforts have paid off, and you have identified a negative brand mention, what do you do?

• Research the situation and determine the facts
• If the implications are not correct, provide the facts and ask for a correction
• If the implications are correct, offer to discuss
• Respond with your own blog and streamline response with any other PR methods
• Be honest and transparent. Don't just be on the defense, listen to the conversation.

Odden says, "Implementing a proactive monitoring campaign provides insight into the kinds of content interactions audiences are having with your brand. When identified and qualified, situations need to be addressed directly. At the same time, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”, and companies need to implement holistic brand content optimization as a best practice. The more branded content in the search results, the more diluted any negative brand content will be."

Google Analytics provides such great insight into your Web site traffic. It gives you a breakdown of traffic sources, page views, time spent on your site and much, much more. It will even track Web site goal conversions so that you can follow how well you are able to convert a visitor into a lead. But, do you know there are other great programs out there that you can install for free that will also give you great information.

Clicktale is a free tool that refers to itself as "in-page Web analytics" because it shows you what visitors actually do inside your Web page. By creating a free account you can get real details about how visitors view and use your site through videos, scrolling heat maps, and link analytics. Clicktale will even give you a timeline of visitor interaction with form fields so you can better understand how they interpret the data you are seeking from them on your Web site.

Here is a sample of a Clicktale online form critique:

Clicktale reports what a user does on your Web site by tracking visitor browsing sessions as flash movies and then presenting it as a video. You can choose which video to watch based on attributes such as the visitor’s country of origin, their time on site, or the number of pages they visited. You may choose to watch videos of people who appear to be struggling—for example, those who visit the same page several times.

While Clicktale does offer a free account, not every user is tracked. ClickTale typically records a random subset of daily visitors and the number of daily recordings is limited by the level of your subscription plan and the criteria you choose.

Web site statistics in any form offer great insight into how you are perceived online. Data you get from analytic sources can help you decide how to improve and optimize your site.

One year ago, I wrote a blog post about Radiohead's album In Rainbows, which was released over the internet on Radiohead's web site prior to a physical record release. The noteworthy thing about that release was that the user determined the price they were willing to pay for the download, even for free. In my post, I championed this move as a progressive, consumer-friendly move by a very talented set of artists, but there was some question at the time as to whether it would prove viable to the band, and to the recording idustry as a whole, from a financial perspective. After being available for download under these terms for three months, the download was removed and the album was released physically in stores.

A year later, some data has become available on how In Rainbows did during its internet release. According to a release by Warner Chappell, Radiohead's publishing company, the band made more money during the 3-month "pay-what-you-want" internet release than they had off all the revenues from their prior album, 2003's 'Hail to the Thief'. In Rainbows then went on to sell 1.75 million physical copies in stores.

The same release points out that most of the people who downloaded the record chose to pay nothing.

That puts some serious weight behind my contention a year ago that by eliminating the role of the record company, and their publicity, marketing, production, and distribution costs (not to mention salaries) and use the internet as a direct distribution tool, a band can actually make more money off an internet release than a traditional release, even if the majority of consumers who download the album don't pay a dime for it. What money people did decide to pay went straight into the band's pockets, not some record label exec's, and it turned out to be more money than they'd ever made off an album prior to that time.

When the album did become available in a physical format in stores, it rocketed to #1 in both the United States and the U.K. This completely disproved any criticism of the internet release based on the idea that free or reduced-cost downloads would hurt album sales. If anything, it seems to have helped by drawing a flurry of media coverage to the album's release. Rather than detracting from physical sales, the download appears to have stimulated them.

What this all adds up to is a potentially lucrative new business model in the recording industry, one that rewards the artists rather than the businessmen who "promote" them, one made possible by the mass disrtibution network we know as the internet. Thom Yorke, the band's frontman, said in an interview in December, "In terms of digital income, we've made more money out of this record than out of all the other Radiohead albums put together, forever - in terms of anything on the 'net. And that's nuts. It's partly due to the fact that EMI wasn't giving us any money for digital sales. All the contracts signed in a certain era have none of that stuff."

I'm not saying that bands across the board can tell their management to take a hike. Most of the people I've ever known in bands couldn't manage a Burger King, much less a profitable recording and touring act. Bands will continue to need representation and management in order to focus their efforts where they really matter, in the creative realm. However, Radiohead have proven that our ideas regarding the distribution and sale of intellectual and artistic property are outdated, trailing the weight and baggage of a no-longer-relevant 20th century business model. We have a new model now, one for the 21st century, one which certainly benefits both artist and consumer. I called it "economic liberty" in October of 2007, and I think that description is still apt.

I'm sure at this point Yorke and co. feel pretty vindicated. So do I for having cheered them on for the idea at the time. A little vindication goes a long way...

Some stats (as of October 15, 2008):

• After being made available for free for 3 months the album was no.1 in the UK and in the US
• 1st Radiohead album on iTunes – no.1 album selling 30,000 units in the US in the first week
• The physical CD has sold 1.75 million to date and is still top 200 UK & US
• Total sales (physical and download) in excess of 3 million
• They sold 100k boxsets via W.A.S.T.E.
• Nearing 17 million plays on last.fm
• 1.2 million fans will see the tour
• The digital income from the experiment made a material difference to WCM’s UK digital revenue this year

A couple of us had a few minutes left in our lunch break so we decided to take a stab at early voting. We parked, walked to the voting precinct, voted and walked back to our car in only 12 minutes!

You too can exercise your civic privilege from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m. Mondays through Fridays at the Board of Elections office in Civic Hall at 155 E. Washington St. in downtown Athens.

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