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."