This blog is about online reputation. The underlying idea about online reputation is that – whether you like it or not – people will talk about you; and what people say about you will inform prospects decisions to buy or not to buy. And this will, increasingly, be outside of your control.

So there are comments here about Bartercard. Some passionately in favour of it, some dead against.

Interesting.

The people who are dead against are out there persuading prospects not to join Bartercard. Those all for it are out there acting as advocates for Bartercard.

The fact that people have arrived here and commented means that they are (whatever their motivation) looking to see what other people are saying about Bartercard.

If they’re Bartercard employees, they’re checking their online reputation to gauge how their customers feel.

If they’re not Bartercard people, they’re either Bartercard customers or Bartercard prospects.

Here’s the bit that interests us – and why we blogged about this in the first place: if this site is top of Google for the search phrases “is bartercard any good?” and “bartercard reputation” and P1 for “bartercard” then Bartercard are missing an online reputation opportunity.

What opportunity? The opportunity to be seen (at the top of Google) to be inviting and responding to the same kinds of comments that we’re inviting and responding to.

That’s a pro-active approach to online reputation. It’s not about leaving it to regional Bartercard brokers to defend Bartercard. It could be about strategically owning this feedback online and being seen to listen and respond to it from a corporate perspective.

This is, naturally, one of the first questions a business will ask when considering the Bartercard proposition.  More and more, businesses will go to Google to get a sense of what other businesses have to say about Bartercard and its benefits and drawbacks.

Already this blog has demonstrated that it attracts people who are either looking to express their dissatisfaction about Bartercard or commend it to other businesses.  That’s not surprising.

The web is already full of comments (in all kinds of places; business forums, blogs, articles etc) about Bartercard.  This blog (as its subtitle indicates) is currently acting as a kind of ’sacrificial anode’ – a lump of metal designed specifically to draw the ions out of seawater so they’ll rust the anode and not the more important steel structure around it.  If you get the offshore oil and gas metaphor…

As a result, this blog will be changing randomly throughout the day – with odd bits and pieces hanging over from the previous theme making it look out of place…

Don’t worry, it’ll all settle down again soon.

http://media.libsyn.com/media/g2b/CharteredConference.mp3

Would you like to offer a support service to your customers? Would you like to be seen doing it?

Enter GetSatisfaction. A site intelligently constructed as an out-house support platform that you can use to invite and handle customer feedback, praise and occasionally, complaint.

It’s early days, but we’ll definitely be evaluating this site further. If it’s as good as I think it is, then not only might we use it (for our ‘mu:kaumedia support) but we may well also recommend it to our clients as part of their online reputation management strategy.

In ORM terms, it makes good sense to invite and respond to customer feedback publicly. You need a well-lit, well-designed space to do that. GetSatisfaction could well be that space.

A couple of weeks ago I attempted to install the e-commerce plugin for Wordpress, developed by Instinct Entertainment.

I found it hard to understand, let alone implement it and got stuck. Like a lot of current software development and social media sites, there was a distinct shortage of simple ‘how-to’ documentation. It’s as if you’re supposed to just use Google and piece it together from the shards of information you find there.

So, I went to Google.

The first thing I learned was that there was no guide to installing and using this plugin. The plugin had loads of mentions but they fell into one of the following three camps:

1) Highly specific, technical discussions (useless to a beginner like me)

2) Requests from beginners for some kind of guidance!

3) Angry people complaining about the lack of support for the product!

Of course, none of this information solved my problem and I ended up as one of the 3rd category, blowing off steam on somebody else’s blog out of frustration. I posted in a thread where several people had made comments about the lack of support for this plugin – and in which Dan Milward, the plugin’s developer, had commented also.

The blog’s owner gave me a telling off for using her blog as a sounding board (understandably!). On the plus side, Dan came back to me as result of that posting and offered some help which, it turns out, was the solution to the problem.

But the real issue is the fact that I ended up there in the first place.

The point of this case study isn’t to be critical of Instinct. They’ve made a great plugin which I finally got working and which I recommend to anyone. However, by not documenting it they created an information vacuum that Google was only too happy to fill with stuff that was never likely to do them any favours.

I’ve been doing some low-level ‘reputation-watching’ on Bartercard since I noticed someone arrived on our ‘mu:kaumedia site via a search on the term ‘bartercard blogs’. (I’d written a post about Bartercard a couple of weeks ago).

Half an hour of gentle research revealed quite a lot of strong criticism about Bartercard and plenty of business people warning others off. In that time, I encountered almost no positive word-of-mouth recommending it. There are one or two people on forums saying how it works for them but they are far outweighed by the criticism.

Aside from the pros and cons of the scheme, any business that charges an initial £750+ joining fee for benefits that are anything but guaranteed is a ‘hi-risk’ proposition and the first thing any sensible business will do when offered such a ‘hi-risk’ proposition is seek out their peers’ experience and opinion.

And of course, they’ll do this in business forums, online networking arenas, review sites and blogs – leaving a permanent trail of discussion and opinion that wasn’t there before and that is impossible to swamp, erase or obliterate.

Your online reputation is always just a form of feedback – and at its core is usually that same, old, time-honoured unheard, unacknowledged customer dissatisfaction.

A quick Google search on the title phrase reveals… this blog at no.1 – and nothing else even matching

Is there no-one else in the whole world using this expression?

Are there really no academic bloggers raising questions about the implications of these media?  Are there seriously no government bodies pausing to wonder what it means and where its all going?

I’d like to think I’ve made some kind of mistake here, but something tells me that I haven’t.

So far, none of the young people we’ve talked to about Facebook have expressed any concerns – or even opinions – about the ‘reputation’ they’re constructing through their Facebook activity. Equally worrying, perhaps, is that none of them has any views on the bigger social, political and cultural implications of the ’social media’ either.  Given the current rumours of Microsoft’s interest in Facebook and economics involved,  that’s astonishing.

As a business, you need to be more than just another ‘user’ of these media; you have to have a view in order to understand the threats and the opportunities.

Consequently, it’s refreshing to find this article by Cory Doctorow. It’s critical and incisive – and offers the kind of bigger-picture perspective on the social media that can help businesses understand, manage and plan their strategy towards them.

This is the current feed for a hotel I chose at random that came low down on ‘recommended’ list for a particular town and it shows a clear – and fairly damning – trend.

‘Feeds’ are summaries of web content and are really useful for letting people make decisions quickly about individual entries they want to look at – or, as in this case, to assess an overall picture.

What would you do if you were considering booking a room in this hotel?

What would you do if this was your hotel?

I’ve only just come across ‘Plebble’ run by two brothers, James and Will Paterson. It’s a business review site that actually seems to cover enough bases to make it a go-er. I’m impressed. The widget you see here is a real-time British Gas ‘monitoring’ tool. As you can see, they’re not doing so well and they need to know about it.

At first glance, I’m impressed with the functionality these guys have come up with and the way the offering will appeal to businesses and the public alike. Watch this space.