I was honored to be invited to speak in Washington DC to the National Foundation for Women Legislators in October. The NFWL was holding their Women’s Congressional Broadband Summit, sponsored by AT&T, which brought women throughout the telecommunications industry together to address broadband technology and how it changes the playing field for women and their families. The elected women discussed how technology touches every aspect of their lives including health care, energy, social networking and elections.
The Broadband Summit was an excellent opportunity for me to speak about the importance of online reputation management, and to unveil a proposal I wrote that would offer affordable website, email marketing / fundraising, and online reputation management services to every member of the NFWL.
What is online reputation management?
Anything that you publish online, or someone else publishes about you online, becomes your online reputation.
With all of the wonderful conveniences the Internet has brought us, it also has a dark side.
It used to be that the only media was print, television and radio, and the great majority of those outlets were professional. These media outlets researched their stories and made sure the facts were straight before publishing their news
We live an a time where anyone can pull out a camera phone, record you, publish the video online out of context and damage your online reputation in minutes, and it doesn’t even have to be true.
With the advent of faster paced social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook, which allow users to spread information almost instantaneously, false allegations and rumours can now travel at a speed never before seen. I’ve heard it described as “word of mouth on steroids”, and that sounds about right to me.
How can online reputation management help?
Online reputation management involves monitoring all online content that is published about you, evaluating if that content is positive or negative, and then deciding if any response or strategy is needed in order to remove or push negative results down in the search engine results. Many of the same skills used for search engine optimization can be utilized to help control your online reputation.
Online reputation management will become more important in the coming years for elected officials and businesses alike. For more information on how Apache Advertising and Design can help elected officials and businesses control their online reputation, please give us a call at 832.971.4905 for a free consultation.
- Matt Hoffpauir
