Managing your company’s digital footprint trumps search for building your business
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve had conversations with clients that have decided social media can do nothing for them. One client comes from a very traditional industry, another from the B2B world. I’ve stopped trying to convince people to engage, it’s just not worth it. Instead I’ve begun to talk to them about building an appropriate digital footprint for their business. Last June I wrote a post on measuring your digital footprint that is still my number one visited post of all time. But I was remiss in writing that post first. Instead, I needed to explain why you really want to plan, manage and measure a digital footprint in the first place…for your business or brand. And why you should be MORE focused on this aspect of your online presence than on hitting the first page in Google search.
According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, more Americans get their news online than from television or the newspaper. Most of us go to the computer when we want to find out more about something - particularly when we’re considering doing business with a company or when we might buy something. We should be thinking about the cold call we made last week…if the person didn’t return our call was it because they looked us up online and we didn’t have a strong footprint? Or maybe they didn’t respond to our pitch well…did they ‘google us’ during the conversation and find a poor online brand? For consumer goods, maybe you just spent a ton on TV and radio ads. If you’re not getting a strong response maybe it’s because your online image is poor. (Or as in one case, the client’s site was written in flash…took so long to come up nobody bothered.)
A lot has been written about managing and monitoring your personal digital footprint and I’ve included links at the bottom of this post to some great articles if that’s your main interest. For companies and brands, there’s not as much information. To start, here are some ways to easily stay on top of what your potential clients and consumers are seeing. Even if your business is quite traditional or a B2b… you’d better keep an eye on it.
- First, find an objective opinion. It’s really hard to review your business’s online footprint when it’s your own company, or a product you’ve helped design or sell. Engage a consultant or some other person to look you up online, and ask them to honestly tell you what they think you do. You would be really surprised how many people think you do or sell something completely different.
- Monitor your online impressions by using Google alerts. Remember to put parentheses around your search terms to get exactly the results you want. Instead of just adding them up, or getting pissed off about something negative, look at the words being used and try to rate them as positive, negative or neutral.
- Use a free social media monitoring tool like SM2 to keep an eye on what’s being said about you in social media, even if you’re not engaging. A huge part of social media is listening….start listening now.
- Find out if you’re attracting the kinds of people you want to your site. Google Analytics and Alexa are excellent tools to gather demographics about your visitors. (Plus, Alexa can tell you about your competitors too. ) You might be surprised to see that the demographic being driven to your site by your digital presence is much different than the one you’re after.
Unless you’re 100% ecommerce, I believe managing your company’s digital footprint is much more important than search engine optimization. Every time there’s a mention of your brand or company in traditional media, or a salesperson is out there trying to drum up business, you’d better have a great message ready online …it’s the next step for most consumers and business people interested in buying from you.
I promised some links to advice for your own personal digital footprint. Here you go!
TwistImage – How to build your digital footprint in eight easy steps
Sandy James – Making your digital footprint count
HuffPo – Five easy ways to build your digital reputation
Tags: building online brand image, digital footprint, measuring brand digital footprint, measuring company digital footprint, online brand image, social media and sales
June 29th, 2010 at 12:31 am
Digital footprint sounds like reputation management in some sense but to alienate the power of search engine optimization is like marketing in the old times. Think of this, if you can’t leverage in the SERPs, do you think you can survive with social media alone if your prospective clients can’t find your site in Google for some important keywords? Just my two cents.
June 29th, 2010 at 5:34 am
You’re right, it is part of reputation management and pr for that matter. My point was that for a lot of companie, like B2B or more traditional products, customers hear about them offline first. So managing their reputation online, or keeping track of their footprint (which may be left by other customers even if its a brand) is more important than search.
June 29th, 2010 at 8:48 am
It really depends on where you marketing efforts are at, if you concentrate on outbound marketing then you will want to manage your digital footprint closely, although if you focus on inbound marketing SEO should be at the top of the list. Personally I don’t think either one is going anywhere so it’s really a judgment call about what service or product your offering to decide if outbound marketing will be better than inbound marketing.
June 29th, 2010 at 8:55 am
That’s the perfect way to describe it…..inbound, focus on SEO, outbound, focus on reputation!
June 29th, 2010 at 1:38 pm
Online reputation management really is quite a fascinating area when you’re in a competitive niche and customers are going to constantly be researching you. With the increase in social media and web 2.0 style websites, isn’t it now easier than ever however for reputations to be altered by unscrupulous competitors?
June 29th, 2010 at 1:44 pm
I think that competitors could try that kind of online stuff, but it’s almost always pretty obvious when they do, don’t you think?
June 29th, 2010 at 4:32 pm
It is really interesting to watch competitors and see what they’re up to. The point of online marketing is to make your company as obvious as possible, and it’s very hard to hide methods in the technical age. Building a brand as an online company is extremely tough because of global competition.
June 29th, 2010 at 4:40 pm
It can be tough, but I think it just takes persistence. If you can stick with it for a couple years usually you can gain traction. And the advantage with online is that it’s typically a pretty inexpensive type of business to start, if you’re not into complicated web design.
July 1st, 2010 at 11:59 pm
I tend to agree about social media being of lower value. It depends what you do, but it’s never really led to me selling very much. The thing is, it’s an audience of people that are not shopping. They are seeking entertainment and social connection. That’s a whole lot different from people who are seeking actual solutions. Those people are more likely to use search, and that’s why the right keywords can convert a lot better. I’d rather have 100 Google visitors than 1000 Stumblers any day! I think it’s swings and roundabouts – it’s easy to get thousands of facebook friends or twitter followers.. but it’s more of a technical challenge to run a successful PPC or SEO campaign.
July 6th, 2010 at 1:27 am
I completely agree with Lex on the point that search drives more conversion than those coming from social networks since people from that point are into engagement and not to purchase. Companies dive into the scene just to get presence and check on their customers and what they have to say about them. It’s an avenue for engagement. But for online shoppers, I would disagree that a buyer would have to open first his Facebook account before searching on what he wants to buy. Social Media stands as a support mechanism but search drives clear cut revenue.
CTR alone in Facebook is pretty bad despite its hype. Would you pay for Adwords or Facebook ads?
Which comes first, SEO or Social Media?
July 6th, 2010 at 9:18 am
Amanda I agree that if you’re selling online or your business is e-commerce, search will be more important to bring customers to your ‘place of business’. But without a strong online reputation, all the search in the world won’t bring in customers. It’s definitely not an ‘either or’ situation, but even for selling online, focusing only on things that directly bring you transactional sales is a short term approach. A negative footprint will kill your business no matter how many search tactics you’re using.
July 19th, 2010 at 6:19 am
[...] such strong comments on my post about corporate digital footprints, I got a REAL expert to weigh in on monitoring your online reputation. Here are Kevin [...]
November 30th, 2010 at 9:36 am
I most certenly liked this angle that you have on the subject. Certainly wasn’t planning on this at the time I started browsing for tips. Your ideas was totally simple to understand. Im glad to find out that there’s an individual online that obviously understands exactly what its is talking about.
October 18th, 2011 at 7:02 pm
reputation management…
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