Keep Your Online Reputation Clean

What does online reputation have to do with cash flow? If it's poorly managed, then you could lose loan and client opportunities leading to reduced cash flow. You don't have to become a regular participant in social networks or anything -- although it can help bring in new clients. Nonetheless, the key is to monitor your reputation.

Monitor Your Business and Brand

The first thing to do is set up a monitoring program. You can subscribe to alerts that send you an email every time someone mentions your company. Alerts can search blogs, Twitter and web sites depending on the service you use. Here are two alerting services to get you started:

• Google Alerts: Enter terms and tell it how often and how you want to receive alerts.
• Trackle: Not only can you customize your alerts, but also set up tracklets to let you know when a competitor updates its web site or changes its price. Check out its tracklets catalog.

It would be helpful to have a Twitter and other social network accounts set up for your company. Don't wait until something bad happens to join the fray. You don't have to use these services on a daily basis, but at least put yourself out there -- ready to handle whatever comes.

How to React to a Mention

Someone say something bad about your company in a review, blog or a Twitter tweet? Address it as fast as possible even if you don't have a response or solution. The key is to let the unhappy person know you're aware and you're working on it. For bad experiences and other things that you can fix, offer a discount or freebie. Or send an apology note with a treat.

You can also take proactive steps after running into a negative situation. Contact bloggers who target your audience and let them know about your product or service in hopes they'll consider writing it up. Remember, their first priority is their readers not your company. So think about what the readers could get from the story and use that as your angle. Let the blogger know that you support a disclosure statement indicating you provided the product. This builds trust and complies with a recently added FTC rule.

Submit press releases to PR submission services. This will help move your positive mentions up in the search engine results and push down the bad stuff. Many free submission services are available, so target those. It helps to submit to the paid services like PRNewswire.com and PR.com. This is the time to contribute on social networks on a regular basis.

Yes, this work takes time, but how much will it hurt your cash flow if you don't address the problem?

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