Real Estate Bloggers are online to do business. We build our identity and reputation through our blogs, our online profiles and all of the networks we belong and contribute to. Some of us enterprising (especially me because I do not have a filter between my brain and keyboard) bloggers realized a while ago we need to monitor ourselves, our companies, our brands and even other bloggers and started using Google Alerts which notified us when specific terms are mentioned.

What is online reputation management?

Online reputation management is a developing field that encompasses public relations and search engine optimization to ensure that positive information about you, your company and or brands filters to the top of the search engines while negative information is pushed backwards in search results.

Why is reputation management important to real estate bloggers?

What would happen to your business if one of your competitors started bashing you online and their posts started showing up above yours? What would happen if a disgruntled consumer started attacking your skill set or a home you were selling on a blog or other site? It could seriously affect your ability to sell a house. Needless to say, you can see the value of monitoring you online reputation and building more positive touch points on the internet.

Read also: Free Online Reputation Management Beginner's Guide

Top 10 things you can do to improve your online reputation:

1. Monitor your online reputation with Trackur. Trackur is an online reputation management tool that monitors your entire online presence for you. Where Google Alerts fail, Trackur picks up. An easy to use AJAX dashboard allows you to monitor all forms of media for you and your brand, receive RSS and email alerts of new mentions and even share, bookmark, filter and sort content. Sign up for the 14 day free trial and I guarantee you will be hooked.

2. Build more positive information about yourself, product and brands by creating profiles on various social networks like MyBlogLog, LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Digg, etc. The more profiles you have online with positive information on them the more opportunities you give people searching on the web to find good information about you out there.

3. Contribute regularly to article syndication sites like Buzzle and EZineArticles,etc.

4. Contribute to forums and social networks like Yahoo Answers, Trulia Voices, RealEstateVoices, Wanna Network, ActiveRain, Real Estate Webmasters, etc.

5. Build alliances with popular/vocal bloggers both in your local area and within the industry itself. People are less likely to attack you if they know you personally.

6. Use multiple blogs to improve your ability to rank on the first page and push more positive information about yourself and services up the engines. Make it easy- start a second video or picture blog that you can post to regularly.

7. If someone attacks you, research the blog, the author and their audience reach before responding.

Tool: PubSub.com and Compete.com give you the ability to determine a blog's popularity

Tool: Bloginfluence.net allows you to determine the audience reach

Tool: DomainTools.com to find out who owns the blog.

8. When responding to an attack, first try emailing the blog owner and making your case, offer to speak to them directly and to resolve problems if necessary. If you don't get a response you can always try responding in the comments.

9. In the case of a large scale attack, rally your friends, co-workers and clients as allies to support your position.

10. Monitor your competition: this means you need to watch for changes to their websites

Tool: Website Watcher, their positioning on search engines for specific key terms

Tool: SEO Digger allows you to type in a domain and gives you what search terms it ranks for

Tool: Monitor This allows you to monitor a single keyword across 22 different search engine feeds at the same time.) and press releases.

BONUS TIP: Turn comments off on all listing and about pages.  It is one thing to get a negative commnet on a story it another thing entirely to have a property or your person attacked!  Don't open up a doorway for it, so do yourself a favor and ALWAYS turn comments off on your listings and about pages.  The worst thing that can happen is a person that saw the property in an open house comes in and comments negatively about it. 

Recommended Reputation Management Reading:

Radically Transparent: a must read for those of you serious about your online reputation. I just finished this book over the weekend and it was well worth the read. I highly recommend it.

Overview: Radically Transparent is a complete guide to monitoring, managing, building, and repairing online reputations. This comprehensive guide provides a full-featured reputation monitoring and management system. It includes practical, step-by-step instruction in four skills for personal reputation construction: public relations, search engine optimization, research, and online content creation. It explains how to apply these skills to create online content for blogs, social networking sites, and text communication (e-mail, text messaging, and so forth). The book provides background information, research results, anecdotal evidence, case studies, and practical strategies. It also emphasizes Internet research techniques for identifying and monitoring online identities and features exercises that reinforce key discussions.

About the Author: Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim Blog has long been a staple in my feed reader! Andy is wise, witty and incredibly adorable (alright, I am just saying this because I know he monitor's his every mention... and I am hoping that a bit of brown nosing will win me an interview with him). The Marketing Pilgrim is a great resource for practical SEO and online marketing. Where a lot of other SEO/Online Marketing blogs focus on the technology, Andy specializes in the practical application of technologies to build a business. He also recently took on a hidden jem on the Marketing Pilgrim Blog (Ben Fremer) who is also worth reading.

"The service is like Google Alerts on steroids." Larry Chase, Web Digest for Marketers

Order Radically Transparent Now

Follow Andy on Twitter

Reputation Management Articles:

• Washington Post article on Google and reputation management
• Tips from an Online Reputation Manager Article on Business and Blogging
• A Primer on Reputation Management
• ...to scale further a reputation system may be required for this network...
• (First Monday) Manifesto for the Reputation Society 9 Nov 2007.
• 10 Rules to Recover from an Online Brand Attack by Rob Stokes

• Online reputation management is hot -- but is it ethical? Computerworld, 19 Feb 2008

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