Online presence management

Online presence management is a process that engineers and stimulates a certain brand online. It combines the elements of web design and development, blogging, search engine optimization, pay per click marketing, reputation management, directory listings, social media, link sharing, and other avenues to create a long-term positive presence for an organization in various search engines.^[1]

Creating a long-term positive presence online is imperative for an organization. It is one of the most effective techniques to make sure that a business website or link is listed in the top few links of the millions of results that are displayed in various search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, Bing, etc. The online presence management process starts by keeping in mind the business goals for the activity. These goals help to define the online presence management strategy. Once this strategy is put in place, an ongoing and constant process of evaluating and fine-tuning begins that drives online presence towards the business goals, while constantly pushing to reduce the cost of achieving those goals by relying more on the organic activity of the Internet rather than the paid placement approaches. These goals will define the online presence management strategy. Online presence management strategy works for any size business, whether it is a small business or a major corporation.

Consumers simply search on various search engines to find information about a certain product or service. When they perform a query in hope of finding information on an organization or a brand, the organization/brand would want to make sure that their website and online properties are listed high in the search results. Most of these consumers would not bother going beyond the first page. In order to manage online brand presence, the organization needs to know what is being said and discussed about their brand. As part of a total online presence management strategy, in addition to the monitoring of a brand, another key component is to analyze online presence within the search engine results. The search engines update their indexes on a regular basis.

Services provided under online presence management

Web Designing and Development

This primarily includes web design, web content development, client liaison, client-side/server-side scripting, and web server and network security configuration.

Blogging

A blog is a website in which items are posted on a regular basis and displayed in reverse chronological order. A blog is like an online journal that is updated daily. The term blog is a shortened form of weblog or web log. Authoring a blog, maintaining a blog, or adding an article to an existing blog is called “blogging”. Individual articles on a blog are called “blog posts”, “posts”, or “entries”. A person who posts these entries is called a “blogger”. A blog may be composed of text, hypertext, images, and links. Blogs often use a conversational style of documentation.^[2]
Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art, photographs, videos, or audio.
Microblogging is another type of blogging, featuring very short posts. The whole blogging process tremendously helps in promoting the online presence of any service or product.

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization is modifying a website to increase its ranking and thus visibility in the organic or natural ("unpaid"), crawler-based listings of search engines. Search engines use a spider or a crawler to gather the listings by automatically "crawling" the web. The spider follows links to web pages, makes copies of the pages, and stores them in the search engine's index. Based on this data, the search engines then index the pages and rank the websites accordingly. Major search engines that index pages using spiders are Google, Yahoo, Bing, Aol, and lycos.^[3]
Some of the methods to optimize a web page in search engines are:

1. Domain name strategies
2. Linking strategies
3. Keywords used
4. Title tags
5. Meta description tags
6. Alt tags

Internet Advertising

Internet advertising is a form of broadcasting and promotion of products, ideas, or services using the Internet to attract customers. A recent advertising industry survey reveals that Internet advertising will generate about $428 billion in revenues this year, whereas last year it was about $220 billion. According to the same survey, 21 percent of Internet users consider online advertising to be the most relevant advertising system. Internet advertising has now overtaken other traditional advertising media such as newspapers, magazines, and radio.^[4] The three most common techniques of internet advertising are:

1. Cost per mille
2. Cost per click
3. Cost per action

Reputation Management

Reputation management is the process of tracking people's actions and opinions, looking for positive and negative opinions about any particular service or product, and removing negative opinions (if any) and converting them into positive ones. The main process of reputation management is reporting on those actions and opinions and reacting to that report, creating a feedback loop. Once a positive opinion about any entity is established online, it's online presence too gets established.
The most important task of a reputation manager is to defend clients against damaging information on the web. With potential customers increasingly heading online to research products and services, bad reviews or complaints that turn up in a search can mean lost business. Thus reputation management services work on highlighting the positive pages and burying offending sites deep in search results. ^[5]

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is a medium that provides social media tools and platforms to create and foster communities and relationships.^[6] Social media marketing programs usually center on efforts to create content that attracts attention and encourages readers to share content with their social networks. A corporate message spreads from user to user and presumably resonates because it is coming from a trusted, third-party source, as opposed to the brand or company itself. Social media is all about networking in a way that advocates trust among the parties and communities involved. Any website that allows users to share their content, opinions, and views and encourages interaction and community building can be classified as social media. Some popular social media sites are: Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Digg, MySpace, Scribd, Flickr, etc.

Understanding what tools are available and how to use them effectively is key to success in social media marketing. Some of these tools are:^[7]

1. Social media monitoring
2. Social aggregation
3. Social bookmarking and tagging
4. Social analytics and reporting
5. Automation
6. Social media
7. Blog marketing
8. Validation

See also

• Search Engine Optimization
• Reputation management
• Internet Presence Management
• Blogging

References

1. ^ "Samefaretaxi Studios". Online Presence Management. http://www.samefaretaxi.com/. Retrieved 16 April 2011. 
2. ^ Rowse, Darren. "ProBlogger". http://www.problogger.net/archives/2005/01/06/about-darren/. Retrieved 16 April 2011. 
3. ^ Callen, Brad. SEO Made Easy. pp. 90. http://www.bradcallen.com/. 
4. ^ "Internet advertising". exchange4media. http://www.exchange4media.com/e4m/bottombarfiles/Internet-Advertising.asp. Retrieved 16 April 2011. 
5. ^ Tozzi, John. "Do Reputation Management Services Work?". Businessweek. http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/apr2008/sb20080430_356835.htm. Retrieved 17 April 2011. 
6. ^ Moran, Mike. "Social media marketing". Search Engine Marketing, Inc.. http://www.mikemoran.com/. Retrieved 17 April 2011. 
7. ^ "Social Media Marketing". Social Media Marketing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_marketing. Retrieved 17 April 2011.