SEO Class

Social Media is an excellent tool for driving traffic to your website, however it can also be used as reputation management tool for your company, product or employees. Since SEO Class is new website we’re facing some of the same issues many of you will also be facing, so I’m starting a series showing you how we’re tackling the problem.

The first step is to develop a list of social media websites that you want to use or protect. As social media sites spring up faster than dandelions on a spring lawn setting up a presence on every site is impossible. A better strategy is to target the larger, more important or topically relevant sites. These include:

Wordpress.com
MySpace.com
Flickr.com
Squidoo.com
Blogspot.com
Spaces.live.com

Depending on the uniqueness of your site name, product or individual person, you might not be able to secure them all, and there’s not much that can be done to remedy the situation. You can try and contact the person to transfer or even purchase the account, but I’ve never had a lot of success with that technique. Basically the people realize they are sitting on a property that’s more valuable to you than them and make you pay in one way or another. Additionally many of these sites have terms of service which prevent the accounts from being sold or transferred.

The second step is to secure usernames on more important or highly visible social media, email, or forum sites. This would include things like:

Gmail
Hotmail
Digg.com
Netscape.com
Del.icio.us
Newsvine.com

Now the point here isn’t to set up sock puppet accounts, it’s to protect other people from making you look like your abusing the system. For example if seoclass@gmail.com set up an account named seoclass on digg.com and submitted stories every days it would look suspicious. This is another case where getting there first is important. You might not be able to get everything but it’s worth the effort to try.

In upcoming sections we’ll be taking a look at how to fill these pages with unique content and leverage it for maximum value.

Tags: social+media, SMO, reputation+management

This entry was posted by Graywolf on Thursday, March 8th, 2007 and is filed under Internet Marketing Blog, Social Media Optimization. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.