3 Core Qualities of a Reputation Manager

Glen Allsopp / 2 Comments / March 19th, 2008 / Subscribe via RSS

People spend hours learning about SEO from on-site optimisation to ways to build quality backlinks. People spend hours on Digg and StumbleUpon in order to be able to help clients get traffic for Social Media Marketing.

But, what do you have to research and learn to become a good reputation manager? In my mind there are 3 core qualities, and I actually think this industry is pieces of other strong internet marketing services; you just don’t need to be as advanced in each.

So, what are the qualities / skills required?

SEO

Search Engine results are one of the most common reasons people get in touch with us, they want to clean them up because there’s something negative they don’t like.

Some of the most important parts of Search Engine Optimisation to master:

Understand quality links and how links affect rankings
Knowing what on-site SEO factors are important to help a page rank
Working out whether to help other pages rank or create new pages to work on (difficulty / competition / time)

Social Media

Besides search engines, you will also find a lot of negativity coming from blogs, forums and other places where people can create content online. It’s not a case of finding negative content and issuing a law suit, some of the most important things to research include:

Knowing how and what to track the social web for
Understanding why people blog and that the web is a two-way conversation
Note all the ways and places people can talk negatively about a brand / company online

Staying Fresh

Just because you know how to do things now, you have to stay up to date on the latest developments in the industries, the latest ways people can communicate to an audience and more. Staying fresh includes the following:

Staying up-to date on SEO techniques that develop
Constantly learning new ways to engage in communities and understanding mindsets of people who write negative thoughts
Sculpting best practices to help companies improve their image and helping it stay clean

5 More Things I think are important:

Being patient, results take time
Staying ethical, it’s probably easy to do a ‘dodgy job’ for the money, don’t be tempted
Don’t be lazy, keep track of what is going on regarding keywords in SERPs and in social sites
Be up to date on any new social sites that are taking off
Come up with documents you can give to clients if you want them to start blogging / twittering etc explaining the benefits and how to go about things

I don’t know that many reputation managers I would happily promote, if our 10 reasons to choose us aren’t enough check out Andy Beal or Brett.

P.S. A friend of mine has launched his Metrics / Analytics Blog, be sure to check it out

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