Aleyda Solis Blog | Web Enthusiast, Developer and Promoter

Since the Web started to get popular, companies and professionals began to develop their “online identities” through their own websites and then participating in relevant forums in their sector.

With the Web 2.0, the development of new platforms, blogs and the grow of online communities where every user can create their own “profiles”, review, promote and give feedback about products, services, brands or even other people it has become necessary to “monitor” and “manage” these type of activities … otherwise when clients or friends search for you or your services in Google they can get results … that you rather don’t want them to see… maybe it is time that you start searching for “your name” or “your brand” in Google!

What is Online Reputation Management?

According to Wikipedia:

Online identity management (OIM) is a set of methods for generating a distinguished presence of a person on the Internet. That presence could be reflected in any kind of content that refers to the person, including news, participation in blogs and forums, personal web sites, social media presence, pictures, video, etc.

…..

The objective of online identity management is to:

1. Maximize the appearances of positive online references about a specific person, targeting not only to users that actively search for that person on any Search Engine, but also to those that eventually can reach a person’s reference while browsing the web.
2. Build an online identity in case the person’s web presence is minimal or nonexistent.
3. Solve online reputation problems. In this case, the process can also be named online reputation management

How can you start building your online identity and managing your reputation on the Web?

By following the advise and guidelines these useful online reputation articles:

• Online Reputation Management, Are You Doing It?
• Basics of Online Reputation Management
• Online Reputation Management by Elixir Systems
• Google Reputation Management: Fix Your Google Reputation & Remove Negative Results
• Free Online Reputation Management Beginner’s Guide
• How To Manage Your Online Reputation
• 38 Must Reads on Online Reputation Management
• Reputation Management Emancipation Proclamation - 10 Ways to “Own Yourself” Online
• 34 Online Reputation Management Tools
• An Introduction to Reputation Management (by guest blogger Tim Nash)
• Reputation Management - The Top Ten Tips to Clean Up Your Online Reputation
• Manage your Online Reputation
• Future of Online PR and Reputation Management
• 25+ Ways to Manage Your Online Identity
• 4 Lessons in Online Reputation Management from a Small Town Grocer
• Your Seven Step Online Reputation Crisis Plan
• Are you prepared for an online reputation crisis?
• Buzz Monitoring: 26 Free Social Media Tracking Tools

Good luck managing your online identity and reputation!

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Last Monday Rand Fishkin asked the SEOmoz blog’s readers about the hardest part of the SEO process in a very interesting blog entry where he talked about the tasks he felt were the “most cringe-worthy”.

According to the the poll, “External Link Acquisition Campaigns” is by far the most challenging task for SEOs, and the reason is very simple:

• Inbound Links are one of the most important SEO factors -and the most important “off-site” SEO factor-.
• You cannot directly control “who links to you”.
• Google has very strict rules for “link schemes” in its Guidelines and penalizes link manipulation (buying links, excessive reciprocal links, etc.) to boost a site’s PageRank.

So what can an SEO do to “get” inbound links? I have compiled the best resources that I have found about it… maybe these can help you, as they have already helped me in such a difficult task!

• 66 Ways to Build Links in 2007
• 11 Experts on Link Development Speak Out
• The Enormous list of Linkbuilding tips, articles and resources
• 12 Different Types of Links and How To Get Them
• 20 Linkbaiting Techniques
• How to Attract Links and Increase Web Traffic – The Ultimate Guide
• Divide and Conquer: Creating and Managing Your Link Campaign
• How To Build 22,938 Links To Your Blog
• The Link Baiting Playbook: Hooks Revisited
• 15 Link Building Methods, Get The Most Out Of Each Of Them
• 12 Basic Link Building Tactics For Beginners : The Ultimate SpiderBait
• 102 Ways To Make Your Site A Back-Link Superstar
• Linkbaiting or Link Baiting Strategies?
• 101 Link Building Tips to Market Your Website

Do you know of other interesting articles about this topic? Good luck building links!

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There are so many lists with tips advising on how to get on the Digg Front Page that even Cracked.com (known to post funny articles that frequently become popular in this community) published this hilarious list with suggestions: Digg This!: 7 Cheats for Hitting The Front Page of Digg while Maki from Dosh Dosh instead of giving “general tips” published an interesting article named “How to Create Digg-Friendly Content: Cracked.com’s Template” pointing Cracked.com’s articles style and characteristics.

But, is it possible to get on Digg’s Front Page following specific writing and interaction guidelines?

Some of these lists just give general “common-sense” suggestions like: interact with power users, write an attractive title for your article, make your article controversial, etc. but there are also lists with more specific tips that suggest the best day and time to submit an article to have the possibility to hit the Front Page. Here are some of these lists:

• Tips from a Top 10 Digg user on how to get to the Frontpage
• 10 Steps to Guarantee You Make the Digg Front Page
• How to Make the Digg Home Page
• 15 Ways to become a Digg Power user in only 48 hours
• Top 5 ways to get on the Digg FrontPage
• Blog Post at Noon on Thursday to Hit Digg’s Front Page

Do you think these “Digg’s specific” tips are accurate? Have you had any luck with them?

If you haven’t maybe  it is time to start also trying with StumbleUpon -that it is said to send better traffic than Digg-.

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I have been following for some time the impact that the Internet has had in the newspaper industry: their circulation, classifieds and “print” ad earnings are dramatically decreasing … newspapers are facing the biggest “crisis” (or opportunity?) in their history and they will need to change their paradigm to survive in an age of “blogs”, “communities”, “news aggregators” and “mobile Internet”.

The truth is that newspapers have lost many opportunities to take advantage of the Internet: In the beginning, they built sites with the “exact” same information than their printed version, they updated it only once per day. Some of them even made their online version only accessible to “subscribers”, strategy that demonstrated they didn’t have any idea of what the Internet meant as a news “carrier”: users could read any news from any other source at any time from anywhere around the world… why they would pay if they could get the exact same news for free?

When they saw that this strategy was catastrophic and some of the “industry leaders and visionaries” were already getting a decent amount of revenue because of their “online version” ad sales they started to realize that they should focus on getting a lot of traffic, so they re-opened their webs to everybody and began to update their news more frequently and sometime later in “real time”. Some newspapers also started to feature videos and multimedia content along with their news.

By this time “free” classifieds sites like craigslist and Kijiji were already born but for some reason these didn’t make newspapers think that maybe it was a good idea to do something like that, stop charging for a service that was already free online and attract more traffic to their sites.

Then a new “phase” started on the Internet: The Web 2.0, with the interaction among users in online communities, writing reviews, giving advise to others, uploading their own photos and videos, writing blogs about their favorite topics, events, sharing their favorite online content, etc.

This new phase was also possible thanks to new technologies, like RSS feeds -a new way to distribute content directly to users, who could now read only new, updated information from their selected sites through one desktop or web “interface” without actually visiting them-.

News communities, like Digg and Menéame where everybody could submit their favorite news and stories -from any website- and vote for them, started to emerge and get a lot of attention, traffic and influence on the Internet. Also, platforms like NowPublic, Newsvine and Bottup where every user could become a journalist, and write about their favorite content on their own “web space” without needing any web development or design knowledge became popular.

And this was only beginning: Now that Internet users can also read the news wherever they want through their mobile phones… why would they need to buy a printed newspaper copy?

Wouldn’t have been easier for, let’s say, the NY Times, who already had a highly visited news site to develop a “news community” like NowPublic? Or with a highly read Travel section, to develop a travel community like Tripadvisor? Why “online newspapers” with an already “strong” infraestructure and audience, who had a lot to lose, weren’t able to see this opportunity when they saw that people loved to comment on news and build their own blogs? Maybe because these actions weren’t part of their “main business” but the truth is that if they want to “stay in business” they will need to be flexible and adapt themselves to a new type of needs, identify the opportunities that the Internet is enabling and embrace new paradigms otherwise they will end up losing their businesses… what has already started to happen.

There are a lot of opinions and suggestions about the future of the industry: some say that the most effective strategy will be that the “printed newspaper version” should become some sort of “magazine” with special stories so they can give more than “everyday news” and their sites need to empower their users to interact more, become web 2.0 platforms; others say that they also need to focus more on local news, as it is easier for users to get “global” news from a lot of other sources…

Here are some of the best articles that I have read about this topic, with excellent analysis about newspapers situation and suggestions for their future:

• The Future of the Newspaper is as a 2.0 Platform by Steve Rubel
• A Recipe for Newspaper Survival in the Internet Age by Slashdot
• The Future of the News Business by Mindy McAdams
• A Newspaper Chain Sees Its Future, And It’s Online and Hyper-Local by The Washington Post
• Who killed the newspaper? by the Economist
• Laying the Newspaper Gently Down to Die by PressThink
• Running the Numbers: Why Newspapers Are Screwed by Silicon Alley Inside
• Future of the Newspaper Industry? by Linkedin Answers
• Irony is dead, last gasp of newspaper industry edition by Marc Andreessen
• 10 obvious things about the future of newspapers you need to get through your head by Ryan Sholin
• 10 Newspaper Myths Deconstructed by Information Architects Japan
• How the Online Newspaper Can Become a Community Hub by Mark Glaser
• Out of Print. The death and life of the American newspaper. By Eric Alterman
• What newspaper history says about newspaper future. By Jack Shafer
• Is this the newspaper of the future? by Shane Richmond
• Journalism At The Crossroads: Change Or Die by Scott Karp

Who has the answer? We will see in the forthcoming years.

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I have found this excellent “Internet Trends” presentation made by Morgan Stanley -the investment bank… big surprise!- where we can see how Internet usage patterns are changing. Among the most important I have found:

• The fast grow of social networks that now have a privileged “position” on the industry with a large share of Internet traffic (YouTube and Facebook as top players).
• New “connectivity” services and styles are emerging with social networks and communities: E-mail is becoming archaic and used more by an “older” audience.
• The most important sources of information are the Internet and the “personal” ones, which confirms the power of the “social” side of the Internet information with communities and blogs with ratings, comments, opinions and reviews.
• The Widget-ization of the Web that gives users more control of what they get and do online through modularization, integration among services and sites.
• New online ad inventory with high potential Social Networks and Videos.

The presentation also shows the extraordinary Facebook growth and analyzes why it is growing faster than MySpace! (more personalization, better user interdace, and less intrusive ads? … go to slide No. 15!) … and the way it is monetizing word of mouth with its advertising platform.

In the presentation you can see more about online advertisement business, the mobile landscape, emerging countries with potential markets and even.. recession! But for that you will need to go through the whole presentation that has 72 slides… I highly recommend it though, as it has many interesting facts, figures and a sharp analysis:

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You can also download the presentation in PDF from Morgan Stanley website.

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I have been researching about the most important blogs in a particular industry but I haven’t had many “sources” of information to perform this task, as I have only found the following comprehensive blogs ranking services: 

• Alianzo Top Blogs
• Wikio Blog Ranking
• Bloguzz Blogs Ranking
• Technorati Top 100 Blogs

Do you know of additional blogs ranking lists? 

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