How do You Maintain a Positive Online Presence?

This is a follow up post to yesterday’s “How do You Repair a Negative Online Presence?”  A lot of marketers think that achieving a positive online presence means that their job is done.  Not true, a positive online presence is only half the battle, you also have to make sure that your online presence STAYS positive.  So, the question is, “what do you do to continue an online positive presence?

Keep Monitoring for the Good AND the Bad

As mentioned yesterday you still need to stay on top of your game by monitoring the online space with the various social media monitoring tools out there.  This means looking for the positive and the negative feedback.  We already know what to do when we have a negative online presence, so let’s focus on the positive.

Reach Out to the User

If someone out there is praising your product or service you need to acknowledge them.  Send them a personalized e-mail or a comment that says thank you and that you appreciate their support.  You absolutely must make sure that the user understands that you value their opinion.

Encourage Sharing

If someone has something positive to say about you, encourage them to share it with their friends and connections.  Oftentimes people that write blog posts or opinion pieces are members of other social media platforms that they can use to help promote their posts.

Promote Them

Nothing makes a users feel more valued then when you help to promote their content.  If you find a blog post or an article that makes you shine, then YOU need to help promote that article.  Use your own twitter account to share it with your followers, post it on facebook, submit it to digg/stumbleupon, etc.

Connect With Them

You should be connecting with people that hate you AND that love you.  If someone is talking about you then you need to make sure that you are somehow connected online.  That way you can share your content with them and respond to them when they share content about you.  Remember, it’s about building relationships here.

Reward the Positive

There are many ways you can do this.  If the person is located near you go buy them a cup of coffee, offer them a discount on a product or service, llink to them from your homepage, put them on a user advistory panel, etc.  This is going to depend on your business but ultimately you want to do something for the users that says “thank you, I appreciate you.”

Create Brand Evangelists

If you find that there are certain users out there that are your biggest fans, then turn them into brand evangelists.  Offer them sneak peak stories or future product releases, let them be among the first users to break the news to the public.  Give them free products to test out, get their feedback on upcoming features.  The goal here is to make the user feel like they are a part of the team, that they are a contributor, and that they are a part of the company/product success!

As you can see there is certainly a lot of work that needs to get done, even if you have a positive online presence.  You must always make sure that your online presence stays positive and you must always make sure that you are building relationships.

What other tips do you have to maintain an online presence?

thanks for reading!