#022 Digital Reputation Management with Shane Barker

So yeah, I am just finishing up my omelet.

It's no joke. I'm on a keto thing.

So I'm doing an omelet.

I'm so glad that you're here.

My name is Sheryl Plouffe.

I'm a video marketing strategist and you're watching Personal Brand Breakthrough. I help entrepreneurs to make money with online video. And on today's episode, we have a special guest. Actually, he's been on the show before. Shane Barker is a digital marketing consultant and today he's going to give us some, some tools actually to help us understand what people are actually saying about us online. So it should be very interesting. For those of you who are new to me, my name is Sheryl Plouffe. You can connect with me on social media @SherylPlouffe pretty much everywhere online on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube. And this show is broadcast every Thursday at 2 PM. So without further ado, let's get into how we can all better understand What People Are Saying About Us Online with Shane Barker today.

So guess who we have back today? Shane Barker, digital marketing consultant, is back with us today to talk about digital reputation management. And Shane, I want you to dive in with us right now and explain what that really is. What is digital reputation management?

Reputation management is something that— it's so funny because it's one of those things that I don't think a lot of people think about. It's no different than— I'm using another analogy here like I did on the last show. An analogy for me is like a lot of people don't put alarms on their cars until somebody's already broken in, right? It's right, so it's like it's not too late at that point. I mean, it's great, you know, for the next time that maybe you're going to potentially, you know, somebody's going to come and break your window. Reputation management is something about looking at your profiles and being in control of your profiles and what people people are putting out there. Social media is an awesome tool and it's, you know, sometimes it's great, you put out content, it can go viral. I mean, that could be good or bad, right? I mean, it could be from a brand perspective, it can be awesome, you have this great story about, you know, we have a FedEx guy that goes and saves this girl out of a burning building and that's great for FedEx, or you have the story of the FedEx guy throwing the package, you know, over the thing and it breaking and the guy then having footage and then putting it on YouTube, right? It's when you look at reputation management, there's lots of softwares that you can use out there like Brand24 and Mention.com and some other ones. But the idea of this is, is, you know, there's going to be good things and bad things, especially when you're in the public eye, right? If you're a brand or even an individual. And I think it's important, like I said before, if something potentially bad happens is that you want to make sure that you're monitoring, you know, Google your name, which is a lot of people do that, or set up some type of monitoring system or keywords or something like that. So you get reports each month, or if something bad happens, you can get sent a report. There's plenty of tools out there. Like I said, even Google Alerts is another one that you can use. It's just important, once again, don't wait for, you know, until something bad happens for you to realize, oh shoot, I should be looking at this. Same thing with restaurants and stuff with reviews and Yelp and all that. I mean, these things are important because once again, your reputation as an individual or as a business, people could be writing stuff about it, either true or untrue, doesn't really matter, it's still out there. So you want to make sure that you're kind of policing that and make sure you're on top of it.

So digital reputation management is about monitoring and really looking at maybe analytics or being able to really kind of keep tabs on how you're being viewed or what people are saying about you in the marketplace. It's like I use Google Alerts and I use it to monitor certain keywords in my niche. So video marketing as an example, But I don't set a Google alert for my name. Should I?

I would, I would. I mean, you've got a pretty unique name. So inside, like, you know, it was like Jennifer Smith or something, I'd say, ah, don't do that because you're, you know, there's probably 1,000 or 100,000 Jennifer Smiths. But I would always recommend that because once again, it's, if somebody's saying something about you, whether it's good, bad, or true or untrue, you want to make sure you know what's being said there. Because there's two sides to it. A, it's, if it's something that's untrue, then, you know, you have to figure out how you're going to handle that situation, like a bad Yelp review or something. You know, as an owner, a lot of people take those personally, and I as an owner would take it personally as well. You can't— you go and write something very emotional, and then all of a sudden you're going back and forth, and now you've got somebody that their full-time job is to write bad stuff about you, right? And it's out there for the world to see. So, you know, I always have to kind of step back for a second and think, okay, like, what should I be writing here? And also take a look at the individual. I always research the people, and if they're just crazy, you can't fix crazy, right? So there's no reason to go up and try to fight a crazy person because they don't know if they've won or lost. They just know that they want to go to battle. So In those situations, you just have to be real careful of that kind of stuff. But yeah, with— and then if somebody writes something on the other side of it, somebody writes something phenomenal about you, like, hey, oh my God, I took a look at this video series, this is absolutely awesome, and has your name in it, you should respond to them and tell them, hey, thank you so much, I'm glad you enjoyed the series, thank you so much for promoting it, you know, if you ever— give you a free half-hour consultation, whatever that is, right? But thank them for them putting that out there. Once again, that— we talk about engagement, right? And so it's like, That's engagement. Like when somebody's writing something good, unfortunately, you know, when it comes to restaurants and stuff like that, most people, if you have an experience, they write about a bad experience. So you get most of the time people write bad stuff, not most of the time, but that's how usually it happens because somebody's frustrated or not happy about something. If somebody writes a good thing, if you really want to kind of foster that and once again, thank them and figure out what you can do to encourage that behavior because that's your community and that's somebody that can be an advocate for your product or service.

So Shane, I know as a digital marketing consultant, you know, you have a lot, you're really tech savvy and you're kind of on top of all these different tools that we can use. And I know a big portion of that is automation and automation is wonderful and it can be very beneficial and save us time and what have you. But as it relates to digital reputation management, if we have over-automated ourselves and we find ourselves in a situation, I'm just thinking like something happens in the world and now all of a sudden you've got this automated content or something that that's going out that's completely off brand for you because something terrible has happened in the world. Talk to us about that, that automation piece and how we can manage that as it relates to our reputation management.

Yeah, so I think it's, you know, it is hard in those situations if you have something that's automated and set up and, you know, something's going out and there's something that happens in the world that maybe makes it, I don't know, that contradicts or it's just something that doesn't look good from a PR perspective. Those kind of things easily can be taken down. So I mean, once again, one of the things you have to do is you have to recognize that there was a problem. So let's say you have some huge backlash, and I did, I'm trying to think, this was a few years ago. I had some backlash on a blog article that I put out. And it was, I put it out and it was something that happened at the same time. This lady was like, I can't believe you're trying to promote your product at this time of chaos. And I didn't really necessarily agree with her because it wasn't anything that was, that I felt there was like a huge connection between the two, but for her, she felt there was a connection. So I said, hey, listen, I'm not trying to be, you know, insensitive. I just was— this was a piece that was scheduled to go out. And once again, I, you know, if you don't like my content and you feel that I'm, you know, like not authentic or I'm, I don't know, I'm just taking advantage of the situation or whatever, I said, that's not the deal. And I kind of waited because, you know, once you have people that have opinions, that doesn't mean you need to change everything you do. If you start to get this sediment of people going, wow, this is really bad, and you need to like stop that, then you need to figure out how you're going to stop that from happening, right? Or at least stop the bad things or whatever the— I guess the ball rolling down the hill, right? Like, what do you need to do? And so if it's a thing where you just need to take the content down and say, listen, once again, this was content that I created 3 months ago, and this was, you know, and so I do apologize. There was nothing— there wasn't a reason why I put that out there. I mean, acknowledge the situation, acknowledge that a mistake was made, right? When you try to hide and then there's social media and you're deleting this and deleting that and deleting tweets and all this and I mean, trust me, you've seen with all the celebrities, like there's screenshot, there's people out there screenshotting stuff so the minute you say, I never said that, and then somebody sends out the screenshot and you're like, okay, that kind of does look like my Twitter handle, maybe that was me or I was hacked, that's the, you know, of course that's always the popular one. Yeah. So—

So I guess, you know, honesty is really the best policy and just being totally upfront about it and just say like, well, this was scheduled to go out and and you didn't intend for there to be any insensitivity around whatever else was happening in the world. And I think sometimes it's like we're unaware that that thing happened. Yeah. Because there's so many things going on in the world. How can we keep on top of everything? And like, you just gave a really good example of a woman who saw a connection where you didn't. So I guess in that case, what can you do but just to be honest and open about it and take the content down?

We're human. Yeah. You know, we're all human. So that's the thing at the end of the day is that, you know, as long as you acknowledge it and address it, and say, hey, listen, I understand your point, right? I mean, you want to acknowledge what they're saying and say, listen, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and take that down. I'm going to make this right. You know, assuming there's a lot of people, just if I responded and took everything down from every person that complained, I would have no content probably at a certain point. But right, but you just have to figure out like, hey, is there really a valid point here? I usually have people and mentors and friends and stuff that I'll say, hey, I got this message. What do you guys think about this? Is this off-brand or Am I— should I not have written this, or what do you think? And then some people are like, no, you know, that lady just needs to be on her medication and you're fine, Shane. Okay, sounds good, you know, it's awesome. So, you know, I do again because you want to talk to other people outside of your guest circle, right, of like people that— like my mom would say, oh, that's not good, Shane, you need to take that down. Like, okay, she's not a marketing person, but, you know, if mom says take it down, then Shane takes it down.

But she's a human being, so yeah, yeah. So Shane, we talked about— I want to talk about what are your favorite tools for digital reputation management. We talked about Google Alerts already. Do you have maybe like 2 other tools or are there specific platforms that specialize in this type of thing from a monitoring standpoint?

Yeah, so I use 2 different tools. Actually, there's a number of them, but the 2 that I use all the time that we use for our clients, one of them is called Brand24 and they do an awesome job. Once again, you can put in keywords, you can, you know, whatever it is, whatever you want to, you know, your own name, you can put them together. You can do different keywords and stuff to find out what's going on in your industry. I obviously do that for like influencer marketing, for reputation management. You know, I want to see what other of my competitors, the content they're putting out, right? That's always fun. And then there's another one called mention.com and they do the same thing. There's a lot of, you know, they'll do— it's cool because you can set it up either for things to be sent to you instantly, it can be an email at the end of the day or something at the end of the week. I usually just have it do it at the end of the day. Depending on the client. Some of the clients, if they're in kind of a volatile industry, then I do it— I get an immediate update or get some type of report and see if we need to make any changes. But those are the two that I've used and have, you know, they've been awesome. I use Google Alerts as well. Google Alerts doesn't pick up as much, I think, for whatever reason, which is really weird because the other tools type— they go into Google. And, you know, which you think that Google Alerts would be like the number one tool that I use, but it's kind of fallen away just a little bit, and these other tools have been phenomenal for me.

Alright, thank you so much Shane, really appreciate your insight. It's interesting you said monitor yourself and monitor your competitors too.

As you should, yeah, you gotta know what they're doing, that way you can do something better next time.

Exactly, so thank you so much Shane. If you want to contact Shane because he is a wealth of knowledge around digital marketing, you can contact him at Shane@ShaneBarker.com or you can visit his website at ShaneBarker.com. He's got some great giveaways there, 5 of the most important influencer marketing goals your brand should focus on. He does an expert roundup. That's how we got to know each other. He's on Twitter, he's on all the social platforms.

So check him out.

Thanks so much, Shane, for joining us, and we'll see you next time on Personal Brand Breakthrough. Bye for now.