With thousands of social networks in just about every conceivable category and many of them boasting millions of users from every country, businesses of every size are realising the benefits that they have to offer. One of the simplest and most effective uses of sites like Twitter, for example, is as a customer relations tool but social networks have other uses too.

1 – Job Hunting

Job boards have been overtaken by sites like LinkedIn and Naymz because these social networks are less expensive for the recruiter to use. For the job hunter they can give greater exposure to more jobs and allow a more personal introduction to prospective employers.

2 – Event Promotion

Local businesses and major corporations can get the word out about upcoming events quickly and easily. Join local groups, connect with customers and encourage your customers to let others know. The viral nature of social networking makes it a massive benefit in organising and promoting an event.

3 – Customer Retention

Winning new business is a big challenge for any business, but so too is customer retention. Effective communication is just one aspect of customer retention and by encouraging your customers to become a part of your Facebook, Twitter, or other social network you can engage them using media that they feel comfortable with.

4 – Online Reputation Management

Whether you’re attempting to build or repair a reputation, social networks are highly effective reputation management tools. Many people use search engines as well as social networks to research a company or individual so creating profiles on various networks can help you to improve or bolster your online reputation.

Being connected to various social networking sites can either be great for an online reputation, or disastrous for one. This is because if the social networking profile is well-managed, it can give the impression of professionalism and success. If it is poorly run, or worse yet if someone else gets the name on the social networking site first, then social networking can be the most dangerous tool on the Internet.

How do you prevent this? Well, there are many websites which reserve your screen-name, company name, or personal name on the many social networking sites–this is certainly one viable option. Another is to create profiles on just a few of the most well-known social networking sites and run them professionally. This will leave you or your company open to criticism, but most industry professionals agree that this is the best way to prevent widespread online libel. Most importantly: social networking is for virtual dialogue and community. It is important to remember that a facebook profile for your local coffeeshop is as much about dialogue as it is about getting the latest announcements on coffee specials. This blogger has some good advice for business owners on this subject.

Social networking websites come in different shapes, sizes, and niches. While Facebook and MySpace might be considered to be general topic and general location based networks you can also find niche networks that not only enable you to create a profile and manage your reputation but can actively help you to find new customers and develop new profitable relationships with others.

1 – LinkedIn

We love LinkedIn, not least because it is arguably the largest and most beneficial of all social networks that are designed for use by professionals and small businesses. Create your profile and consider paying the relatively small cost required to further extend your network. A paid account isn’t necessary to get many of the benefits of LinkedIn but it can help. LinkedIn is especially useful to job seekers as well.

2 – Yelp

Yelp is a hybrid site that offers some social networking aspects as well as consumer reviews. You can add, read, and rate reviews of local businesses and if you’re a local business interest then you should definitely consider establishing a profile with Yelp. There are different websites for different countries too, so as well as being a niche consumer review social networking site this is also a geographically targeted one.

3 – Cofoundr

Cofoundr is a niche network for professionals and b2b service providers but specifically deals with those that are in the business of startup ventures. A popular network that can be used to develop an online profile and help build beneficial relationships that will last for many years to come.

I’m not going to take the time to hash through the entire article, which you can read below, but iBurst is a company in South Africa that offers broadband. Long story short, in 2009 it had major billing problems thanks to a new billing program which was buggy, to say the least. This, combined with a customer service call center that was insufficiently prepared resulted in a Category 5 storm of criticism about the company online.

They employed a solution in the form of corporate reputation management.

The turnaround in iBurst’s online reputation – as well as customer satisfaction – in just one quarter has been nothing short of amazing. Review of the BrandsEye reputation score firstly shows iBurst mentioned in dramatically more categories online – increasing breadth of conversation it is involved in.

More importantly, the reputation score, which measures the “positive” or “negative” tone or context of the mention, has gone from significantly negative to “a little negative”.

The most important key to this story is that iBurst was proactive. They did not just ignore the problem and expect it to go away–they tackled it and tried to heal their reputation.

http://www.bizcommunity.com/Article/196/16/47804.html

Your personal reputation should be important to you. If you’re looking for a new career then remember that prospective employers are more likely than ever to conduct some research on the Internet in a bid to find out information about you that your CV doesn’t show. If you ever decide to become freelance or set up your own business then your reputation will become potentially even more important as consumers and businesses are especially likely to look online in order to find out who they are dealing with.

Everything you do on the Internet leaves a trail of some sort. Whether you manage your own website, or you are a member of social networking websites, your name and your reputation will be governed by the pages and comments that appear on these sites. You can certainly manage your own website to ensure that others see information that you want them to but can you elicit the same level of control over other people’s web pages, blogs, forums, and other online comments?

The short answer is no. If somebody wants to post negative comments about you then they can, although they do face legal repercussions if those statements can be proven to be defamatory. However, you can protect your personal online reputation by closely managing the search results that people see when they look for your name. Create positive or informative web pages and blog posts. Add profiles on social networking websites and get involved in discussions relating to your industry or your hobbies and these can eventually take the place of negative posts.

When a user conducts a search using Google, Yahoo, or virtually any other search engine (Technorati, Blogrolls, etc…) they are presented with a list of pages that are deemed relevant to that search. Typically a page is considered relevant if it contains a number of instances of the word or term that the user searched for.

Furthermore the pages are then ranked according to how relevant and how much authority they are perceived to have. Considering results are usually returned in a second or so, there’s a lot of calculations that need to be conducted to ensure that users get the best information quickly.

Page relevance, or on page SEO, looks at the existence of keywords in the page content. While it was once considered standard practice to aim for a specific number of keyword instances in a page, search engines now encourage more organic results and so the number of keywords can be considerably more flexible.

Search engines are also believed to look at factors like domains and some HTML tags in order to determine the value of a page.

Off page optimization concentrates specifically on the number and value of links that direct to each of the pages. Each link is considered individually and if it uses a specific keyword or a related keyword then it indicates that the resulting page is relevant to that term.

Another factor considered in calculating a page’s rank is the authority that it is perceived to have. Links from pages with more authority will be given greater weight than those from sites with less authority.

SMX Advanced London is an event in the United Kingdom which is focused on the Search Engine Optimization and Online Reputation Management industries.

SMX Advanced London covers all of the search engine marketing topics – SEO, paid search advertising, analytics, social media marketing, local, mobile, and much more – again, with each session taking a deep dive into a topic, covering aspects of search marketing that many may not have considered or even known existed. Our goal is to “wow” an audience full of people who themselves are qualified to speak.

The event seems really interesting–professionals from all over the Europe and the UK will be present. We’ll try to keep readers abreast of any important news that comes out of the conference.