Introduction | Know | Grow | Monitor | Protect

Introduction

Do a Google search on "Google is evil" and you'll get a return of around 65 million listings! No one can completely 'control' their online profile but you can monitor, influence and manage it.

In a perfect world your organisation would have total control over every word said about you but the truth is 'total control', especially in the online and social networking digital economy, simply does not exist. The ways in which your business can find itself represented online are determined by events, trends and influences so varied and transient they defy naming. Short of 'controlling' what's said about you online you can become one of those influences: you can manage your profile.

My website's effective and I get thousands of visitors a day – why should I worry about my online profile?

Of those thousands of visitors, many have come to you via a search engine. While good search engine optimization can control that to an extent, there are countless potential visitors to your site, doing the same search, who may instead select a link to a blog, chat room or other website that can contain false or grossly misleading "information" about you. Even if the "information" is only slightly inaccurate, and not intentionally damming, it can be damaging. Beyond a key word search, there are a myriad of other forums that may be speaking to your audience, and other means of connecting with them, such as Twitter, Facebook and a growing number of similar social networks. While your website might attract and retain genuine customers, yours is not the only online voice they are listening to.

That which you cannot control, should be watched very carefully, but the last thing you want to do is discourage all unsanctioned online discussion about your business or product, and it's unlikely such an approach would have anything other than a negative impact anyway. Remember too that, often, unauthorised commentary can put you in a positive light and even negativity can become constructive criticism. The first thing you want to do is identify the forums, and related websites, of most relevance to your business or product.

How does inTREND determine the importance of significant websites?

inTREND employs a combination of data mining techniques, keyword searching, automated website ranking, custom-built software and the profiling expertise of communications strategists to rate websites of influence. Knowledge is grown via internet spidering, patterned searching and directory harvesting. The importance of websites is determined through:

• Number of relevant pages
• Number of connections with other pages
• The amount of traffic the site attracts
• The authenticity of the site
• Human quality assurance