Because a large organisation touches so many stakeholders, these new roles must be dispersed throughout the organisation. Management’s task is coordination rather than maintaining a hierarchy. For instance, a publisher must be a good and effective coordinator, not a powerful and authoritative commander in chief. Monitors, responders, and bloggers may sit in different departments, a challenge for the publisher but also an opportunity to bring many minds and viewpoints to the table to polish company’s digital reputation.

Media Distribution – Who’s in charge of ensuring that company online prescence is aimed at reporters, bloggers, and other members of the media is up to date, complete, ready and responsive? For instance, offering dozens of RSS news feeds; multimedia press kits tailored to specific events or issues; photos and videos for journalists to download.

Search Engine Optimisation – What do the first results pages indicate about company’s reputation? How can the company use search engines to improve visibility and reputation?

Metrics – to measure, such as how many people read a particular blog post and how many commented. Metric has to be linked back to the business objectives.

E-Community Moderator – to make the community an engaging place; growing and managing online communities; welcome first-time posters, keep conversations going, and weed out inappropriate comments.

Responders – Arrange for each representative from each department to resolve customer’s problem, follow up to address the immediate situation.

Digital Facilitator – The overall role is someone who continue constructive conversations around the topics, products, and issues the company wants to talk about. For instance, the company would want to have conversations on wealth management with customer etc. Somebody has to have the responsibility, the time, the information, the authority, and the resources to monitor discussions and post timely comments.

In the Web 2.0 world, we could observe 3 categories of roles; editors – for content and dialogue, distribution, and publisher – the manager who is responsible for the company’s overall digital reputation strategy, implementation, and evaluation.

With the above mentioned tools, the company can not only monitor what people are saying about them, they can see how people react to company’s response when they address the negative issues. Are people buying their story? Are they buying their answer? Are they raising new objections or new questions? Is the company slowing or stopping the spread of negatives? This is an ongoing process, not a one time fix.

Another point is to know what people are saying about the company is to identify them and their relationship to them. How significant is an individual blogger? Is the issue one that will affect customers directly? Shareholders? Employees? How will what company’s hearing be likely to influence the company’s reputation among stakeholders?

Eg. Using Google Alerts – depend on how widely you cast your net, Google will notify you when it turns up new results from latest news articles, web pages, blog posts, videos that contain your search term.

Eg using Twitter to monitor customer conversations – using 3rd party tool to monitor conversations about company’s brand, services or products, such as Twitterfall.

Consider alerts to;

• Stay up to date on company’s competitors, company’s industry, and key industry leaders, if any
• Follow a developing news story that affects company’s brand, markets, company etc
• Watch for new videos on topics related to the company etc

First step is to determine who are your key stakeholders and what issues they care about. The stakeholders may be just as concerned about microissues unique to the company or the community. Also understand how stakeholders see your reputation in the context of the issues that matter the most to them. For example, do you have a good reputation when it comes to product quality but a tarnished reputation on environment affairs? All these are about perceptions.

Set priorities and objectives for managing company’s reputation. Issue by issue, what kind of reputation would you like to have among each stakeholder group? Where are the gaps between the reputation company desire and the reputation the company actually have? Which issues and stakeholders are the company’s top priorities?

Next is about engaging, involving and influencing company’s stakeholders. Similar to the idea of “open source computing”; all participants contribute to creating company’s reputation. The open reputation requires specific strategies for engagement, content, building online environment, creating places, and distribution.

Once the company has got the engagement strategy and the content, what are company’s online opportunities for contacting stakeholders? Every organisation has many communities with which it needs to work to build and manage the digital reputation; customers, prospective customers, employees, vendors, stockholders, regulators etc

Next, what are the new roles and new jobs the company need to implement an effective reputation management strategy? Who in the company is going to be responsible for all this?

Identify Community Evangelist : People who promote your community. They tell other people about your community. At times, you may discover that community evangelists appoint themselves without formal invitation.

Align Your Content with Audience Needs : We are trying to build a community around your content. We could think of content like you would the features of a new product. Features have benefits. People buy or adopt something because of its benefits, not its features – they buy on the basis of what a product does for them rather than what it is. Benefits are recognised in the context of needs.

Encourage User-Generated Content : Your community will not really be a community without content contributions from its members. These contributions will be different for each community.

• What functions and features do I want to have available to my community?
• What will be the expense of building and maintaining the community?
• Will I need internal human resources to build and maintain the community, or can I outsource the work?
• How long will it take to get the community launched?
• What are my competitors doing in this space, and what tools do they appear to be implementing?

1. Metropolis Communities : mySpace and Facebook are examples. They have million of members with diverse interests. Nearly anyone can join, even your business. Member join these communities because they want to have conversations with friends, share moments of their lives, and make new connections

2. Affinity Communities : Some people are passionate about the English Premier League – EPL. If you visit the official EPL site, you will see a lot of rich media that complements the content of EPL that shows on television. In fact, EPL has altered their business model to accommodate the way their community wants to interact with their brand. You can simply be a visitor and download audio material from their site. You can get more detailed story information than what was on the broadcast, including photos, videos, and links to background information. You can also become a registered member of the community, create a profile, and actively engage other members.

3. Intracompany Communities : Some companies have created their own internal social network, using applications such as Wiki. Intracompany communities can be beneficial to productivity.

4. Vertical Communities : These are industry or lifestyle-specific communities where people with specialised skills and expertise interact with one another. There could be possible niches within a vertical community.

5. Horizontal Communities : Are not industry specific by focus on functional groups or expertise that can cut across industries. For instance, marketing department to HR department etc