www.starrynightsocialmedia.com.  I hope you visit us there.

Thanks,

Kim Starry

More and more of our lives are on the Internet and so more and more of our reputations hinge on having a solid online presence. These are five habits that everyone who cares about their online reputation should have.

1. Think Before You Post
Before posting (or even emailing) information about yourself, including photographs and videos, consider whether you’d want your mother, your insurance provider, business partners or customers to see it. One drunken party photo or one stupid comment in a video can become fodder for the reputation slayers. So think before you post.

2. No Oversharing
This ties in with #1 and is probably the most common way that people ruin their reputations. While posting that one bad photo or one stupid comment could ruin you, continually posting banalities can be just as bad. Before you make those daily Facebook status updates and send those iPhone tweets about your current activities, think about the value they may (or may not) have. Does anyone other than you mom, sister, cousin, or wife care about your trip to the movies? Is the fact that your dog can (finally) sit on command really a life-altering event that should be enthusiastically tweeted? Don’t overshare.

3. Do Not Slam, Flame, or Attack Anyone Online
Yes, the Internet is full of people who make stupid remarks or who claim to know things they obviously know nothing about. These people probably deserve to be put in their place. But not by you. A flame or ad-hominem attack sullies you as much as it does the person you’re aiming for. Flaming quickly can become something more than cyber-bullying, stalking, or worse. Your attack on someone, no matter how innocuous, on a blog’s comment area could become a full-fledged campaign by them to post vitriol on your Facebook, YouTube, website, and other sites across the Internet. So do not slam, flame, or attack anyone online. It might feel good right now, but it can haunt you later.

4. Do An Online Purge
For most of those we talk with when discussing reputation management online, this one is often the hardest to convince them to do. During a recent keynote speech, half an hour of my question and answer period centered on this one facet of online reputation management. It’s that controversial. There are a lot of reasons why, but for space considerations, I can only skim some of them. More are covered in-depth in our book Do It Yourself Online Reputation Management.

Purging your online presence doesn’t mean removing yourself from the Internet, but rather it means streamlining your presence for better control. Are you actually utilizing that MySpace account, for instance? Should it be deleted? Maybe it has 3,000 friends, but if it’s of dubious value to your reputation and is rarely updated, it’s probably more of a liability than a help. Likewise, having 8,000 Facebook friends might seem great for your marketing, but are those people really people? How many of them do you actually interact with?

Oprah has hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers. How many of them does she actually talk to regularly? Is she the one really talking to them, or does she have a PR person just for Twitter? Can you afford to hire someone to reliably run your Twitter or Facebook accounts? Would it be worth it?

Your online presence can only work for you and keep your reputation clear if it’s well-maintained and streamlined to the task you wish it to perform. If your presence is all about marketing, then you’ll have very different goals than if it’s just about connecting with friends and family and occasional colleagues. Know your goals and keep your accounts tailored to them. This means purging the extraneous friends, information and accounts you might have.

5. Surf Like a Ninja
This last one is often the easiest for people to grasp and the fasted to adopt. Everything you do on the Internet can be tracked. That’s not paranoia, it’s just how it is. There are few regulations covering how information you might post online (including your surfing history and habits) can be used. Your photos on Facebook, your sign-up information on Gowalla, and your Web browser’s history itself might all be public information being traded between marketing groups.

So take steps to minimize your exposure and keep as much of this information as possible to yourself. The tools are all easily found and basically free. Use a good anti-virus tool, obviously, to keep your computer clear, even if you are running a supposedly a safe system like Mac or Linux. On top of that, use stealth tools to keep your browser history locked down (or cleared), your visiting information hidden (such as with an IP mask), etc. Tools for all of this are easy to install, automated, and freely available.

If you take these five steps in stride and incorporate these habits into your normal routine online, you’ll find that your reputation will not only be more in your own control, but more easily managed as well. Even if you don’t do business online, your online reputation can be important and will only become more so in the future as more and more of our lives go online.

In today’s economy consumers are more often than not doing research before they make purchases, buying services, and before they start doing business with your company.  They will be researching your products and/or services and investigate what your current customers are saying.  It is imperative that now more than ever whatever information they find is accurate, positive and leaves a good impression.

It today’s world it is not only important to maintain your reputation in your local community but you must also manage your online reputation as well.  Bad reviews in blog sites, forums and other channels such as Yelp and Four Square that use the power of the Internet can have a significant effect on the reputation of your company.  You have to be ready to quickly respond and take necessary action immediately to correct any bad publicity.

Although it would be impossible to respond to every negative comment out there, especially for larger companies, you can address negative blog posts by building positive exposure through proactively interacting in pertinent online communities.

Reputation management in the online world includes being present and positively active on social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.  Depending on your business you may want to be involved in Yelp, GroupOn and FourSquare.  You will most likely want a blog.

All of this can be a daunting task, there is no doubt about it.  It is also true the good reputation it can take businesses years to build can be severely damaged in minutes.  That is more true now than ever with the Internet.  By considering the advantages of online reputation management, a business with substantial presence on the Internet can cushion itself from the effects of bad publicity.  Over the coming months we will be rolling out services to assist you with online reputation management.  We can help you set these tools up and teach you how to manage them yourself or do it for you.

Stay Tuned!

IMPORTANT: Protect Your Online Standing

Online search engines have contributed immensely in making research easier. No longer do we have to go to the library during business hours to search through outdated books and hope they have the information that we need. There are so many references available online that are free and available to you:

Google and multiple other search engines

• Blogs
• Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn (and a plethora of other social networking sites with more cropping up what seems like daily.)
• Online consumer forums
• Company Websites
• Wikipedia

I’m sure you can think of quite a few that I haven’t listed.

If your customers and potential customers are looking for services or products that you offer they may very well go to one of these sites that we mentioned. The last thing that you want them reading are bad reviews about you or your company. These could be extremely harmful for your image and your reputation. Once you damage your image and reputation it can be very difficult to fix.

In upcoming Blog posts we will be discussing why consumer feedback is critical, how to manage your reputation and some online reputation management tools for your business.

We are excited that we will be offering new services to assist you with some of these aspects of your business in the near future. Stayed tuned for the roll out of these next services in the next four to weeks.

Have a great weekend, and enjoy the Super Bowl!

One teleseminar, webinar, or radio show can be used to create dozen of articles and even more blog posts. You can submit your articles to article directories and ezine publishers. One thing is for sure you can never get your message in too many eyes.

After you have those articles written you can repurpose them into blog posts either on your own blog or as a guest on a colleagues blog. Then you have more fresh content for the search-engines to pull up your rankings. You can break them down even further and use them for posts on Twitter.

You can also use your content to make short one to two-minute video clips for YouTube.

If you are a speaker, author, consultant, trainer, organizer, wellness professional, coach anyone who is conducting any kind of presentation and recording it, and those recordings are just sitting on your computer, you are literally sitting on a gold mine of untapped income that could be going in your pockets and adding value to your clients. AND if you are conducting presentations and not recording them you need to start now, today, with your very next presentation.

Why not take out those audio recordings and let’s dust them off and start adding to your bottom line today. Contact me today at KMStarry@gmail.com and we can discuss a plan for your specific needs.

Kim DeYoung (aka the Get It Done Girl) teaches entrepreneurs how to start blogging (or improve the blog you already have). The idea is to use your blog to create a loyal following of a targeted market who love you and are ready to BUY!

Kim said I could share with you a few mistakes she’s made so you can learn from them and begin blogging more effectively right away. Here’s what she said about 7 blogging mistakes that are easy to avoid…

1.  Publish regularly.

Often I’m asked, “how often should I blog?” Whether you post frequently or rarely is not as important and whether you publish regularly. You need to set your readers’ expectations so find a rhythm that suits you and maintain it. If you’re going to be away, write posts in advance and set them up to be posted automatically at your usual time. You need to maintain momentum.

2.  Stay focused.

Trying to speak about more than one topic in a single post will confuse your readers and will make your posts hard to categorize. Try to keep your posts as simple as possible and stick to one subject. It’s great that you have lots of ideas, but save them for future posts. Keep a swipe file or journal for all your future ideas.

3.  Connect with your readers.

To really connect with your blog, your readers will want to know something about you. Include an author biography, and preferably a photo to help you build up a relationship with your customers. Share personal stories, when appropriate, so you can build connection and rapport. Consider incorporating video into your blog.

4.  Have a point.

The headline of your post is all that will show up in search engine results and links so be sure to make it attention grabbing and relevant to your post. No one will bother to click on a link to your post if they don’t know what it is about.

5.  Pay attention.

Carried away by the success of their first blog, many authors start several more. Maintaining a blog takes time and effort and the quality of your blog will suffer if you spread yourself too thin. One high quality blog with regular postings is better than several neglected blogs.

6.  Keep it all together.

Your blog is an ongoing story or conversation. You will want to refer to previous posts but you won’t want to explain to new readers the entire contents of your previous articles. Insert links to the relevant posts, and keep an easily accessible archive of your most significant articles.

7.  Respect your readers – all of them.

Receiving negative comments can be frustrating and upsetting, but don’t forget that the author has made the effort to read your post and make a comment on it that means your post has been impactful. Read your post again, keeping the negative feedback in mind. You may be surprised that you start to agree with the comments. You’ll find that all comments, whether negative or positive, give you valuable feedback that you can learn from.

Whether you’re just getting started, or have been blogging a while and you’d like to learn how to blog more effectively, you should check out Kim’s new product where she walks you through ALL the steps – Blogging ABC’s. Make sure you checkout her free blogging tips available through my special affiliate link at http://dld.bz/FzzN

My first step was to enter a contest to work with Alicia Rittenhouse for three months, as an intern, and learn everything she knows, and believe me it’s a lot. Alicia, along with Jessica Steward have already been an inspiration and ignited a fire in me so even if I don’t win the contest, I’m still a winner. To enter the contest you had to write an essay, do a slide show, or a video. For me, the video was the most difficult, moving me the furthest from my comfort, so that is what I chose to do. I’ve been sitting in this comfy zone too long.

This is going to be the year for me to shine. I can’t wait.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qz_CVwek4N0

If you want crystal clear clarity on what steps you should be taking I have great news! I want to introduce you to a friend of mine, Kim DeYoung, she’s the Get it Done Girl.

This Thursday she’s going to teach you exactly how she gets so much done. She has a SIMPLE FORMULA to help you choose the RIGHT PROJECT for your business that creates real results, real fast. Since we’re just starting the New Year it’s the perfect time to share this with you.

Join me at Kim’s F*REE teleclass on January 6th at 1 pm EST where she’ll share how to Revolutionize Your New Year. How to Choose the RIGHT Projects for Your Business that Create Real Results, Real Fast. You can sign-up here and join me on the call.

http://dld.bz/DHmz

You’ll discover how to:

• Figure out whether or not your project really meets your objective (and what objectives are most important for you)
• Create a clear vision for your project that meshes with your overall business vision
• Determine if your project is big enough for you (a little extra motivation to just go for it!)
• Help you let go of the bright shiny object syndrome (the things that sound fun, but won’t really benefit your business)

Here’s that link again to reserve your spot in this complimentary teleclass –http://dld.bz/DHmz

This call will give you clarity on what steps to take…whether you want to build your list, gain credibility, expand your platform or make more money!

See you on the call!

Kim Starry
KMStarry@gmail.com

p.s. As you probably know it’s not always easy figuring out how to choose a project that will get results. Let Kim walk you through a simple formula so you can tackle your projects with confidence! Reserve your seat here  

http://dld.bz/DHmz

http://player.vimeo.com/video/18355014

Demo for Press This from Kim Starry on Vimeo.

Enjoy and Happy New Year!

I have decided I want to blog more in 2011. Rather than just thinking about I am going to just do it. I am committing to it a public forum, so I hold myself accountable. I’m starting right now. I will be posting on this blog once a week for all of 2011.

I don’t feel confident about writing, so I am hoping by committing to it and following through, by the end of 2011 I will improve my writing skills and writing frequently will be enjoyable. I’m promising to make use of The DailyPost, and the community of other bloggers with similiar goals, to help me along the way, including asking for help when I need it and encouraging others when I can.

If you already read my blog, I would appreciate encouragement. If you are participating in the challenge maybe we can encourage each other through the year.

Wishing you and your family a Happy New Year.

Kim Starry