A Good Online Reputation

Reputation. The beliefs or opinions that are generally held about someone or something. In todays world, having a good reputation is essential. Especially within the online world. Business's reputations are not built up simply by word of mouth anymore. Unfortunately, a person or company's reputation can be easily influenced nowadays. 

It has become especially hard to control an online reputation. Positive and negative feedback can be seen by almost anyone. But there is a way to turn that all around with five simple steps. 

1. The Golden Rule: form a dialogue with your customers or clients. When you form a relationship with your customers or clients, it is easier to take control of your reputation. By responding to ALL comments, that being positive and negative, you are showing the importance of feedback, which will make you look outstanding. 

2. Be apart of the online conversations. This helps place you as a crucial figure and makes you proactive. 

3. Don't have others monitor your online reputation. By doing this yourself, you will know how your business is doing in the online environment. For some smaller businesses, it is hard to keep track of it yourself. But, by setting up Google Alerts or TweetBeeps, it will help you keep an eye on what is happening. 

4. Negative comments can stick out in the middle of all of the positive feedback. Respond immediately to the negative comments, when needed. This will show that you customers' opinions are important and that you WILL respond to their concerns. 

5. Use other blogs or social media outlets to help your company's positive reputation. If there is positive feedback about something, then you should post about it. This will help spread the word about your positive reputation in the online world. 

Twitter DON'Ts

Photo from: http://www.1stwebdesigner.com/freebies/50-free-social-twitter-resources-and-icon-sets/

When entering the Twitter world, there are some things that need to be addressed. Yes, knowing the Twitter basics is essential like, RT is retweet and @name is the way you respond or tweet at someone. But there are some Twitter "don'ts" that users need to be aware of. 

1.    Don’t tweet anything that could get you fired or stop you from being hired.

2.    Don’t be boring. For example. Don’t tweet, “Goodnight Tweeps!”

3.    Don’t tweet more than ten times in one day. It’s annoying and takes the attention away from other Tweeters.

4.    Don’t reply to every tweet.

5.    Don’t tweet drunk. They might be funny to your followers, but not as funny to you the next morning.

6.    Don’t use cuss words in your tweets.  

7.    Don’t tweet about something big that has happened to you without posting a photo or a link along with it. It bores the other tweeters.

8.    Don’t #hashtag every topic. People will get sick of them and then your topics will be ignored.

9.    Don’t RT yourself. It’s just bad form. Don’t do it.

10.    Don’t tweet your own blog posts.

11.    Don’t take an Unfollow personally. And don’t report your unfollower. Nobody really cares.

12.     Don’t follow every person who follows you.

13.     Don’t tweet everything about your personal life. Sometimes it can be entertaining. But most likely, not all of the time.

14.     Don’t tweet if you need more than 140 characters. That is what your blog is for. Stick to that.

And lastly...

15.     Don’t tweet and drive.

Some of these don’ts may seem obvious to most. But surprisingly, they aren’t to some. The world of technology is now our way of life. People are learning how to have etiquette for all of these different media resources. Not only with Twitter, but also with Facebook. But hopefully, the people of the “Twitter World” will catch on to proper Twitter etiquette. 

Public Relations Research

In the world of Public Relations, researching is vital.  You need to research to gain knowledge, set objectives, plan campaigns and succeed. Research today gives public relations room to grow. I interned with Baylor Sustainability this past semester and before I got the job, I had to do research on what Baylor Sustainability is and its purpose on the Baylor campus. Since my internship was strictly about going green and sustainability, I didn’t have to do too much research.

Public relations has been proven to be one of the most stressful jobs in America, which shows it’s tough. There are demanding clients who want more results; therefore, research is something that is definitely needed. To have results that the client wants, it requires research on the public relations executive’s part.

Research in public relations gives the base for almost everything communicators do, such as identifying and understanding key publics, framing important issues, expanding public relations and organizational strategy, measuring the results, and gaining publicity. The main ways of public relations research are qualitative and quantitative research. Qualitative being thorough insights and understanding of a situation or a target public and quantitative is more expensive and complicated, and has the greater ability to generalize to large populations.

There are many other reasons why public relations research is important. It provides unbiased information, organizational strengths and weaknesses, provides valuable information about how the organization should craft its messaging, and gaining feedback. The “needs” for conducting public relations research are, to collect information that public relations professionals need to have and to know to do their jobs more effectively, to obtain benchmark data, to plan, develop or refine a public relations activity, to track or monitor programs, to evaluate the overall effectiveness, and providing appropriate support in promoting a specific program.

Research in public relations is absolutely essential. Without it, I don’t know how public relations executives would be successful.