Online presence management is the process of presenting and drawing traffic to a personal or professional brand online. This process combines web design and development, blogging, search engine optimization, pay per click marketing, reputation management, directory listings, social media, link sharing, and other avenues to create a long-term positive presence for a person, organization, or product in search engines and on the web in general. Online presence management is distinct from web presence management in that the former is generally a marketing and messaging discipline while the latter is Governance, risk management, and compliance discipline.
Theory of online presence management
Due to the evolving nature of Internet use, a web site alone is not sufficient to promote most brands. To maintain a web presence and brand recognition, individuals and companies need to use a combination of social tools such as Google Maps, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Flickr, YouTube, and Pinterest, as well as cultivating a brand presence on mobile apps and other online databases. The online presence management process starts by determining goals that will define an online strategy. Once this strategy is put in place, an ongoing and constant process of evaluating and fine-tuning is necessary to drive online presence towards the identified goals. An online presence management strategy has several parts. Generally these will include search engine placement, monitoring online discussion around the brand, and analyzing the brand's overall web presence.
Elements of online presence management
Online profile or reputation is a sum of multiple activities and platforms. It includes following:
Web Portfolio Management
Online portfolio helps build visibility of a brand or individual. It works as a centralized hub for all the activities related to the brand and includes, contact info, about the brand and a product showcase. The Web portfolio ranges in type. The most common form of portfolio is the website. A website, usually built on the same domain as the brand's name, represents the business/person throughout the web. However, there are niche-based portfolio websites too that help brands reach out to a more targeted audience through purpose built features and spot on galleries to brag about their work and achievement.
Blog
A blog provides the brand a way to express. It allows the brand to talk and get their voice/opinion heard on any topic they choose. Blogging can promote a brand through consistent, interesting content generation associated with a particular brand or the market brand caters to. Blogs can be created on the website or on third party platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Quora, Wordpress, Blogger.com and Medium, etc. Apart from conventional blogging, social media enabled Microblogging is particularly effective in establishing a brand name and build recognition through interaction with masses. It is also a quick way to respond to brand-related complaints and queries.
Search Engine Optimization is one of the most popular technique to build traction and turn a web page into a revenue generation machine. Search Engine Optimization or SEO allows companies or individuals to:
Identify keywords that are likely to bring potential customers or audience to their website
Embed those keywords into the web content, naturally and in a value added way
Allow search engines to crawl the web page and index all the content
Search engines use a spider or a crawler to gather listings by automatically "crawling" the web. The spider follows links to web pages, makes copies of the pages, and stores them in the search engine's index. Based on this data, the search engines then index the pages and rank the websites accordingly. Major search engines that index pages using spiders are Google, Yahoo, Bing, AOL, and Lycos. Some methods that help optimize a web page for the search engine include:
Link Building i.e. creating relevant and natural links for the website.
Creating great, keyword-optimized, content.
Internet Advertising
Internet advertising is a form of broadcasting and promotion of products, ideas, or services using the Internet to attract customers. Internet advertising has overtaken other traditional advertising media such as newspapers, magazines, and radio. Internet advertising targets users interested in relevant keywords and displays a text or image ad next to search results or within social media.
Reputation Management
Reputation management is the process of tracking actions and opinions, looking for positive and negative reviews that reflect the opinion of the users about any particular service or product, and removing negative opinions and converting them into positive ones. It is important, however, not to attack or try to obscure negative opinions through devious means, as this is likely to have an overall negative effect on the brand. A better strategy is to respond to complaints with information and an apologetic attitude, cultivating later positive reviews.
uses social media platforms to create and foster communities and relationships. Social media marketing is focused on creating content that attracts attention and encourages readers to share content with their social networks. Social messages are often effective because they usually come from a trusted, third-party source, rather than the brand itself. Understanding what tools are available and how to use them effectively is key to success in social media marketing. Some of these tools include:
Many of the tools listed above are often found in a social media management system. This is a collection of procedures used to manage workflow in a disparate social media environment. These procedures can be manual or computer-based and enable the manager to listen, aggregate, publish, and manage multiple social media channels from one tool. The common features of a social media management system include access control, content libraries, publishing and scheduling, workflow, aggregation, mention listening, sentiment, analytic and archival functionality. Jeremiah Owyang is often attributed with defining this term while he was working at Altimeter Group, now part of Prophet.
