News

Keep Yourself up-to-date with the latest news on the IT universe:

Protect your Brand Online

Google helps you protect your brand and business online -

There is more to life than just building a website. Apart from the obvious requirement to maximise your presence through Search Engine Optimisation  there are other ways to draw attention to your services and brand.

Youtube videos are very popular and some that have gone viral have had over 1,000,000 hits.  Youtube allow anyone to upload their videos and the mix of the right content and keywords can draw more attention to your brand name and pull more visitors to your website.

Google Places ( http://www.google.com/places/) is growing in popularity and allows you include your business location and details of your product service. Because smart mobile phones now have more power than laptops – it is very useful for the likes of Restaurants, Hotels and tourism related ( not to mention every other type of business) to include themselves on googleplaces.  
Say someone is driving through your town and views their google places to find a Restaurant – if your business is not showing – then you are losing out.

It is very important that you keep a close watch of both Youtube, Google places and other sources of free marketing.  

WHY?
Three examples - 
1)A certain  chamber of commerce in Ireland spent a great deal of money on putting together a quality short video to attract industry to their town.  The quality and content was excellent except that they allowed comments and nobody monitored the comments. The comments were extreme and did far more damage to the perception of that town in question than the video did.

2) During the week we came across a well known and popular main street Restaurant on Google Places  with the following comment as the headline comment
- Aug 2, 2011
Bad service. Avoid
Once again – any intended good in putting the restaurant on Google Places was negated by the only comment regarding the premises.

3) A Dublin Hotel which normally gets positive reviews received a very negative guest review on expedia and left it there  with no reply. A missed opportunity in responding ( even if they were 100% at fault – to apologise – as it was during reconstruction – and offer free vouchers/accommodation to the aggrieved party.

What do I do
Once you use any 3rd party service that can impact on your business – it is important to monitor it. That can be by visiting it once a day, once a week, once a month and checking out what comments are there ( or in the case of the Chamber – perhaps removing the comment fields or filtering them) and taking appropriate action.
Another great service provided by google is “Google Alerts”. If you sign up to gmail  you can receive daily google alerts about anything. From the paranoid of what are they saying about me, to important things like protecting your brand or business name – it is a valuable resource where google will trawl the internet overnight and present everything it can find related to your query and send you an email with all the relevant links.   The easiest way to find out about it is to Google “google alerts”.

This valuable information is supplied by Handyweb.ie – web designers and operators of Irelands No 1 Free online business directory handyinfo.ie

---

News Archive «