Highlights from Andy Beal speaking to our blogging workshop

Tuesday evening we were honored to have Andy Beal, renowned online reputation management expert and founder of Trackur, Skype-in to our blogging workshop and speak with the participants, taking questions and sharing his insights.  Thank you, Andy!

We live streamed the workshop and also videotaped it to make available for later viewing. Unfortunately, the next day we found that Murphy's Law took effect during Andy's speaking with us: we didn't realize the camera had accidentally been left on earlier when testing, and the battery died without our being able to video all of his segment. Ok, no problem; we had a backup plan because we were doing a screen capture of the Skype segment. Old Murphy struck again, though, and the quality wasn't good enough for use. Soooo, I apologize and will try to recap some of what went on. I'm sure I'll be leaving out a ton of good information, though, and am so disappointed :(

First of all, Andy was extremely interesting and entertaining! He explained to the class why he decided to create Trackur, why ORM is so important, and that you're mistaken if you think you're not on social media because somebody somewhere is talking about you.  (Example, my mother is 78, has never used the internet, and is all over social media because of photos and postings from family members - all good stuff, of course). You want to be where the conversations are, though, so you can either take advantage of positive remarks or proactively act on negative remarks.

He's such a nice guy that the last thing he was doing was hawking his product; he recommended that participants start with a free tool like Google Alerts. That showed me that he's genuinely more interested in helping people than in trying to make every dollar he can. Luckily for our group, though, we're giving each of them 30 days free on Trackur so they get to use the tool created by the master himself.

To demonstrate how a small local business can use a monitoring service, he shared a story of a Raleigh glass company that used Trackur to monitor the impact of a radio campaign they were running.

I asked about other local business examples, but he said there's really not a lot of difference in how large and small businesses use monitoring other than the fact that large businesses will naturally have more mentions. I shared with the class that one of my saved searches is for economic development website design rfp, and within a few days of setting it up I found an RFP that had been issued in Canada for two sites.

Replying to a participant who asked how to handle a situation where untruths have been posted about you, he had several suggestions. He recommended that you first contact the person nicely, explain to them that the information is incorrect, and ask them to take it down and then retract what they wrote and apologize.  He explained that you shouldn't just ask them to post a correction in a follow-up post because, as we've all seen many times, the big story is in the initial claims and nobody cares about the retraction.  By having them remove the incorrect information, you don't run the risk that it remains up for later visitors to read without seeing the correction.

If, after a reasonable length of time the information hasn't been removed, you should contact them again and more forcefully request that the information be removed, emphasizing that every hour it stays up is damaging your company, and stating that you will bring your attorney in if the situation isn't corrected.  If you still don't get results, you need to turn it over to your attorney and have them handle it legally.

He also talked about setting up effective searches to reduce noise and get more relevant results for your needs, explaining how Trackur has the capability for you to specify words that must be or must not be found in combination with your search phrase. For example, if our staff member Glenn Brown were setting up a search for his name, he would want to exclude "British artist" and "Australian musician" because he knows these two people exist and would be able to eliminate those false matches.

If I remember more of the details that Andy spoke of I'll update this post; sorry for the video mishap, but hopefully many of you were either in the workshop or caught the live stream. You can view the video of our blogging workshop here, including the first ten minutes of Andy Beal.

Thanks again to Andy for his kindness in sharing his expertise with our group; hopefully one day we can afford to bring you up in person to speak!

Next up: how to not get clients through social media.  I'll contrast my experience in my initial contact with Andy through Twitter and my experience with another social media monitoring company.  Hint: their sales department isn't backing up their social media presence.