Tekspire.com Blog
What is Online Reputation Management?
Mar 15th
Online reputation management
is the deliberate action of influencing the way people perceive a person or a business in the internet. Until recently, internet reputation did not matter much to individuals and to businesses. However, it has become clear to public relations consultants that as a result of increasing reliance on the internet for decision making, consumers will use someoneís online reputation as a basis for making their decision to buy.
Reputation management employs the same methods used by search engine optimization specialists to achieve the intended results. The point of departure is that while search engine optimization tries to increase traffic to a website, online reputation management involves increasing traffic to websites that have favorable reviews of the client and minimizing access to websites with unflattering reviews. In either situation, the methods used are measured by search engine rankings.
There are a number of reasons why businesses need to protect their online reputation. First of all, online businesses depend a lot more on whether customers trust you or not. The threshold is much higher than for brick and mortar businesses because of the difficulties involved in tracing the physical premises of an online business if there is some sort of dissatisfaction. Considering that people often buy products and services internationally, it may not be possible to pursue normal litigation channels in order to find redress for unpleasant experiences. This makes it vital for customers to trust you and hence they should not be seeing too many negative sentiments relating to your company.
The second reason for online reputation management is that it is very easy for a company to suffer from the wrath of a disgruntled customer or employee in online platforms. An employee can decide to post sensitive company information online in order to get back at the management. Usually, it is much more difficult to trace the leak than it is for paper based systems. In this sense, a lot of damage can be done in a very short time if wrong information about the company remains online without some sort of damage control.
The third reason is that it helps to be the first one to own up to mistakes. There are moments when businesses, even well established ones, make mistakes. In the recent past, there were the massive recalls of Toyota vehicles because of various faults. Being the first to go online with bad information about the company reduced the impact of the information. People tend perceive you as trustworthy and also can tell that you care about their experience with your products. There may be a short term dip in sales, but in the process, a company buys long term loyalty.
There is a strong case for every company to have some form of online reputation management plan to ward off bad press. This applies regardless of the strength of the companyís online presence because chances are that many of their clients look for information about the company online. It is important to note that strong online reputation management is not a substitute for excellent service delivery.
Charlotte Restaurant Week – Some Websites Couldn’t Handle Extra Traffic
Aug 3rd
There’s a big restaurant promotion week that happens a couple times a year in Charlotte, North Carolina called Charlotte Restaurant Week where a lot of upscale, popular restaurants offer at least 3 courses at dinner for $30/ person. It’s become very popular, and I guess you may say it can be both a blessing and a curse to these restaurants.
When attempting to check out one of these restaurant’s website near the end of this promotion, I received the following:
I spoke briefly to the owner when I called to make a reservation and mentioned the error just to make sure he was aware. He said his site had gotten about 4 X normal volume due to the special promotion that week and that this happened near the end of the week. He said he wasn’t even aware of this limitation before this nor did he really care to worry about things like bandwidth being exceeded when that is not his focus or area of expertise. I felt for him, and I totally agree – small businesses owners shouldn’t have to worry about these things.
But it does raise these questions to business and other site owners:
- How would your site hold up to an sudden increase in visitors to your website?
- Does your website or web hosting company place a limit on the amount of bandwidth allotted per week, per month, etc. or is it unlimited?
- Are you getting a fair price for your website hosting , maintenance and design?
- Are you taking full advantage of the incredible number of options that exist these days to promote your business using the internet, email, mobile, search, social media, and other low cost or free marketing options?
Contact us if you’ve got questions or concerns around these areas. I don’t think restaurants or other small business owners should have to worry about these technology issues, especially during a time when they are getting more business then they are used to. They should be able to focus on taking care of each and every customer so they can build many new loyal customers. They should have someone they can trust to take care of it for them and to turn to in case of unexpected issues with their website.
WordPress 3 Multisite Safe XML Sitemap Plugin
Jul 26th
Been very busy lately and I haven’t gotten to blog much so I’m trying to play catch up. If you’ve read any of my earlier blog posts, you know about my WP 3 Multisite Experiment
One of the things that bugged me when I enabled WP 3 multisite was that the very cool Google XML Sitemap plugin did not work after the this. It gave a warning about Google XML Sitemaps will be disabled when running WP 3.0 in multi site mode. XML Sitemaps basically let you tell the search engines in a direct way about pages and posts you would like them to consider for indexing in their search engines. They are considered a best practice in SEO.
So I did some research, tried one called XML Sitemap & Google News Sitemap Feeds - here’s my quick findings:
1) This worked in WP 3+ mulitsite mode
2) The site map it produced, however, included some things I didn’t want included and I didn’t see a way to adjust this
3) You could always try it and see if you’re fine with the sitemap it produces, and if so, go with it
I needed something more configurable. So I looked some more and found one called Google XML Sitemaps with Multisite support
This turned out to do what I was looking for, and in fact, it really is just a quick modification of Arne’s excellent Google XML Sitemap plugin.
Here’s a blog post about it from the developer where you can read more about it. Thanks to Mario Kostelac for developing this.
Also, I also found after that that Arne has a beta going on for a multisite supported version of his Google XML Sitemap plugin too, so keep an eye out for that as well.
What Impact Does the Google Plus 1 Button Have on Search Results?
Jul 25th
Since the Google +1 Button‘s general release on the Google Search results earlier this year, and then in early June when Google made it available for Websites to add their own Google +1 button, I’ve wondered about what actual impacts would be on search results.
Well, I’ve been making some observations and plan to share some soon. I always like to see some actual data and observations instead of just people’s guesses. More to come. I’d love to hear about other data and observations on this topic as well.
What is the Right Balance Between Business & Personal in Social Media?
Jun 29th
Hey, so earlier today our affiliate business partners, Much Ado Marketing, kindly gave a shoutout to us, Tekspire LLC, on their Facebook page.
Anyway, one gentleman commented about preferring to see real names and faces for our Twitter account and posts (originally all these initial blog posts showed “admin” as the user. I can honestly say that was just a side effect of configuring Word Press Multisite, which does not, by default add your WordPress user accounts to your new WPMU site other than the network admin, but I digress).
I really appreciated his feedback, and it got me wondering:
For Small Businesses, How do you Strike the Right Balance Between Business and Personal in Social Media?
Now admittedly, I’m a techie by nature and Social Media is not really a natural draw for me. In fact, you know how some people are intimidated by technology? Yeah, well some of us techies are intimidated by Social Media, but also realize its power and reach. A classic Catch22.
Well, I know that I’ll continue to learn a lot in this area from Much Ado Marketing (aka MAM), but feel free to post any thoughts you have on the matter as well. On second thought, I guess that would require readers first and I’ve had zero time to promote this blog, so perhaps the question will remain rhetorical.
Top 10 Things To Know About WordPress Multisite
Jun 23rd
Top 10 WordPress Multisite Facts
- WordPress Multisite (aka WPMU) allows you to run multiple WP Blogs with a single WP Installation
- You CAN run different themes on WPMU sites
- You CAN run different plugins, or mix & match plugins among WPMU sites
- By Default, WPMU is included in the core with WP 3, but it is disabled & you must take specific steps to enable it
- By Default, WPMU assumes you will run your network of blogs on a single domain with first on main domain ( yourdomain.com) and others either as sub-domains ( site2.yourdomain.com) OR sub-directories (yourdomain.com/site2)
- It is possible, with the use of the WordPress MU Domain plugin , to run your WPMU blogs on separate domain names
- At the time of this writing, it is NOT possible to enable WPMU sub-directory option on a WP install that is over one month old (see http://codex.wordpress.org/Create_A_Network for details)
- Not all web hosting companies may be compatible with WPMU. You should make sure your webhost can support some features needed by WPMU before you enable it OR be prepared to test and undo the steps if you’re not sure.
- Running multiple WordPress sites as a network (another way to refer to WP Multisite) can save lots of time on updates to Core WP, plugins and installations of additional sites but it does take some time to get initial setup and learn how to administer it.
- Expect that you’ll have to be more technical and closely follow the installation steps (including modifying some PHP code as well as .htaccess file).
WordPress Multisite Plugin
Jun 21st
So one of the things I’ve quickly seen with my WP MU experiment is that you need to be aware that plugins are not all wordpress multisite plugin “safe”. However, more and more are safe to use in a WordPress 3 mulitisite setup (or network as it is called by WordPress documentation).
How To Check If a WordPress Plugin is Safe to Use With WordPress 3.x Multisite Installation
Some of the best ways to tell if a plugin is multisite safe are:
- Look up the plugin on WordPress.org and find the page dedicated to that plugin, then check to see:
- If it is compatible with a pretty recent version of WP (look on the right-hand side)
- If the Description tab mentions it
- If the FAQ mentions WP MU compatible
- If there are support items that talk about WP Multisite (click on the “See what others are saying … ” link on the lower right-hand side of the plugin’s page)
- Test It On Your Site
- If it clears Step 1 check, or if you’re more a “proof is in the pudding” type of person, you can skip to this step
- Install the Plugin from your WP Network Admin (this will appear as a new option in the upper RHC of your WP Admin ONLY after you have enabled WP Mulitisite – click for step by step instructions )
- Now Either Choose to Network Activate the plugin from the Network Admin Plugins or Navigate to the site dashboard you want to try the plugin in, go to the Plugins section, and Activate it there
- See if the is a warning that appears about Multisite when you Activate it, if so, deactivate
- If no warning, test your site to make sure everything is working fine
Feel free to comment below or add other useful tips. Hope this is helpful to others who are new to WordPress Multisite plugins.
WordPress Multisite Experiment
Jun 21st
Howdy, just getting a chance to post after undergoing a major site redesign, in which I’m currently using one WordPress theme on my main domain, and trying out WordPress Multisite (using subfolders) to run this blog separately with another theme. It’s an experiment, so I wanted to post and share a few initial thoughts. I welcome comments or questions – what do you think about WordPress Multisite (also refered to as WP MU)?
It’ll take some getting used to, but it looks like the multisite feature of WordPress 3+ is quite powerful. Basically, it lets you set up and run multiple WordPress sites using a single installation of WordPress. The sites you run under WP MU are referred to as a WP Network or just Network within the WP Admin.
What are some of the Benefits of using WordPress Multisite?
- Allows you to Run & Manage multiple WordPress sites from a single WP installation & database (this means fewer files and less disk storage and server resources used)
- Can control, update, and install Plugins at a Network level or a Site Level
- If you own and run multiple different separate WP sites now, you know how time-consuming it can be just to go update all your WP installations and plugins to the most current version, so this is pretty powerful.
- It also allows you to add a new WP site much more quickly after your base installation, since you don’t have to go and reinstall all the plugins and themes over again, you can just pick and choose which you want to activate for your new site
- You can also pick some plugins to be “network enabled” so they are enabled for all sites in your network if you know you always want to run those plugins
That’s it for now. Please excuse the mess while I kick the tires a bit on this, and let me know if you’d like to hear more about WordPress Multisite or if you have some WP MU nuggets of wisdom to pass along.
