Day 7

Subject: [firstname], manage your reputation with social media.

Hey [firstname],

Probably the greatest benefit of being active on social media is the ability to manage your business' reputation online.

Social media in general, and Twitter in particular, gives you the opportunity to respond to any negative comments and nip bad publicity in the bud.

The first thing you should do is set up a Google Alert with your name or the name of your business. To do this go to: https://www.google.com/alerts and follow the on-screen instructions.  When it's set up, you'll get sent an e-mail whenever that term is mentioned on a site crawled by Google.  If it's on social media, and it's social media platform you're a member of, you can respond right away.

Don't be too defensive though!  Just try and explain any misunderstandings.   You should also follow up on positive comments too.  If someone gives you a shoutout, or retweets one of your posts to their followers, be sure to thank them.

You can also hire professional reputation management companies to manage your online presence and do things like: Improving the tagging and search engine optimization of positive customer testimonials in order to push down negative content; publish positive social media profiles; submit online press releases to authoritative websites in order to promote brand presence; and submit legal take-down requests if you believe you have been libeled.

These services aren't cheap, but if you find there's a lot of negative publicity about you, your business, or your brand out there – and let's face it, we all do stupid stuff from time to time – it could be money well spent.

The best strategy, of course, is to simply ensure you have a consistently good stream of positive information on social media.  That way it's easy to recover when things go wrong.

To your success!

Warmly,

[Your Name]

PS. I've still got a few copies of my social media guide left, but they're going fast.  Be sure to get your copy right now from [link to sales page] before your competitors do.