Just been latterly catching up on the Altimeter Group ‘Social Marketing Analytics’ webinar series. As always, interesting / thought provoking stuff. The white paper can be viewed below. Certainly concur that social media needs standardised measures.

Heard today about a firm offering to  remove bad reviews about your business from yelp. co.uk

This is an interesting development in the ongoing “reputation 2.0″ debate.. as is this from GeekSugar:

There are a lot of business owners who’ve felt the sting of bad Yelp reviews, and one restaurant in San Francisco is getting even (instead of getting litigious).

Pizzeria Delfina decided to embrace its one-star reviews — by printing them on the shirts the staff wears. 

They triumphantly rock t-shirts that say stuff like “This place sucks” while serving their delish dishes. 

Here are my picks of the best reads last week about things you should consider if you are responsible for your brand’s reputation online.

Please note: A big hat tip to Gavin Heaton (or @servantofchaos) who provided the insipration for this post. His weekly “5 must read posts from last week” are great reading which is probably why, totally unwittingly when I posted this last night I managed to completely (almost) plagiarise his blog post title - funnily enough, that being the topic one of the must-read posts he links to on an earlier list.

1. How brands should manage their reputation online

Some of the biggest names in social media gathered together at Blogworld expo last week. This post covers highlights from one of the panel sessions including some level headed advice from Amber Nasland at monitoring specialists, Radian6 such as “social media didn’t invent criticism” and that organisations should have emergency plans in place (Vegemite’s iSnack 2.0 leaps to my mind here).

2. The Top 10 free tools for monitoring your brand’s reputation

One of the most important things to do if you are responsible for your brand’s reputation online is to know what people are saying about you and this article reviews some of the easily accessible, free tools to listen to online conversations.

We must remember that conversations are being held on the web with or without our consent. That means we can choose whether to be observers, participants or outcasts

3. Top 5 Twitter Trends to watch right now

Once you start monitoring conversations going on about you / your brand / your organisation you’ll realise quickly that many of these are taking place on Twitter.

Here’s a great article that includes insights about Twitter trends from blogger, author and entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki as well as PR2.0 guru Brian Solis.5.

4. Managing your reputation through search results

This post from the Google blog has some tips on what to do when you aren’t that happy with what you find when you type your company’s name into Google. These include thinking twice before you publishing anything online and if there’s something you don’t like - contact the source of the information (and there are some tips on how to do this) as well as proactively publishing positive information.

5. Damage Control: Social Media Reversals

Renowned web strategist Jeremiah Owyang identifies and analayses three case studies in this post looking at how organisations should respond to a social media crisis: “assert themselves and be proactive - even during a crises”.

Sometimes I forget that a lot of tools we’re aware of aren’t necessarily known to everyone, so I will try and make a point of remembering to post them up here.

Case in point was in Prague yesterday when I did a quick ‘Twitter sentiment snapshot’ of Virgin Atlantic using http://twitrratr.com/ on the big screen. As I turned round I noticed that everyone was taking note of the URL, so, well here it is.  The grab below is a snapshot of sentiment around Brizzly, the Twitter tool of the moment we’re using @ Carve.

Twitrratr is pretty simplistic but a fun / instant / free way of checking out the view of the Twitterati. Give it a go

I am very much looking forward to speaking at the Sales & Marketing in Travel European Summit in Prague next month ( details ).

I am going to be talking about how travel organisations can realise value from Corporate Social Networks. Specifically we’re going to look at how you can  develop a social media strategy, and part of that is going to include building an active listening plan.

As per our post to the Social Media In Travel LinkedIn discussion group, we’re looking for a couple of volunteer organisations actually whose brand / profile / market place we can look at live ( a bit like this example ) during the event.

Anyone like to volunteer their company or specfic idea / market?  Comment us below if you’re interested.  See you in Prague.

We were talking to a potential client yesterday about a b2c social campaign, and the Moonfruit Twitter campaign was one of the examples we discussed. This reminded me that at the time we did a quick social snapshot of the buzz the campaign generated, and thought it would be cool to share.

Full story here on mashable (under the title “Twitter Promotion done right” ) if you missed it. The basic premise was that if you tweeted #moonfruit, you had the chance to win one of 10 Macbooks. As you can see by the number of mentions (until Twitter somewhat contentiously pulled it as a trending topic, see Moonfruit’s own blog here ) this was -whatever your view on the rightness / wrongness - a very cute savvy campaign,  generating over 100,00 conversations (or at least, tweets)  over a couple of days.  The tag cloud, right, shows mentions for squarespace, who ran a similar, earlier campaign.

Have SMART products helped you transform the way you teach? Have you had a SMART moment?

If you are a teacher or have used SMART products in an education environment then we would like to hear from you. We are looking for people who want to contribute to a blog that will be posted on the new SMART UK site. The theme is SMART moments - your personal story about how SMART have helped you to get your students involved and excited and provided you with that special teaching ‘moment’. We want to publish your entries on our blog and that will be launched on their new UK site very soon.

If you’d like to get involved please add a comment or email smart@carveconsulting.com

As La Costner mused in Field of Dreams, “If you build it they will come”. Not long-dead baseball players in this case (did anyone in the UK understand that story by the way? Something about a guy who threw a game and didn’t wear any shoes? Or something?) but rather a salutory lesson in blog relations: keep talking, keep it authentic - and the audience will follow. Our musings rewarded with a place on Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop Career directory.

Some great blog up there that we’d not come across before - definitely worth a browse.

On a related, nice link on there to Guy’s Visual CV. We ran the story about Heidrick & Struggles investing some time back, so interesting to see it in action. More on VisualCV later in the week..

We’ve been working recently with web developers 9web and leading Food Recruitment firm Focus Management on the launch of FoodJobBlog, to go to destination for food industry news, analysis, and ( of course ) food careers news.

It’s at a very early stages at the moment, but we’ll try and use this as an “open” case study of how we build blog relations / social media marketing campaigns (including SEO for blogs, link building, community development, nurturing internal bloggers and so on ), and also the challenges of getting companies to think - and act - transparently.

But in the interim, great work Paul / Ian on the blog look n’ feel (the blog is based on the MovableType platrom ), and Stephen and the team at Focus for their vision. Now the hard work begins…