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Raise your hand if you’ve ever Googled your name. If you didn’t raise your hand your either ashamed to admit it, or it just never occurred to you.   Well I can promise you its occurred to a lot of other people. But don’t take my word for it.   Seth Godin’s got a concise little rant about it.   If you are the CEO of a company your customers, partners, competition, and future employees are all Googling your name, and what they find directly impacts your companies corporate reputation.

Growing concerns about reputation management are evident from this Google Trends graph showing an increase in the number of people searching on the term “reputation management”, as well as the number mentions in online news sources.

Search engine optimization companies everywhere are shifting part of their focus to market their ability to provide search reputation management, and companies are popping up everywhere that focus solely on search reputation management.

Enter Twitter…

Twitter is so appealing to the Google search algorithm that they somehow coerced Twitter into adding a “nofollow” tag to the profile section of user’s tweets. Unless you are an SEO nerd like myself you have no idea what that means, but suffice it to say that Twitter could be used by spammers to game Google’s algorithm for providing relevant search results, if this measure was not taken (I’ll save the anti-nofollow post for another time).

Here’s a great example of the power of Twitter on Google.   A search for “kevin rose” (no quotations), the founder of Digg, returns over 5.5 million results on Google, and his Twitter page is third behind his personal website.

So essentially the point I’m trying to make thus far is get on Twitter and use your full name as your Twitter handle.

With all that said, the fact that your Twitter account will likely appear in Google when people are searching for you doesn’t really answer how Twitter is such a powerful tool for managing your corporate reputation, but hopefully it at least convinced you to start using it.

Cutting through the clutter with its 140 character limit, Twitter is forcing people to be direct with their intentions, and as a result it has become arguably the most effective tool for communicating online.   You can help to manage your companies reputation by communicating with Twitter.   In keeping with this blog series format of follow, create, and engage, here’s what you should do once your on Twitter to manage your corporate reputation.

Follow - Follow people talking about your brand, your industry, and maybe even you.   Listen and Learn.   If you claim to use Twitter to listen to your customers, make sure you follow a substantial number of them.

Create - Share interesting information about your industry, and anything else for that matter.   Just like a popular website or blog, if you continue to guide people to helpful, funny, or insightful stuff they will come back for more.   Like with all other social media platforms the most important thing is to be authentic. Do not try to push an agenda without being transparent.   Be yourself and update often.   The more you update the more Google crawls your page.
Engage - Don’t be afraid to join the conversation.   Nothing like the CEO of a major company mixing it up with the commoners to get people to like you and your brand (if you play your cards right brand ambassadors are ripe for the picking on Twitter, and influential ones at that).

CEOs are on Twitter right now managing their corporate reputation.   If you don’t believe me check out BusinessWeeks Twitter Rolodex of company heads.

How are you using Twitter to manage your corporate reputation?