The social check-in site is an even more modern take on the social network. It uses computers and handheld devices, which make it popular with a demographic of younger, tech savvy people on the move that access the Internet using mobile phones and other mobile devices. The user can create a profile and then log in using a GPS enabled device when they visit a new location. This information is then updated on their profile so that other users and even the establishments they visited can see the buzz.

While some local businesses have taken to social media optimisation with aplomb others have found it to be too time consuming or costly in order to generate decent results. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Find some of the more popular social check-in sites, register the details of your business or establishment and then monitor and react to the buzz that this creates on the Internet. Not only is it a great way to build kudos around your venue letting visitors inform the world as to how great their experience was but it can also encourage others from a local area to pop in and give it a try.

Another beneficial use of social check-in sites is in a reputation management campaign. This means having some semblance of control over the top positions in search results and on social networks so that if potential customers search for your name or the name of your business then they will be presented with the information that you want them to see first.

Social networking websites aren’t just a great platform for staying in touch with friends and colleagues or making new connections. They can also be used as a highly beneficial tool in promoting a website or business. Here are 4 ways of using social networks to the benefit of your business.

1 – SMO for SEO

SMO, or Social Media Optimisation, can be used to improve search rankings for your main pages. Set up profiles, add bookmarks, and blog frequently about your services or products and include links to your main website or web pages. Get others, including your readers, to post, blog, and retweet in order to help results further.

2 – Online Reputation Management

A negative review or story can really hold a business back. Ensure that when people search for your business name or your individual name that they see results that you want them to. Develop profiles on sites like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, as well as more specific networks for your business and for you personally.

3 – Make Connections

With so many businesses and consumers on social networking websites, they are a great way to make connections for your own professional use too. For instance, biznik is a social networking websites developed to bring small business owners together so that they can develop synergous relationships.

4 – Communicate With Existing Customers

Many people use feed readers or subscribe to blogs, pages, and people that they like. Encourage your own customers to do this and use the opportunity to occasionally send details of promotions, special offers, and new product details.

Thus far the reputation management failure of the year has been a tossup between Toyota, Goldman Sachs, and British Petroleum. All of the companies have done horribly with their reputations, likely because none of them envisioned having to tackle such an incredible failure by their business. Online reputation is key to preparing for the overall media onslaught that accompanies problems like this.

Company crisis leaves many workers facing insecurity, a loss of control and disillusionment in a corporation that they were once proud of, management experts said. And that is a recipe for even more disaster because employee morale suffers.

Unfortunately, many employers facing adversity forget about its impact on the rank-and-file.

“In a crisis situation, many companies focus externally only” on things such as public relations and a firm’s stock price, said Christine Probett, a management and human resource professor at San Diego State University.

“If there is no internal communication, employees expect the worst and productivity drops significantly while employees speculate on what might happen,” she said.

Surviving a major mistake can be tough for a company, especially if that company is large enough, or the mistake is bad enough, to attract the attention of major media. Online reputation management is one way to get out ahead of such problems.

http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/breaking/Surviving_your_company_s_mistakes-93898294.html

Updated 7:45 PM PDT, Sun, May 16, 2010

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Company calamities like the ones playing out at firms such as BP, Goldman Sachs and Toyota do more than just impact a firm’s reputation and bottom line. They also do a number on employees.

It’s been nearly a decade, but Shirley Green still remembers vividly the pain and anguish she felt when her former employer Qwest Communications faced disaster.

The company announced sweeping layoffs in 2000, the stock plummeted in 2001, and CEO Joseph Nacchio soon resigned amid allegations of fraud. He was convicted of insider trading in 2007.

“It was really upsetting,” said Green, who was a process analyst for the telecommunications company at the time. “At baby showers, networking groups, even when I went to the doctor’s office and filled out forms, I didn’t want to say where I worked.”

Green, who lives in Denver and spent more than two decades with Qwest until she was laid off, describes herself as a “peon” who had no direct connection with the goings on at the top at the beleaguered company. “The people at the bottom of the food chain are the ones who get hit the worst.”

Company crisis leaves many workers facing insecurity, a loss of control and disillusionment in a corporation that they were once proud of, management experts said. And that is a recipe for even more disaster because employee morale suffers.

Unfortunately, many employers facing adversity forget about its impact on the rank-and-file.

“In a crisis situation, many companies focus externally only” on things such as public relations and a firm’s stock price, said Christine Probett, a management and human resource professor at San Diego State University.

“If there is no internal communication, employees expect the worst and productivity drops significantly while employees speculate on what might happen,” she said.

Online Reputation Management or ORM is often considered to be a practice that is reserved almost solely for businesses and celebrities. However, the fact is that if you’re looking for a new career or job then there is an increasingly good chance that your prospective new boss will conduct some kind of online research to see if they can gleam more information about you. They will typically use the search engines to conduct this research but considering modern search engines index all of the major social websites this means that comments on Facebook, Tweets on Twitter, and blog posts written by others can come in to play.

You might think that there’s little you can do to manage your online reputation but you would be quite wrong. You may not be able to remove negative press without lengthy, potentially costly, and possibly unsuccessful legal action but you can control the higher echelons of the search results in such a way that you can be sure that anybody researching your name only reads the information that you want them to.

The majority of people will not venture beyond the first page of results and very few indeed will travel to page three even during a thorough search.  Signing up for networking services that are dedicated to professionals, such as LinkedIn and Naymz, will help because these profiles are often indexed by search engines and given reasonable weight. This allows you to post what amounts to an online CV for prospective employers to read. Blog about your experience, and be careful how you conduct yourself on sites like Facebook and MySpace – you may reap the rewards in your next job interview.

No matter how much or how little business you conduct online, you need to remember that your potential customers or clients, and even business partners, are increasingly likely to conduct their research using the net. It’s fast, effective, and efficient providing your leads with a simple means to find out what others think about you. As such, managing the pages that those leads see should be considered a part of your online marketing or online branding efforts – any Internet reputation management program should start by determining your existing online reputation.

Online reputation can be tracked in many ways. Customers and others that have endured a bad experience with you or your business may post on their own blogs, other blogs, social networking sites, review directories, and even article directories. It would be impossible to check every single possible venue for such reviews. Using a search engine it is possible to get a quick snap shot of current results but for ongoing results you need a more permanent solution.

MonitorThis is a free feed service that aggregates results from 20 different search engines providing them in a single feed. As new results are indexed by each of the search engines the feed is updated so that you can see new results as soon as they are first discovered by search engine spiders.

Included in the list of search engines are major news sites like Google News and Yahoo News as well as blog search engines such as Google Blog Search, Technorati, and Blogmarks. A convenient and free way to see all of the most recently indexed pages containing your name, your business name, and aliases.

This v-log is a good example of how Search Engine Reputation Management intersects with business, school, and yes, even politics. Gordon Brown, the current Prime Minister, made a giant gaffe this week in which he forgot he had a microphone on him and referred to a voter as a “bigot”. If you google “Gordon Brown” right now, you’ll get a number of links telling you this story in various ways.

Most professionals in the online reputation management industry say this is nothing but bad for Prime Minister Gordon Brown. However, in the long-term it can be fixed by online reputation management. This is just the digital part of repairing a reputation, but it is important in its own right–especially at the Internet becomes more and more important.