Twitter has announced that it is banning all third party advertisements that appear in the user timeline. According to their blog and reported by Mashable, the move has been taken in order to ensure that the Twitter network retains its integrity but also to benefit Twitter especially by only allowing the use of their own Promoted Tweets in the user timeline display. The big problem in the eyes of most developers is the fact that they believe they have been misled and even fed misinformation on the subject in previous correspondence.

Twitter has an extremely active community of developers, who are responsible for creating a number of innovative and beneficial applications using the Twitter API. As such, they are also partially responsible for ensuring that a lot of users get the most out of the system encouraging them to return to the service more frequently and for longer periods of time. This recent move is the latest in a series of moves that the developer community believes undermines their position.

If you’re a regular user that enjoys looking through user timelines unimpeded then the news is potentially good for you. There will almost certainly be far fewer advertisements so that you can enjoy unrestricted access to the information that interests you most. Ads that are displayed around the Twitter display are still acceptable and, of course, Promoted Tweets will also still appear in the timelines that you view. If you make any income through third party Tweets then you may need to rethink your monetisation strategy too.

“A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.” – Winston Churchill.

The above quotation has always been extremely popular in reputation management services circles. That is because it is more true now, in the digital age, than it ever was before. Indeed, the quotation should probably be modified–in the digital age lies get all the way around the world before truth has rolled out of bed, instant communication and a worldwide reach means that misinformation has a way of traveling quickly and being pervasive. This is so unlike what companies had to deal with when newspapers were the main medium of communication, or radio after that, or finally television after that. All of those communications were conducted at a snail’s pace, comparatively. The result of the advances in communications have been almost universally positive–but the pace at which a lie circles the globe is certainly one drawback. Reputation management services are really the only options available to individuals and businesses which have been unfairly maligned–bloggers have neither the incentive nor the inclination to withdraw bold-faced lies.

There’s been a massive boom in the number and variety of social networking websites that have been launched in the past few years and while some have attempted to take on the world by offering general social networking, there are also a very good range of niche social networking websites that are geared towards specific people or companies, as well as geographically targeted websites for users from or related to specific countries.

Attempting to manage your own social networking program typically means using one or a small handful of networks and then concentrating your efforts on these. As such, it may be your first instinct to plump for those with the largest user base irrespective of their industry or geographic targeting. However, this might not be the best move and creating a portfolio of profiles that include both general and niche can give truly excellent results.

Social networking can be a great way to develop new customers and create a buzz about a new brand or a new company. It can also be extremely beneficial for online reputation management; ensuring that when potential clients use the Internet to search for details about you, they are presented with results that you control.

Set up free profiles and add relevant and existing contacts to that network. Find ways that the sites enable you to create new connections but first ensure that your profile is relevant, informative, and links to your own website and web pages if allowed.

Knowing what people are saying about your business online is incredibly important. A company named ILD Corp. has begun offering assessments of how good or bad your company’s online reputation is. The article cited below is about this business and its program.

While the program is ultimately designed to serve as a growth tool, Michael Lewis, ILD’s chairman, says it first serves to give a broad assessment of where a company’s online reputation is.

Stories about those reputations have been widespread, ranging from companies that have been rather ground-breaking in managing theirs (Comcast in its quick response to tweets) to those that have been pilloried for missing out until it was too late to resolve a situation (United Airlines in its response to a YouTube video about a guitar).

Earlier this week, I sat through an online demonstration with Ilona Olayan, ILD’s director of marketing, with the opportunity to see exactly what one of ILD’s analysts sees on the dashboard used to monitor clients’ online mentions.

The industry of business reputation management has needed an online reputation assessment tool for quite some time. Whether or not this is that tool, only time will tell.

http://jacksonville.com/opinion/blog/403664/abel-harding/2010-05-13/listen%E2%80%99-what-they%E2%80%99re-saying-about-your-business-web

Online social networking can prove a highly beneficial way of promoting a website, encouraging client interaction, and generating a viral buzz about you, your website, or your products. Using sites like the 3 listed below it is also possible to use them in order to improve or repair a damaged online reputation. Set up a profile and post occasional updates or get considerably more involved and develop a whole online social media optimisation program for your website and online business; the choice is yours.

1 – Facebook

Facebook is not only the largest social networking website in the world and used for professional and business purposes but it also contesting with Google to be the most widely visited of all websites. Simply put, you need to create a profile here and add a professional fan page so that others can follow you and read your updates.

2 – Twitter

Twitter is another Internet phenomenon and while it may not have gathered quite the membership that Facebook has, it is still incredibly popular and very quick and simple to use. Create a profile including a link to your website and update it with 140 character microblog posts.

3 – MySpace

MySpace was once the undisputed king of social networking but it suffered at the hands of spammers and also faced something of a decline in popularity when sites like Facebook and Bebo were introduced. However, it still offers a lot of opportunity to create a free profile, to customise that profile, and to create a strong online network of leads.

Reputation is a big part of running a successful business and while the scope of modern business has changed, with a major slant towards the Internet, word of mouth is still a huge consideration in the promotion and marketing of a company. Many people choose service providers and businesses based on recommendations or perceived recommendations of others. In some cases, this means asking friends or family but on the Internet this is extended even further; consumers take notice of online reviews and accounts to determine whether they should buy a product, use a service, or even employ a new team member.

Whether you’re looking for a new career or your business sells products locally you can benefit from an online presence. Even if you conduct your business offline, you should remember that many of your customers or employers will still conduct their research on the Internet because it is fast, convenient, and offers a wealth of information that is otherwise unavailable to them. As such, even local businesses can benefit from using online reputation management services.

Online reputation management services first determine those phrases and keywords that matter most to your business or you personally. This typically means your name, the name of your business, and the names of your products and services. It may also include domain names if they are different to other names, and aliases that you might regularly use.

Online reputation management services will then determine how well you perform for those searches and ensure that you are in complete control of the results that web users see when they search for you.

There are literally thousands of social networking websites, many of which offer very specific categories as well as broad networks that are used by anybody that wants to make new contacts on the Internet.

There are those sites that are used primarily for social purposes, making friends and catching up with existing friends, and there are also social networking sites for professionals (LinkedIn is the most popular example of this kind of site).

Anybody is able to post virtually anything on these sites for the world to see. Include blogs, groups, directories, and review sites and there are many tens of thousands of places where your customers, employees, and even employers are able to post their opinion on you or your business.

When a lead or a potential client searches for you it is usually these results that they will see first. For this reason, it’s important that you do everything you can to ensure that the most prominent results are the pages that you would like to be seen.

With so many sites and opportunities for bad press, it would be impossible to check every site manually. Fortunately, searching is what the search engines are best used for.

For an instant snapshot of your current reputation, you can enter your name in Google or Yahoo. You can try the same with your business name or your website name. You can even add the names of executives in your company in order to find out what people think of you and, more importantly, what others are reading about you when they research your name online.

Alternatively, adding your chosen keywords to MonitorThis lets you keep on top of all the results from 20 search engines and social search sites. What’s more, it’s free to use.

What does the new system of Facebook “likes” mean to the reputation management industry? Facebook is intending to use the data, but it is, as of yet, unknown exactly how they intend to use it. Over at a blog called SearchEngineLand they have an article which says, in part:

the vision here is a network of discovery tools and information that operate higher up in the funnel than search: what are my friends doing, where are they eating, what do they recommend? This clearly doesn’t eliminate the need for search. But it does represent an alternative way in many cases to discover information.Yet the mountains of data that Facebook will gain could improve Facebook search results and potentially the coming, new and improved Bing integration. At a simple level, if Facebook knows the most “Liked” sushi restaurants in New York and those liked by my social network it can show me that information in search results. That hypothetically makes Facebook search much more social and more of a “recommendations engine” than Google at this point.

The online reputation management business may have a tough time dealing with this development, should it ever come to fruition.