Managing online accounts, social media logins and other profiles is not something new.  In fact, our Executive Vice President of Client Strategy, Danielle Leitch wrote a piece in a previous newsletter aiming to alert companies as to how important it is to manage their online accounts.

While the article mostly discussed social media passwords, it is important to have a plan to manage all of your business accounts.  Some of the common mistakes we see are that companies task their employees with setting up and managing multiple online profiles for their business.  If no plan is in place, the employee may simply use their company email address.  In most situations this is ok, but if the employee leaves, it can be a headache for the next person responsible for these accounts.  The email may be easy to figure out, but the password could prove to be more difficult to find. 

To make it easier for online profile management, it is important for a company to set up email addresses that are not necessarily tied to any one employee.  It is also important that there be a way to keep track of these various email addresses and passwords, so that it is easy for other people to get access.  A spreadsheet or a CRM software package can be used to track various usernames, emails and passwords.

You may even wish to create email usernames based on the types of account that it is associated with.  Examples:

• social@yourcompany.com – Use for Social Media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.
• pr@yourcompany.com – Use for press release syndication services and other public relations type services.
• local@yourcompany.com – Use this for any type of local search sites that you manage such as Google Places or yelp.

It is also important to instruct employees not to use personal addresses when creating various accounts.  This can be even more troublesome if that employee leaves, or someone else needs to take over their duties. In some cases it is also very difficult to get the email changed if you wish to consolidate listings.  When a personal email is used, it also opens up that employee to sharing personal information.

After a year of testing, Google has released its newest search technology.  Google Caffeine is supposed to provide 50 percent fresher results as compared to the last index.  Now when you are searching for news, photos videos and websites, you will see links to more relevant content quicker.

Google says that this technology is necessary to keep up with the staggering amount of content that is created and uploaded to the Web each day.  People and businesses are posting more content through their own sites, blogs and social media channels than ever before.  Google wants to make sure that the most relevant content is posted when a searcher makes a query.  The new index is built with the future in mind.  It has the ability to re-index content quicker and lays a foundation for the growth of information online.  You can read the official post about Caffeine at Google’s own blog.

As this search technology rolls out, we will be keeping an eye to determine how this impacts search results..  Generally speaking, when Google makes a change like this, things will shift around for a little while, but then when all is sorted out, the best results are left standing.  With Google’s push to be indexing the most relevant content, this says to me that the sites with blogs attached, or frequent content updates will fare best.  Sites that remain stagnant in content will not benefit from this new technology.  To stay ahead of the curve, be sure that you are exploring all of the possibilities of frequent content updates.  Start a blog, engage in social media, update your website often and post pictures wherever you can.

Whether you think so or not, every company has news.  From new product and service offerings, to the promotion of employees, every company can use these tidbits of information for press releases.  Once the press release is written, now you need to know what to do with it.  First, submit it through a feed service.  There are many to choose from on the web both free and paid.  The paid submission sites will give you more options in terms of distribution and analytics.  But, it is understandable that while you may be your own PR department, you may not have the budget to always do a paid distribution.  If this is the case, the free sites will suffice. 

After you have sent your press release via syndication services, it is important to also incorporate it into your site and your social media channels.  Post your release to your news page, your Facebook wall and Tweet it through your Twitter account.  Posting your release to your site and social media channels will give it maximum exposure to your fans, followers and website visitors.

When you submit your press release to multiple locations, you also have the chance of it being “picked up” or republished by many other websites.  It can then be reposted to other sites and you can receive benefits such as increased traffic and backlinks.  For the best possible chance of this, make sure your press release is well written and includes some links to the best pages of your site.