For any business, reputation is everything.
With an online presence comes an online reputation. A good online reputation is worth its weight in gold. But how do you know what’s being said about you, and how do you manage it?
Enter myfrontsteps.com, and their latest idea: StepRep. Basically, it sorts the good from the bad, and makes the good appear higher up on the Google rankings.
“People are rating your services on sites like ServiceMagic and Yelp,” says Brendan King, CEO of myfrontsteps.com. “They’re blogging, and commenting on each other’s blogs. One comment can be seen by tens of thousands of people. It’s really upped the stakes.”
“Small business owners might think, hey, I’ve got a low profile, no-one’s talking about me,” says King. “But when you don’t have a large online presence, the effect of each comment is magnified. It’s even more important to keep on top of what people are seeing when they Google your name.”
Between blogs, your own website, portals, facebook, linked in, and other social media websites your name is being mentioned in many places. Googling yourself or setting up Google alerts can only take you so far. “From the front page of the New York Times to some angry little blogger with a grudge, StepRep finds it all”, they say.
The idea is that you can embrace the power of social networks and let your clients recommend you, and your work, to their friends and family. You can monitor, manage and build your reputation.
StepRep is best explained by their own video:
Once released, the StepRep widget will allow you to broadcast positive stories to anyone who visits your blog or website. Best of all, it’s completely free.
Behind myfrontsteps.com and StepRep are VendAsta Technologies, a software development team based in Saskatoon, Canada. In August 2008 the startup received $3 million funding from Victoria Park Capital to develop a social networking initiative that would combine the founders’ expertise in software and real estate services.
StepRep is only one of the company’s projects. In March, myfrontsteps.com will launch Homebook, a place for homeowners to share photos of their homes and get ideas for design and renovation.
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Sounds like a great tool to help small companies monitor their online reputations. Any idea of the expected costs?
Emma thanks for noticing! “Social Media Monitoring”: This part of our service is free and will continue to be free. We will be releasing new software this spring that will help business users connect to consumers. This software will expose our business model.