Cranberry Splash » CompanyPond

The totally awesome PeoplePond online identity badge is ready for your blog

Joe Beaulaurier — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 16:19:35 +0000

Bloggers rejoice! Now you can represent your online identity in style using the PeoplePond badge via the WordPress PeoplePond Identity Widget or the PeoplePond ADAM API. This badge is another example of PeoplePond’s continuing commitment to find more ways to extend the reach and value of your PeoplePond profile.

No longer are you stuck with a bunch of different badges from a variety of services in a variety of colors and sizes into your sidebar. Instead you get a professionally designed badge that includes:

Your name and title just as you have it on your PeoplePond profile
Your photo from your profile
Your Identity Verification status
Chicklets (little icons) linking to your presence at all the services where your blog visitors can connect with and discover more about you.

Some of you will notice this badge follows the same great look used in the PeoplePond Facebook profile badge.

Both the ADAM API implementation and the WordPress widget provide complete SEO benefits by providing clean links from the badge back to your profile and also from the chicklets, helping boost your online personal brand’s SEO and visibility up even more.

To install the WordPress PeoplePond Online Identity Widget, simply search for the “PeoplePond Online Identity Widget” from the Plugins – Add New page and click Install when the plugin has been located.

To install the ADAM API badge on a non-wordpress site, you can call the API directly in one of two ways:

1. To have ADAM send along CSS styling, as we do with the WordPress widget, you’ll want to include the “widget” argument.

http://adam.peoplepond.com/peeps.php?displayName=XXXXXX&widget=yes

2. Alternatively, if you wish to render the output differently you can call the “mini” argument instead and this will return un-styled XHTML.

http://adam.peoplepond.com/peeps.php?displayName=XXXXXX&mini=yes

And of course, if you still haven’t created your PeoplePond and CompanyPond profiles, what’s stopping you? Get started now.

Study reveals Fortune 100 online reputation management levels

Joe Beaulaurier — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:12:51 +0000

ReputationManagers.com, an SEO-based reputation management firm, has released a study entitled, “Corporate Reputation Management 2009 Study.” This study looked at the first page of Google search results when searching each company’s brand. They looked at the results and measured how much of the content displayed was published by the brand and of the content that wasn’t published by the brand, how much was negative or positive.

The ideal result would be a combination of content produced by the brand intermixed with positive content from other sources. Negative content can hurt a brand given the large number of people that turn to the search engines for information. So it is not uncommon for companies to make an effort to remove such content or actively “push” it down in the search results by promoting positive content using simple tools such our CompanyPond and PeoplePond services or hiring reputation management firms.

Admittedly, we were quite surprised at the lack of brand control these large Fortune 100 companies have over their own brands. Most of the issues can easily be averted with standard Online Reputation management practices.

This study is very interesting as it brings up some familiar questions about “controlling” one’s brands online. First, is it really possible to control how your brand appears online given the ease and freedom the marketplace has to create piles of content about your brand without your assistance or knowledge. And secondly, given this ease and freedom, how expensive and effective would it be to provide a viable motivation for people outside the organization to create and/or promote positive content about your brand? What risk exposures come with such a strategy?

24% of the bad items found seem to be opinions of a single person, versus fact or standard public knowledge.

With so many people available to create positive content around a brand, the above finding seems painfully ironic.

Start-Up Toolkit article describes best practices for PeoplePond and CompanyPond profiles

Joe Beaulaurier — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:00:15 +0000

Howard Greenstein has published an article about PeoplePond in Inc. Magazine’s Start-Up Toolkit section entitled, “Are You for Real?” It’s a great read about how to go about using your PeoplePond and Company Profiles to

improve your online visibility with greater personal SEO,
prove your personal identity to your audience, trade partners and prospective contract employers (like, say, the government), and
assert ownership over your online presence.

This is one of the problems that PeoplePond.com is trying to solve. When someone from a social network connects with you, how do you know that this particular “John Smith” is the John Smith who you met at the chamber of commerce meeting, or at college?

What?! You still haven’t created your PeoplePond and CompanyPond profiles? What’s stopping you? Get started now.

PeoplePond president will be in the house at Gnomedex

Joe Beaulaurier — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 04:37:41 +0000

PeoplePond president, Theron McCollough, will be attending Gnomedex later this week. Gnomedex is an annual technology conference in Seattle known to draw tech influencers, entrepreneurs, and enthusiasts.

If you’re at Gnomedex and can track down Theron (recent mugshot provided here), it will be a great opportunity to discuss best practices for getting the most exposure for your personal brand using PeoplePond and for your company brand using CompanyPond. He can also tell you about the latest developments for authenticating ownership of your online assets (read social media accounts) while also verifying your identity (you are who you say you are).

CompanyPond is now available for boosting your company’s online presence

Joe Beaulaurier — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 14:33:32 +0000

PeoplePond now has a sister site, CompanyPond. CompanyPond is an easy to use powerful online service that enables search engine optimization (SEO) experts and novices to train search engines to promote the best of their company’s online assets, making them more visible to prospective customers, potential employees and trade partners.

The best use of CompanyPond is to leverage the many PeoplePond profiles of the company’s staff, board members and evangelists. From the press release announcing the launch:

“The incredible SEO benefit of leveraging CompanyPond with PeoplePond to make use of the brand advocates found in employees, partners, stakeholders and evangelists is undeniable,” said David McInnis, the innovative mind who conceptualized both PeoplePond and CompanyPond.

Read the full press release here.