Online Reputation Management (ORM) includes monitoring, influencing, managing, and defending the online presence of your company, brand or name. Proactive Reputation Management is where you take active ownership and control of your online presence. Get in the "driver's seat" and adopt ORM best practices.
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Take preventative action to manage your online presence before someone has you in their "cross-hairs." Anyone with an ax to grind represents a potential threat to your reputation, such as former employees who feel that they were unfairly treated, angry customers that blame your company because a problem wasn't addressed their satisfaction. Moreover, a competitor may take action to undermine your success by attempting to damage your reputation. Malevolent press in any form can destroy a company's reputation overnight.
Consider the fact that over 82% of consumers conduct research using one of the major search engines before making a purchase. When a potential customer searches online for products and services that your company offers, you want the search engine result pages to deliver overwhelming positive news about your company - endorsing the integrity and value of your brand and reputation. Make sure that these hungry consumers are greeted with only positive news about your company.
You're responsible for promoting your brand and protecting it from people who exploit the power of the web, anomalously; posting lies, rumors or half-truths with complete immunity. Defend and retain your online reputation so your company is always perceived as a trusted supplier of goods and services.
Take control of your online brand and presence before someone else does who may want to hurt your company, brand, and reputation.
Establish a strong online brand using best practices that will prevent or mitigate negative coverage.
Proactively defend your reputation and mitigate negative coverage through preventative actions.
Monitor direct online competitors, you're competing for market share which means customers. Your reputation must be at least as good and preferably better than your competitors, or value-based selling will quickly turn into selling exclusively on price with eroding margins and lower business valuation.
Respond and engage when attacked by a person or group that may be slandering your reputation
Prevent and mitigate negative posts or news through preemptive, preventative and reactive reputation management practices as appropriate and applicable to the situation.
The first step in the process of proactive reputation management is building a strategic plan with a roadmap for taking control of your online presence that outlines the approach steps necessary to establish a rock-solid foundation for your online reputation.
A Reputationsmanagement well-architected plan supported by reliable intelligence will go a long way in keeping your brand unblemished.
Regularly monitor every major search engine, blog network, social network, media site, and news outlet with technology that will provide you with nearly real-time information about your company and brand. Employ these best practices to get a complete and accurate picture of your online reputation. The following outlines the primary elements that go into the creation of a comprehensive ORM plan:
Trends that transcend the web into the offline world are extremely important to understand. Reliable, actionable data in addition to accurate assessment will provide you with rich insight concerning what's being said about your brand, where, how often (volume) and so forth.
Prepare and continually update a detailed sentiment analysis report that includes buzz rating factoring concerning your (quantitative and qualitative) findings. This can be useful for sentiment analysis analytics. It is a relatively standard measure, so the buzz rating can be used to see how you rank against your industry peers and competitors
In today's word of push button publishing, any company can become the victim of an online attack from disgruntled customers or competitors with a computer and an internet connection. Because of the nature of online search, negative blog posts, comments, and press can quickly tarnish a company's reputation if potential customers find harsh criticisms when conducting a search for your company's name.
These types of attacks can be extremely damaging to your reputation and profitability - especially when they appear on the first page of search results. However, there are ways to counter them using the same techniques applied by top Internet reputation management experts.
#1 Monitor Your Online Presence
A key component in any Internet reputation management campaign is to continuously monitor what others are saying about you online. When and if negative information is published about your company, you'll want to be aware of it quickly in order to take action. The simplest way to do this is to set up a Google Alert for your name and your company name, as well as any other key terms associated with your line of business.
#2 Think Carefully Before You Retort
Unlike a conversation you may have with someone in person, a dialog carried out in the comments section of a blog or online forum will be recorded and leave a footprint online for years to come. If you learn that someone has posted a negative comment about you or your business, your first instinct may be to type out a heated retort. Instead of replying immediately, give yourself time to calm down and clearly think through your message before you reply.
Once you calm down, you will likely regret what you may have said in the heat of the moment and worse, possibly enabled the negative publicity to rise in search results.
#3 Ask Content Publishers to Remove Vicious Attacks
Internet reputation management experts will tell you that you can remove some blatantly slanderous results by contacting the content publishers where the comments are posted. This is usually only the case when the comments are overtly slanderous and unfounded. However, many content publishers will not remove material once it has been published. Once you've attempted to remove as much of the negative commentary as possible, your next plan of action should be to push the negative dialog as far back in the search engine results as possible. While quite time-consuming, it is a key component.
#4 Continuously Grow Your Presence on Search Engines
More relevant positive information, properly created, in the search engines related to you or your company will dilute the negative information and push it further back in the search engine results. The most effective way to accomplish this is by publishing more valuable content online through user-generated content sites or by building optimized profiles on various social media sites. Remember, the vast majority of people only search the first page of search results.
Companies and individuals may need to rely on Internet reputation management experts to push negative queries back from the first or second page of search results to a distant place where they will seldom if ever be seen. Professional internet reputation management experts use techniques that include building entire sites, massive article publication and distribution, press release generation and distribution, worldwide blogging and more. In addition, Internet reputation management experts are skilled in search engine optimization techniques and understand how and why search engines rank pages, thus making their efforts even more effective.