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. Sit in the “driver’s seat” and adopt ORM best practices.
Take proactive steps to manage your online presence before someone has you in their “crosshairs.” Anyone with an ax to grind poses a potential threat to your reputation, like former employees who feel they were treated unfairly, angry customers who blame your company because an issue wasn’t addressed to their satisfaction. Additionally, a competitor may take steps to undermine your success by attempting to damage your reputation. Malicious press in any form can destroy a company’s reputation overnight.
Consider the fact that more than 82% of consumers conduct research using one of the major search engines before making a purchase. When a potential customer searches online for the products and services your business offers, you want the search engine results pages to provide overwhelmingly positive news about your business, supporting the integrity and value of your brand and reputation. Make sure these hungry consumers are greeted with only positive news about your company.
You are responsible for promoting your brand and protecting it from people who exploit the power of the web in an anomalous way; publish lies, rumors or half-truths with total immunity. Defend and preserve your online reputation so that your company is always perceived as a reliable provider of goods and services.
Take control of your brand and online presence before someone else wants to damage your business, 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 action.
Monitor direct competitors online, you are 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 become price-only with eroded margins and lower business valuation.
Respond and participate when attacked by a person or group that may be slandering your reputation.
Prevent and mitigate negative posts or news through preventative, preventative, and reactive reputation management practices. as appropriate and applicable to the situation.
The first step in the proactive reputation management process is to create a strategic plan with a roadmap for taking control of your online presence that outlines the steps necessary to establish a solid foundation for your online reputation.
A well-designed plan backed by trusted intelligence will go a long way toward keeping your brand spotless.
Regularly monitor all major search engines, blog networks, social networks, media sites and media outlets with technology that will provide you with near real-time insights into your business and brand. Employ these best practices to get a complete and accurate picture of your online reputation. The main elements involved in creating a comprehensive ORM plan are described below:
- research and discovery
- Review and analysis of your online presence
- Online brand positioning inventory
- online messaging
- Critical content and interactions.
- Sentiment and buzz analysis
- Current Approaches to Promoting Brand and Online Reputation
- Channel selection and placement
- A budget for the promotion, protection and management of the online brand
- Audit and review of the website
- Evaluation of interactions with customers both online and offline
- Methods and effectiveness to communicate with customers.
- Competitor monitoring, online presence evaluation and benchmarking
- Risks evaluation
- Survey of key executives
- Formal strategy session
- Design and architecture of the initial plan
- Review and delivery of the execution plan
- Continuous management and reporting
In addition to what you discover through real-time web monitoring and all the vital information collected as part of strategic plan development, delve into various online channels and offline areas where there is an interdependence that requires further inspection and understanding, including but not limited to the following:
- niche forums
- forum posts
- Financial message boards
- consumer reports
- consumer websites
- social networking websites
- Facebook profiles
- LinkedIn Profiles Newspaper Archives
- Image results
- Video Sharing Sites and Posts
- Blog and comment portals
- search engine results
After the deep inspection phase is complete, review and analyze the data, including both positive and negative listings or news. Look for existing trends and channels of dysfunction that represent an unacceptable level of exposure to the business and risk to your brand.
It is extremely important to understand the trends that transcend the web to the offline world. Reliable, actionable data, plus accurate assessment, will give you valuable insight into what is being said about your brand, where, how often (volume), etc.
Prepare and continually update a detailed sentiment analysis report that includes rumor scoring factors regarding your findings (quantitative and qualitative). This can be useful for sentiment analysis analysis. It’s a relatively standard measure, so word of mouth rating can be used to see how you rank against your peers and industry competitors.
