Most people define online reputation management (ORM) as “the act of monitoring, addressing or mitigating SERPs (search engine result pages) or mentions in online media and Web sphere content.”
ORM primarily involves tracking what is written about a client on the Internet, then utilizing sophisticated online and offline techniques in promoting positive and neutral content, while at the same time pushing down those links the sponsor may not want to show when their name is searched.
In short, ORM is keeping track of what people are saying about you online and promoting the positive while eliminating and preventing the negative.
ORM is especially prevalent today as just about every business has an online identity in one form or another.
An identity or brand can be promoted in a number of ways, but it can also be damaged in many ways; and managing both of these plays key roles in ORM.
All of these affect your online reputation and that reputation is just as important as your offline one – something you’ve probably dedicated years to building and promoting.
Online Reputation Management Challenges
To say that online reputation management is not without its own challenges simply wouldn’t be true.
Whether it’s a business owner’s train of thinking or a bad online review, there are a few obstacles that can come up in ORM.
Here are some of the biggest challenges, and how you can combat them:
- Bad press. Bad press includes a number of things, and they are the number one challenge in online reputation management. This is what it’s all about after all, trying to limit and eliminate all the bad press that’s out there.
- Thinking the business does so well offline that no reputation management needs to be done online. This is something that lots of business owners think – a shocking number of them, actually. And while it’s true that some businesses have built up their reputation so strongly, and think that because they’re so successful right now, that a few hits to their online reputation will largely be ignored by their customers.
This is often true – for now.
But business might not always be so good and in those times, a good online reputation is a great thing to fall back on. Add to that the fact that those “few hits” could have a snowball effect where people start to pay attention and rest assured, it will matter at some point.
Lastly with this point, while major corporations may have a large and loyal customer base that will disregard bad reviews and the like, small businesses most likely do not.
That’s why small business owners need to pay even more attention to ORM. If you don’t take control of your online reputation, someone else will!
- Not knowing something can be done about it!
Lots of business owners also know that negative reviews and bad online press is out there about them. They may even know who published it and where to find it; but they don’t think there’s anything that can actually be done about it.
Managing your online reputation though is very similar to managing your offline reputation.
You would never walk away from a customer if they had or walked into your office and complained.
And when you leave online questions unanswered and complaints ignored, that’s exactly what you’re doing.
The Steps
Creating a positive brand for yourself online and getting rid of the negative publicity that’s out there can seem a bit overwhelming at first.
But when broken down into steps, business owners can simply follow them through and have a strong, positive online reputation at the end of it all.
For those business owners that simply don’t have the time for ORM, this guide will even show you how to hire a marketing consultant to take over the job for you.
- Assess your online reputation
Before you can start doing anything about your online reputation, you first have to know where your reputation currently stands.Start assessing your online reputation by performing searches on all of the major search engines: Google, Yahoo, Bing, and any others that you can think of.
You’re looking for anything that’s written or published about your company at all – good, bad, or indifferent.
Remember that if you’re logged in to Google or any other search engine to sign out. This will give you the most accurate results as to what the average user would see when they search for your company.
The good comments and published posts will be obvious when you find them, and so will much of the negative publicity that you find.
But if you don’t find anything at all related to your company, or the results are indifferent, those are problems as well.
Not finding anything at all means that you need to start from scratch to build your online reputation.
When search engines show indifferent results, it means that the result is neither good nor bad. These are often directory pages or listings that likely include the names and numbers of several of your competitors.
When searching for your company, do more than just search for your name.
Also make sure that you search for your products, your highest-profile employees, your own name, and any usernames or handles you use on any other site. All of these will point you towards anything online that has to do with your company, and will be your biggest indication if there are any problems.
Create a spreadsheet and along the way in your search, make sure to track and record anything and everything that you find.
- Secure your name
Why do you have to protect your online name?
Because if you don’t, someone could easily come and take it and use it to make your company look bad.
Make sure you have a website and a blog registered under your company’s name and use that as your main site. But also register sites such as “[mycompany]sucks.com.”
Again, if you don’t register this domain name, someone else can and actually use it as a hate site.
If you register it first however, visitors will still be directed there when they search for you, and you can then use it to address any criticisms or complaints and actually win those customers back. Do this with your blog, product name domains, and with different domain extensions – .com, .net, .org, and any others that apply.
While you’re protecting your name, also make sure that you register your company’s username with all the major social networks: Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
Because all of these sites allow for such quick interaction between members, these are all some of the first places people will go to leave a review or comment about your company.
Be sure to create accounts, pages, and profiles on all of them so that no one else can take it over online.
- Protect your name
Once you’ve registered your name and domain names, you need to protect it.
When protecting your username, there is a fine line.
If you don’t have much of a reputation yet, you definitely want to keep your pages as public as possible to encourage interaction and followers. However, you also need to protect it in order to keep it safe.
With this in mind when changing your privacy settings, look within the different social networks to find the options of what’s displayed in the search engines and what is not.
However, you still want to keep your pages and accounts open so that people can join, follow, and like you.
- Join the conversation
Once you’ve secured all of your domain names and usernames, it’s time to join in on the conversation or get one started.
Publish a blog post and encourage comments; ask questions on Twitter; or start a poll on Facebook.
When you’re using pages that you’ve personally created or registered, controlling the information that’s on them can be relatively easy. But you need to also remember to join in on conversations that have already been started – this is where you’ll find the most bad reviews and can take the time to respond to them.
Visit industry blogs; sites such as Yelp, Amazon, StumbleUpon; BusinessWeek; and Crunchbase to see what reviews have been posted.
Respond to all of them whether they’re positive, neutral, or negative, and always thank people for the time they’ve invested in your company by trying your product or asking a question.
Respond very politely and address any concerns that come up.
Remember that you always must maintain the utmost professionalism and extend extreme courtesy when online.
When possible offer something comparable, free samples, complimentary services, or anything else that may make them feel better about using you in the future. Don’t get defensive, as easy as it is to do.
Cursing, insulting, or acting as though the customers’ opinions don’t matter won’t be the effective ORM you’re trying to achieve.
- Be proactive about customer feedback
From your very first interaction with a customer, and every one afterwards, always promote feedback and ask them to provide their thoughts and opinions about your company online on your Twitter or Facebook page, or on the company blog.
- Establish yourself as an authority
Just like when you’re offline, when you establish yourself as an authority in the industry to your customers, they tend to respect you more and automatically give you more credibility.
This helps with your ORM because customers will start to say good things about you, and people will seek you out online to ask questions and seek advice.
That will get people talking, will increase your page rankings in the search engines, and will better your online reputation.
Here are just a few ways you can establish yourself as an authority:
· Create a group or organization on MeetUp or GoToMeetings.
· Visit sites such as Yahoo! Answers and ChaCha.com and answer industry-related questions.
· Make video tutorials of how to use your product.
· Make podcasts of seminars addressing some of the biggest customer concerns that your business or product can help them with.
· Get your blog listed in popular industry blog directories.
· Arrange to be a speaker at industry events and/or conferences.
· Get in the news! Have the regional, local, or national news quotes you online about your opinions regarding a hot topic in your industry.
· Join industry associations and organizations and strive to win awards from them. Display the association’s logo on your website to show visitors that you are a trusted and integral part of the industry.
· Distribute press releases online about new products, new staff members, and anything else newsworthy that your company has to say.
Make yourself and your company accessible
Most of the time, comments that are left on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter are a result of a frustrated customer trying unsuccessfully to reach out to the company directly.
When phone calls and emails go unanswered, customers feel as though they have no other option but to make themselves be heard.
If you had answered them in the first place, they most likely would have never reached out to other mediums, and you wouldn’t have a problem that you now have to fix.
If you absolutely can’t answer them immediately, tell them that you’re sorry and that you need to look into it; but that you will get back to them within 24 hours. Then make sure you do!
- Set up an online customer service center
Another reason why people often turn to the most public social networks to leave feedback is because they don’t know where else to go.
You have to make sure you tell them!
Just like your company may have a customer service desk or department that handles complaints, suggestions, and customer issues, you must also have the same kind of service online.
Suggestion Box (www.suggestionbox.com) is one such place where you can set up a box, direct people there if they have any questions or concerns, and they can easily leave you a comment or suggestion.
Once people feel as though they’ve unloaded their grievance, it’s typically much easier for them to move on and wait for your response. Again, you must make sure that you answer every response and thank every single person for their suggestion – no matter what it is.
It’s the only way to make these tools truly effective.
- Gather and publish customer testimonials
Ask every single customer for a testimonial and then make sure you use them.
Post them on your website, your blog, your Facebook page and anywhere that potential customers will see them.
Remember that positive tweets about your company also count as testimonials, as do positive comments left on other networks.
In addition to just displaying testimonials, allow customers to leave reviews and feedback on your website in regards to the different products you sell – they’re a huge help to visitors when they’re trying to decide whether or not to use a product or a company.
- Know how to use SEO
ORM isn’t SEO, but the two do go hand in hand.
You need to know which keywords relate to your online reputation, because you’ll need to use these as tracking devices.
A keyword is any word or phrase that a customer may type into a search engine when they’re looking for information about your company. You’ll need to research which keywords are being used most often, and then focus in on those.
Don’t just rely on the keywords you’re currently using in your marketing campaign. ORM keywords are different.
Not only will you need to find ones that are different from those you use in marketing, but you’ll also need to change your ORM keywords regularly – every time you come out with a new product or service, or have news to share with your customers.
- Fight back with links
Spammers and those who really want to focus on building a strong hate site get their site listed at the top of the search engines through link building.
The search engines love links more than just about anything; and the more you have on your pages, the higher you’ll rank.
The higher you rank of course, the more you can be the first people visitors turn to when looking for information about your company. Use domains, sub-domains, news sites, corporate blogs, industry sites, and other websites to get links up.
For those websites that you control and publish, regularly include links to your other sites, and always keep all sites updated with fresh content – this is the only thing search engines might love even more than links.
- Track your online reputation
After you’ve established certain ORM systems and practices, you will no longer need to rely simply on searches to find out what people are saying.
There are a number of different tracking programs available and at your fingertips. For any of them, you’re going to need your list of keywords so that you know what exactly you’re tracking.
Here’s a list of the most popular tracking tools:
· Feed readers.
Use feed readers such as Feed Demon to enter the addresses of the websites that are most likely to post reviews about your company. You’ll have all the different review websites in one place, and the titles of the review will appear automatically every time a new one is posted.
· Google Alerts.
For Google Alerts you’ll need your list of keywords so you can enter them and be notified any time new content with those keywords is posted. With these notifications you can set up alerts for the news, blogs, videos, and groups. You can receive Google Alerts either through a feed or via email.
· Yahoo Alerts.
Just like Google Alerts, you can track certain items. In Yahoo Alerts these are stocks, local news, and feeds. Yahoo Alerts are delivered through email, Yahoo Messenger, or to your mobile phone.
· Twitter search.
The Twitter search function allows you to easily search through your keywords to find out what people are saying about them. When asking customers for feedback, set up a hashtag (#topic) so that you can find them easily.
· Social Mention.
While you shouldn’t rely on Social Mention alone, it is a great way to do a broad sweep of all the social networks and see what people are saying about your company and your keywords.
Other social tracking sites.
In addition to the features on the individual sites and Social Mention, there are other sites you can use to track what’s being said about you in the social networking circle. These are: HootSuite, EasyTweets, Disqus, Atom Keep, and SocialStream.
- Make ORM an ongoing effort
Just because you have all your social networking pages in place, and you’ve landed your company the first five spots in the search engines, your work is not done yet.
An online reputation is even more fleeting than an offline one; and if you don’t take the time necessary to constantly update, track, and improve your online reputation, you’ll soon find you have one you don’t want one at all!
If you would like help with your ORM Management, Ask us!