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 embrace ORM best practices.
Take proactive steps to manage your online presence before someone else “crosses” you. Anyone with an ax to grind poses a potential threat to your reputation, such as ex-employees who feel they were treated unfairly, angry customers who blame their company because an issue was not addressed to their satisfaction. Additionally, a competitor may take steps to undermine your success by trying to damage your reputation. The malicious 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 the products and services your business offers, you want the search engine results pages to deliver 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 business.
You are responsible for promoting your brand and protecting it from people who misuse the power of the web; publish lies, rumors or half truths with full immunity. Defend and preserve your online reputation so your business is always perceived as a trusted 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 preventive actions.
Monitor direct competitors online, you’re competing for market share, which means customers. Your reputation must be at least as good and preferably better than your competitors, or selling on value will quickly turn into selling on price alone with eroded margins and lower business valuation.
Respond and participate when you are attacked by a person or group that may be smearing your reputation.
Prevent and mitigate negative posts or news through proactive, proactive, 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 required to establish a strong foundation for your online reputation.
A well-designed plan backed by reliable intelligence will go a long way in keeping your brand spotless.
Regularly monitor all major search engines, blog networks, social networks, media sites, and technology-enabled outlets 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 following are the main elements that go into creating a comprehensive ORM plan:
- 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
- Selection and placement of channels
- A budget for the promotion, protection and management of the brand online
- Website audit and review
- Evaluation of customer interactions 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
- Ongoing management and reporting
In addition to what you discover through real-time monitoring of the web and all the vital information collected as part of strategic plan development, delve into various online channels and offline areas where there is 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 publications
- Blog and comment portals
- Search engine results
After completing the deep inspection phase, review and analyze the data, including both positive and negative listings or news. Look for trends and channels of dysfunction that exist 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 and actionable data, plus accurate evaluation, 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 buzz rating factors regarding your findings (quantitative and qualitative). This can be useful for sentiment analysis analysis. It’s a relatively standard measure, so the word-of-mouth rating can be used to see how you rank against your industry peers and competitors.