Photo credit: Sachs Marketing Group
Reputation is everything. These days it’s online reputation that’s everything. A damaged online reputation can severely harm an organization. A single bad online review can destroy a small business, especially one in consumer services such as restaurants. Online criticism can undermine the reputations of even the largest organizations.
Some organizations may confuse online reputation management with crisis management. Crisis management is a reactive strategy. It involves responding to a reputational risk that has already occurred. Reputation management is a proactive strategy.
Online reputation problems can develop gradually over time. Negative brand mentions can accumulate slowly over time. The issue may not become obvious until it passes the tipping point that severely damages online reputation.
These are the crucial steps for proactive online reputation management.
Promote positive content. Publishing positive content about your organization on your website, social media channels, and other websites through content marketing efforts can counteract negative comments about your organization. Publishing and promoting positive content and following SEO best practices helps push down negative content in search engine results for your organization.
Employ social media listening. An essential element of the proactive approach entails continually monitoring the organization’s reputation — not just when a specific event or attack forces you to respond. Through social media listening services, companies can collect online content, including blog posts, online reviews and social media comments. Some services, such as Glean.info, formerly CyberAlert, can measure the overall sentiment by grading social media posts as positive, neutral or negative.
Proactively responding to negative customer feedback. Initiating friendly conversations, as opposed to confronting critics, and solving customer problems helps stop negative comments from spreading. Responding quickly is crucial. You can never predict when a disgruntled customer or a deceitful competitor may spread negative information about your organization. You can create alerts to have a media monitoring service immediately inform you when your company or its products are mentioned.
Legal responses. In some cases, more assertive actions are required if information is false and potentially libelous. In that case, you can contact the content creator or website manager and respectfully request them to correct the false information or remove the slanderous web page, blog post or video. If negative content becomes a liability and the creators do not cooperate, your organization may need to seek legal advice and resort to a legal takedown request.
Consider using an online reputation management company. Although competent, trustworthy reputation management services abound, some employ disreputable tactics such as black hat SEO tricks that can prompt lower search results rankings. You can spot unethical outfits by the tactics they employ. They frequently use spam bots to post fake comments, overuse keywords, censor or block all complaints, and create fake user profiles to provide favorable comments. Competent management reputation companies, by contrast, can obtain relevant mentions on third-party sites that rank highly in search engines.
Appoint a reputation manager. Larger organizations may wish to appoint a single person to oversee reputational risk, offline as well as online. That senior risk manager would be responsible for assessing the company’s reputation, monitoring the beliefs and expectations of stakeholders, and measuring and monitoring the company’s reputation on an ongoing basis. The senior risk manager should report regularly to senior management and the board about the company’s reputation and risks.
Bottom Line: Being proactive is the key to successful online reputation management. Companies can take advantage of a media monitoring service to identify comments that require timely responses as well as incorrect or slanderous content that calls for a more forceful response.
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William J. Comcowich founded and served as CEO of CyberAlert LLC, the predecessor of Glean.info. He is currently serving as Interim CEO and member of the Board of Directors. Glean.info provides customized media monitoring, media measurement and analytics solutions across all types of traditional and social media.
Great post, I have written similar posts on this topic. I would also mention how important response time is, responding immediately to customers is crucial, and taking the issue offline if need be. Even if people see negative issues, the fact that you respond to them creates a positive. Great post!
Blogs, PRs, competitors, review sites, social media and all these play an essential role in maintaining the online reputation of a business. That is why a special attention is required towards them, so that everything goes as per our expectations. And if it doesn’t, things can always be mandated.
I would go with hiring a professional ORM company or individual serving the same purpose. Saying it on behalf of my friend who already hired an ORM company which helped him and his business to come out of the dark abyss of damaged reputation. And trust me, that that firm considered all the above mentioned points, so I can verify their authenticity.
Brand management would include more specific marketing tactics of creating content, getting the word out and creating the preceived online brand value.
Brand management plays a major role in increasing online brand value. It has a major role in the success of an organization.
Nice post nowadays social media is becoming another platform for reviews if someone puts negative feedback on your services so its not necessary that this guy is really have trouble it also can be a Fake review which can posted by any competitor… so first make sure is there really have someone or not ? there are lots of review posting sites we cant reach everywhere instantly so social media is right place to promote on-line reputation where can also put updates…regarding reviews as a note for customers
Most of the restaurants and local business are the main targets of Online reputation pollution. If I’m running a hotel, I will always make sure customers are happy before they leave.
Blogs, PRs, competitors, review sites, social media and all these play an essential role in maintaining the online reputation of a business.