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Unlike traditional media, the online world moves at dizzying speeds as information travels instantly across time and geographical boundaries. While this bodes well for marketers who spend time and effort to improve their visibility on search results, it can transform into a double-edged sword when the search results are negative. As an increasing number of unhappy customers, ex-employees and nasty competitors take advantage of the quick and easy online forums, blogs and message boards to vent their frustration on companies and individuals they are unhappy with.

Why Online Reputation Management (ORM) is Important

Your customers are no longer passive receptors of the information you disseminate to them through your website. However, with perceptive online marketing you can convert critics and disgruntled customers into your advocates and evangelists. While most customers make purchases offline, they take advantage of the internet to make purchasing decisions based on online research and reviews of customers who’ve used your products and services. Hence, it is very important to ensure that you have an ORM process in place to protect and advance your online reputation.

ORM involves tracking and managing how the online world perceives your product or service through the various online forums. When people say bad things about your product or service, you don’t just delete the negative comment and retain the positive ones. Displacing negative search results is not the solution to the problem, since it only resolves an overt issue, even as the root cause of the problem remains to be addressed in detail. A bad online reputation can reduce customer confidence and plunge profits. However, you must take a proactive ORM approach and incorporate good business practices by placing the right messages through focussed social media marketing and simultaneously deliver excellent customer value online and offline.

Through ORM you can protect and manage your reputation by being actively involved in the outcome of search engine results and incorporating a 4-step process.

Analyse Your Online Space

The goals of ORM are high rankings and indexing in search engines for all positive content on associated websites. This will ensure an increase in your overall positive web presence, which will enable you to own top spots in search engine rankings for your brand. Thus, as a first step, you need to understand where you are placed in relation to your use of social media, search engine positioning and what the buzz on you in the online world is all about. In the same vein, you should analyse the core elements of your website and the online activities you are involved in that negatively affect your reputation.

Monitor Activity

People Googling your company name will often skim through all the links that appear on the results page and not merely the ones that lead to your website. There could be both positive and negative listings about your company on these links. At the end of the day, the general public moulds its opinions on how your brand is viewed through blogs, podcasts and opinion forums, necessitating that you monitor these online conversations. However, since it is difficult to continuously monitor everything that is being mentioned about your brand, you need an advance information system to alert you of all news relating to your brand, so that you can remedy it if the need arises. You can do this by:

• Setting up Google and Yahoo Alerts to track your brands mention in the news including the names of company, products/services and key employees
• View how your brands fare in blogs by participating in sites such as Feedster, Blogpulse and Technorati
• Monitor industry-related sites
• Customize RSS readers for brand tracking

Even as a monitoring system for your brand is set in place, you should also track news on competitor brands, companies, industry terms and general industry news. While monitoring is an essential strategy for addressing adverse information within your search engine space, its effectiveness is best realised through proactively influencing what people read about your brand in your space.

Optimise Content

You can protect your brand’s online visibility by optimising your content. Ensure that all your digital communications is optimised. This includes PR, marketing, SEO, HR, investor relations and related electronic content, which is publicly available on the web as well as across social media sites viz. text, images, audio, video; to enable listing of more branded content in the search engine ranking pages. This does not effectively put your brand in control and above negative backlash, but it places you in a much better position if such a situation arose. The more branded content in the search results, the more diluted any negative brand content will be.

Influence the Influencers

Finally, get actively involved in online conversations by participating in them to improve your brand’s perception and eliminate negative feedback. Regularly participate in your industry’s conversation by contributing to blogs and forums that cover consumer opinions and complaints, competitor attacks, social networks, counterfeit products and trademark infringements.

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