Online Reputation Management (ORM) is a proactive process of managing and protecting your brand online. If you have a proper ORM strategy in place, it can provide you with cover from all the angles of a negative comment or status update to reflect badly on you. Your ORM strategy also helps building your reputation online with positive and neutral information to help you build your brand online with good search engine rankings and through various social media channels.
Negative feedback and content can come from anywhere – an unhappy client, ex employees, and even from a competitor that wants to damage your reputation to enhance the amount of business coming their way. It can literally take 140 characters (Twitter) or less to destroy a reputation. Here’s a couple of tips on protecting your online reputation.
Online reputation management and social media
With the current explosion of social media, Web 2.0 is an excellent approach for utilizing ORM. Online you will find thousands of social media active websites and platforms, and they rely heavily on the participation of their network to supply them with content. Relevant real-time information and content is king with social media.
When a negative comment or update about your brand name is published on most of these social media channels…it is public, and it can be seen and further commented on by thousands. Anyone has the ability to post anything online and negative feedback spreads like wildfire. The harsh reality is that a negative comment can be posted by anyone. Your clients, competition, general public are all “journalists” online.
One of the best ways to counter negative comments and feedback online is to assess the comment, and respond directly to the person that initiated the negative press. Show your transparency if there is a real problem and never use foul and harsh language when replying to negative press.
Online reputation management and Google
If you have a blog at your disposal, then it is good practice to make use of all the benefits a blog offers and optimize all of your blog posts as well as the blog shell to rank for specific search terms related to your business or brand name. This can greatly help prevent that negative results appear at the top of the search engine results pages (SERP’s). This can be achieved by combining a couple of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and various digital marketing strategies to get good rankings on Google. It is good practice with online reputation management when the search engine results are populated with positive content about your business or brand.
Having an online reputation management strategy can help protect your online reputation from negative criticism and at the same time, help you build your credibility online. As more people get connected everyday to the online universe, having an online reputation management strategy is becoming critical to achieve success online.