If you are interested in finding out what others are saying about you online, starting your own online reputation management (ORM) strategy is easy. To start you can search for your company or brand name on Google and see what information you can find. Even though Google is the top search engine around, do some research on the other popular search engines as well such as Bing and Yahoo. The different search engines have different algorithms for keywords and they don’t all work exactly the same. You can also search on metasearch engines such as WebCrawler and Info.com.
So how should you search and what should you search for regarding your online reputation? Well, you can start with your business name, the owner, CEO or even key employees as well. Along with searching through those names, also search for your brand name, and any relevant products and services that you offer. You can also search for names related to and in association with your business. Lots of data to research.
What information can affect your business?
While you are doing your research and searching for your company name on the search engines, remember that most of the popular search engines displays personalized search results. The personalized search results will be based on your last location, as well as your company or personal results if you are signed into that search engine for example – with your Gmail account. If you are signed into Google and you are using their search engine, there is a chance of the content you have written, or the content that were shared by your social circles on Google+ will be displayed. What you want to find when you are searching for is information you don’t already know is online and that could negatively affect your business.
Keep track of your reputation online
Once you have completed all your research and found results on all the search engines, what are you going to do with your findings? Save the results in a document that you can reference to later To summarize the document, add the following information to that document; date, position on the search engines, the URL of the mentions, the type of mention (was it negative or good?).
When you are doing your research and searching for mentions of your company or brand name on the search engines, record the first 30 results that you have found, regardless if the results are positive or negative. Once you have those results, it is just a simple task of finding all the positive results and checking how you can use those to your full advantage, and finding the negative ones and checking how you can fix those results.
Use online reputation management to build your reputation
Online reputation management is becoming vital in today’s digital marketing business world. Take note that the method above is just a simple way on how you can monitor your online reputation for negative feedback, online reputation management can also be used to start building your reputation online.
Yes – I
do agree Anton.
There are a couple of methods you can go by when monitoring what’s being said
online about you or your Business. One of the things that people tend to forget
is that the posts their employees make can also influence their online
reputation. ORM is one of the most important ways of being active and engaging
with targeted users – this is great for PR and Marketing on all scales and
channels.
One thing is for certain – you can’t afford to invest digitally and not invest
in a proper ORM strategy and tool.
Indeed Byron. Many people make the mistake of only using ORM to check for negative mentions and posts regarding them. It can also help you with finding new ways on improving the visibility of your brand online.
Online reputation management is something you should set your eyes on early on. It is the main reason why searching for a big company’s name never turns up it’s bad reputation. Online reputation management do not delete the bad reputation your products or services have incurred on some of your clients. It just hides them from plain sight and pushes them to the farthest back of SERPs. MIT IT Recruitment