If you have strong competition online, ORM (online reputation management) is a very important aspect of social media marketing that you cannot ignore any more. There are numerous ways people can track down reviews of a company or a particular product before they make the final decision and part with their money. It is now easier than ever before to choose different options when we are ready to buy.
Now is the right time to take control of managing your online reputation and presence before someone else takes the spot and does it for you. Whether you are a business selling your services and products or just looking for a job, if someone wants to find out more information about you, what is stopping them from typing in your name into a search engine? This can happen from potential prospects and investors looking for more information about you.
If your online presence is not optimized for what you cater for, this might cause you considerable problems. What if a consumer clicked on one of your competitors instead of you or a regular customer switched to another service because of this? The more optimized and visible your online profile is can definitely attract the right people who you want to do business with. If you don’t care about your reputation online, the more financial implications it might present as more of your customers can move elsewhere to someone who they can trust.
Take charge of your online reputation
How do you take charge of your online reputation? Luckily to the web, there’s a couple of ways to monitor and to improve your reputation through the usage of Web 2.0 (social media channels). With hundreds of new businesses creating Facebook Fan Pages everyday and most of the popular ones owning Twitter profiles, social media is a big part on how businesses communicate with their clients. Social media allows companies and individuals an opportunity to have an influence over the discussions taking place about their brand.
If you are communicating with your customers in positive manner online they are more likely to repeatedly purchase from your company, but there’s also the opportunity that they can become “social media ambassadors” for your brand, marketing your services and products to their own network.
Turning negative comments into positive outcomes
Another huge step with social media is that it allows companies to demonstrate how they are to better their services by turning negative feedback and comments into positive outcomes by engaging with people who are less satisfied with them.
If these customers had their issues solved without any problems, they are most likely to have a restored faith in the company and might even go as far as to report their experience with their own network, increasing your brand visibility at the same time. Even though this might seem like a very small impact and stepping stone, when this happens a couple of times with many prospects involved, it proves to be a real effective form of online reputation management.
Hi Anton, great article!
ORM is definitely the way to go, especially if we see what is already happening overseas.
In most European countries, ORM is a standard part of the marketing mix.
However, in order to get a grasp of what is being said about your brand online, as well as measure the impact of these comments, it is vital to have an ORM tool in place to assist you.
saidWot, our own ORM Tool, allows you to monitor what is being said, report back on the ROI of campaigns, and measure the impact of your audience’s comments on your brand.
Kind regards
Carla Jones
http://www.saidwot.com