In our everyday digital lifestyles where most businesses marketing online have the dreams of having top organic rankings for all the keywords that they are targeting, their online reputation also play a big role. With all the social media hype online such as blogging, micro blogging, online reviews, and social networking, it has become a necessity to maintain a good reputation online.
Online Reputation Management (ORM) is a process of maintaining your reputation on the web and it usually consists of a combination of digital marketing strategies. Whenever anyone is searching for your name on Google or any other social media channel, you want to display the best and most positive links/mentions. To get these positive results on the web for your personally or your business is not a once off project, and you will need a proactive online reputation management strategy for ongoing results.
Find below a couple of reason why online reputation management is important.
Your reputation counts
With online reputation management you can keep your online reputation intact. It constantly monitors all the aspects of your brand online and it also helps you to reduce all the negative and undesirable feedback that appears on the organic search engine result pages (SERP’s). ORM helps you to promote all the useful content and links on the search engines very similar to search engine optimization, but the core idea around it is to outshine the results with positive and up to date information about your business, and the services or products that you offer.
Share positive brand information
Most social media channels represents a space where members can establish their identity to other interested members. The reality is, Web 2.0 can make or break your reputation in 140 characters or less – Twitter. There are hundreds of examples where things have gone sour for people and business with an online reputation crisis. When an online crisis happens, news tend to spread like wildfire and many have a hard time in recovering from the negative publicity. Creating a positive social media presence on select social media channels can increase your positive online reputation and it can help with building up your credibility.
Build brand authority
Misinformation and lies about your business can easily be spread because of the nature of the social web. Since there are many elements that can affect the perception of a person or a business, online reputation management helps as a defending barrier to filter out all the negative feedback against your brand. When you proactively monitor and respond with your online reputation management campaign, you are providing marketing stability to your business.
Maintain a positive brand image
In plain English, online reputation management can help your business in putting its best face forward to the public by keeping track of all the feedback about your company. You can turn that feedback in a positive loop that can help you maintain a positive brand image online.
Having a negative reputation online can negatively affect your business without you ever hearing a word from a disgruntled customer or without even saying a single word in defense to the negative comment. Let’s face it. Online reputation management plays a crucial role in today’s digital business landscape.
Wow – Yet again, another wonderful blog worth reading. And
ORM in my opinion is a definite must! One cannot afford to have a bad
reputation in the online community and not be aware of it, It will affect the
way you are perceived online and can be extremely negative for any Business, Especially
those online.Thanks for sharing your knowledge, I always find your Blog to be a wonderfull reading experience.
Thanks Byron for the comment.
The problem is that many people believes that an ORM strategy should only be in place to counter negative feedback. ORM can also play a role with your social media marketing, search engine optimization, and offline marketing campaigns.
Thanks for your feedback Anton. And yes – Sadly most people think ORM is only a way to counter negative feedback and hype, Fortunately ORM provides a lot more than just the basic Reputation Visibility and tracking.
One thing which I’m sure you will agree on – A cheap ORM system is still better than not having a ORM system in place at all?
Indeed Byron, but it all depends on the nature of your business.
Having a good online reputation is so important in the current day of social media. You can work for years to build your professional reputation or business reputation and it can become quite tarnished in a few days with social media outlets or customer reviews. It really is important to take a proactive approach so if and when a negative comment is made about you it can be cleared up quickly.