The Essentials of Online Reputation Management

What Is Online Reputation manAGEMENT?

Online reputation management simply means managing search engine results for brand queries as well as negative reviews on the many social media and user driven platforms. Online reputation management is no longer just for the big brands. It is now a necessity for all brands, big or small, to adopt reputation management measures. With the enhanced use of social media, and the rise in popularity of user-generated review sites such as SiteJabber, Amazon reviews, Yelp, and Glassdoor, managing and supervising the reputation of your brand has never been more important. With more power in the hands of the consumer to express their point of view about or to talk about their experiences with a brand, online reputation management has become more challenging for companies. The large number of consumer voices involved, negative feedback, complaints, and diffuse nature of commenting online has made reputation management very difficult.

Understanding The Basic Of Online Reputation Management

The current technology, especially social media, has made it easier than ever to do a thorough background check on a product or a service before customers make a purchase. In fact, consumers use the opinion of other online users in their buying process. Some studies suggest that users will trust an online review as much as if it was a personal recommendation. You can learn what other consumers believe about a service or a product, the experience of using the product, or why they love or hate it under a minute. As a result, managing your brand reputation is critically important if you want to maintain the customer trust you have built over time. A strong reputation means a strong brand and that can have a huge impact on the sustainability and growth of a business.

Managing Social Media & Review Sites

As the Internet has matured and the technologies have evolved, the way companies do business online has also had to adapt. In the past a company didn’t necessarily actively engage their consumers online. The dynamics of the online space have significantly shifted and consumers have a very powerful platform to make their voices heard. How should you interact with online users when they are talking about your brand? As a best practice, reputation management can be summarized in the following two points. 1. Always Respond One of the best ways to handle online criticism is to respond quickly, professionally, and where possible try to take the conversation offline. By taking this approach you are demonstrating that you care and this helps to build your brand’s trust and credibility. 2. Be Transparent As much as transparency is considered a healthy means of enhancing the trust of your brand, being too transparent may simply work against you. How transparent you are is a balancing act. Information that has the potential to be negative or damaging to the business needs to have a thoughtful response. Although we’ve just talked about how to deal with the negative sentiment, these two principles should be applied to positive sentiment as well. 

Advanced Tactics

Here are two additional tactics that you can use to manage your online reputation effectively.

Own the search engine results page

Appearing at the top of Google search results for your brand terms is incredibly powerful. Online reputation management uses SEO to help rank content about your brand, products and services. SEO is fundamentally done by optimizing on-page factors like meta-data, content, site architecture, and off-page factors such as back linking and social sharing. By maximizing the amount of content about your brand that you have control of, you'll provide search engines will more opportunities to return that content in their search results. This helps to make a good first impression whenever someone tries to find information about you or your business. Online reputation management should be focused on establishing a positive long-term presence for your business. A positive business reputation that lasts online can be created by establishing captivating social profiles, a sustained positive review presence, and having high-quality content.

Be social

Instead of waiting for something negative to show up online, use social media to proactively to build your reputation. Engage and share with your audience and look for opportunities to join conversations around the things that your audience is talking about. The key is to be authentic and sincere in your interactions. Make sure to claim as many of the social media profiles and accounts as you can so that they can’t be hijacked. You will need to monitor these channels for mentions of your brand, products and services. There are literally dozens of different solutions available to help with this, but the quickest way to get up and running is to use the free Google Alerts tool. You can start by setting alerts for any instance of your brand name, products, services or even mentions of your competitors.

Bottom Line On Online Reputation Management

No matter the kind of business you are in your customers are going to be talking about your brand in one way or another. They’re leaving comments and reviews online, or they’re posting and sharing on social media. If by any chance you are underestimating the impact of these multiple voices of online users, think again. Adopt a proactive reputation management strategy that includes a process for responding to both negative and positive online content about your brand. You shouldn’t be caught unaware because it takes a lot of effort to rebuild your reputation once it’s been affected. Keep in mind the key to being effective is to respond, and to not ignore the conversations that are happening about your brand.