Few things are more crucial than the online reputation of your company. Customers, employees, and investors all benefit from it. As a result, you'll be able to grow your company more efficiently and generate a higher return on investment. Online reputation management is the most effective technique to maintain your brand's image.
Unfortunately, far too many businesses wait until they're in the throes of a public relations disaster before investing in their online reputation. That is mostly the fault of the industry, as we have done a bad job of communicating what reputation management is and why it is required.
- The process of regulating a person's, company's, or brand's online narrative is known as online reputation management.
- It entails reputation safeguarding, monitoring, crisis management, and rehabilitation.
- Before making a purchase, 88 percent of shoppers conduct online research.
What is online reputation management (ORM) and how does it work?
Reputation Management on the Internet
The process of controlling online information about a person, company, or brand is known as online reputation management, or ORM. ORM's main purpose is to create an accurate, long-lasting, and manageable search landscape that reflects an organization's or CEO's entire life cycle.
The procedure entails creating and optimising web content in order to dominate Google's first page for branded search queries. Review management, social media marketing, public relations, search engine optimization, and customer service methods are all common components of an ORM strategy.
Digital reputation management, on the other hand, falls under the umbrella of search engine optimization (SEO).
Why? Because, whether you're focusing on brand health, full-on damage management, or reputation rehabilitation, controlling what people see when they search your brand should be your first priority.
In fact, for any query, 98 percent of searchers will not look past the first page of Google results. As a result, the content that appears on page one has a huge influence on public perception. You must control the material that shows on page one when stakeholders search for your brand if you want to own your story.
However, there are a slew of digital platforms that play a role in online reputation management. Actively controlling all of them is required to create a positive impression of your brand. The channels can be classified into the following groups.
Owned media
Any online media that you control, such as your brand's website, blogs, or pages on third-party websites, is considered owned media.
This is one area where SEO is quite important. You'll have more influence over your online reputation if you can get more controllable web sites on the first page of Google, Yahoo, Bing, or other search engines.
Earned media is a term that refers to media that has been paid for.
Earned media refers to all of your brand's free exposure and coverage via third-party outlets, such as:
- Press attention
- Other websites' articles and blog posts
- Discussion boards (Quora, Reddit, etc.)
- Listings from third parties (Capterra, Glassdoor, Trustpilot, etc.)
- Review sites that you don't have control over (Google, Yelp, etc.)
Positive brand mentions strengthen trust with both your audience and Google, thus earned media is critical for online reputation management. Furthermore, as the Google algorithm notices a rising amount of favourable off-page signals, it will give your brand greater authority and credibility, resulting in higher ranks.
Communicated media
Any sort of content marketing that is shared between your brand and others is referred to as shared media. Your many social media accounts, for example, are shared media. Despite the fact that you own your profiles and generate individual social media postings, anyone can leave positive or negative feedback.
It's crucial to pay attention to how consumers interact with your brand online, particularly on social media. It can harm your brand's image if you have a lot of unfavourable reviews on Facebook or negative criticism on Twitter.
Make a concentrated effort to track any brand references in real time and get help from online reputation management firms to deal with unfavourable criticism.
Commercial media
All channels, platforms, and digital marketing vehicles where you must pay to have your business featured are considered paid media. Paid media includes social media ads, Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, LinkedIn sponsored messaging, display ads, native ads, and sponsored content.
Paid media gives you the chance to reinforce your favoured story. Consumers trust organic search results more than commercials, thus it's not as valuable as earned or owned media.
The Importance of Reputation Management
We've already touched on this, but it's worth emphasising how powerful bad reviews are in influencing brand sentiment.
Those are mind-boggling figures that communicate a very simple story. The majority of buyers look for reviews, trust them, and base their selections on what they find.
The value of your brand's reputation is measured in billions of dollars.
A poor encounter may become viral in a matter of hours thanks to the speed and reach of social media, destroying your company's brand. A United Airlines flight crew hauled a passenger off a plane in 2017, and the incident was captured on video. With over 100 million views on social media, the video rapidly became viral.
What's the end result? United Airlines' stock price has plummeted by almost a billion dollars. This and several such examples demonstrate how damaging negative press can be to your brand.
Results on sales
Your internet reputation has an impact on sales as well. Before making a purchase, 88 percent of buyers conduct research online. If a streak of unfavourable reviews or publicity about your brand appears, it may sour potential buyers' perceptions of your firm and cause them to purchase from one of your competitors.
If consumers see a lot of great reviews and press, on the other hand, they're more likely to trust your brand and buy anything.
Feedback from customers
You can also obtain vital client feedback by managing your internet reputation. As a consequence, you'll be able to improve your products and services, as well as your overall consumer experience.
To improve your business, you should conduct client surveys and polls. Unsolicited input, on the other hand, may reveal new and better ways to serve your target audience.
Examples of online reputation management
Online reputation management isn't just for companies in trouble. Prevention is, in fact, an important aspect of reputation management. Negative news and opinions can now go viral in a second, causing brand reputation damage in real time.
Here are some examples of how Stridec has assisted customers in enhancing their internet reputations:
- An executive at a multibillion-dollar corporation whose company suffered a setback when an unpleasant story was published on a prominent news website. Despite the fact that the article was false, it was picked up by other media outlets. The tale finally made its way to the executive's social media accounts, having a negative impact on the company's bottom line. The executive search environment was rebalanced by Stridec to convey a truer and more holistic account of the individual's accomplishments.
- A prominent financial services firm whose revenues were being harmed by a few bad evaluations. A few unfavourable evaluations, unfortunately, had a significant impact. During the sales process, prospective customers frequently brought up the reviews, which influenced the company's ability to close deals. Stridec regained control of Google's first page for the company.
- An executive at a well-known company who was troubled by an out-of-date news item. When people searched for the executive's name on Google, they came across an old story about a failed business agreement. Stridec relocated the obsolete and irrelevant content further down in Google's search results, where it would be discovered by fewer stakeholders.
As you can see from the examples above, internet reputation issues may have a significant influence on a company's bottom line. Furthermore, issues arising from a company's central figure can harm the brand's reputation.
How does online reputation management differ for businesses?
The majority of internet reputation management companies concentrate on local business listings or personal branding.
However, when it comes to enterprise businesses, size matters. Millions of customers are affected by mistakes. As a result, online and physical brand messaging is no longer within the authority of business owners.
Consider the case of a three-hour downtime on your website. Customers may not even realise if it's a small business website. That same three-hour window, on the other hand, could cost an enterprise ecommerce company millions of dollars in revenue. Worse worse, it would almost certainly make the evening news.
What if you're a business-to-business platform like Slack or Facebook? Prepare yourself for three hours of Armageddon-themed memes on social media.
Consider the consequences of a mistake that causes actual harm to a consumer or a heinous act by a company boss. What if your website is hacked, allowing unscrupulous actors access to your client information?
Small firms can recover fast, but large corporations will be hit by a storm that might last weeks, months, or even years.
How does executive online reputation management differ?
In the public view, many brands have become inextricably linked to their founder or CEO. This is especially true if the company has a compelling genesis story. Elon Musk, for example, is inextricably linked to Tesla and SpaceX. He's also built a brand for himself, promoting his own narrative and encouraging nicknames like "The real-life Iron Man."
Although not every CEO aspires to be famous, it is an unavoidable consequence of leading a well-known company. CEOs are under the limelight thanks to social media. Customers, on the other hand, take mistakes quite seriously.
CEOs' controversial personal behaviour might lead to negative press and social media boycotts. A single Tweet can cause stock prices to collapse and investors to flee.
As a result, CEO reputation management develops an executive's legacy outside of their function as a company leader.
7 Techniques for Brand Reputation Management on the Internet
Let's take a look at the most crucial steps you can take to improve your online brand reputation.
1. Conduct a brand audit
A brand audit is an important first step in managing your online reputation. Take stock of your complete online presence, including your website, blog, social media profiles, and third-party company profiles, and assess it.
Examine the results of your Google search as well. When consumers look up your brand name and relevant keywords, what do they find? Are there any unfavourable or off-brand effects? Are there too many news pieces and not enough brand assets that can be controlled? Remember that up until something awful happens, positive articles are excellent. Then, overnight, those tales would become unfavourable mentions.
2. Keep an eye on brand mentions
Actively monitoring brand mentions on the web is an efficient strategy to manage your brand online. Set up notifications for your brand name and associated keywords, and then respond swiftly to any favourable or bad mentions. This covers social media mentions as well as any mentions of your brand in blog articles, forums, videos, and other places.
The quicker you can spot and eliminate bad references, the better. Most people are willing to overlook honest mistakes if the company makes a sincere effort to correct the problem.
3. Respond to unfavourable online reviews
You may be tempted to disregard negative online reviews in the hopes that they would disappear, but this is a mistake. Negative reviews provide your company the chance to address issues head on, exhibit customer care, and build a more genuine connection with future clients.
Regardless of whether the review is nice or negative, you must respond to it. Thank customers for their suggestions, even if they're negative. And, whenever possible, provide real-world answers to challenges.
Customers don't want a discount for 20% off their next purchase if they had a negative experience. There will be no next purchase if you take this route. Show customers that you stand behind your brand and that they can rely on you to make things right.
Your online reputation will benefit if you can turn a poor review into a pleasant client experience.
4. Invest in search engine optimization
Although SEO is an important aspect of online reputation management, the approach is different.
The most common application of SEO is to rank multiple pages on a single website for a variety of search queries. In terms of ORM, however, we employ SEO to rank a variety of websites for a few brand-specific queries. As a result, you'll be able to relegate negative search results to the bottom of the page and replace them with material that you control.
Your branded SEO approach should concentrate on optimising as many controllable web pages for brand-related keywords as feasible.
- Create useful content for reviews and leadership pages on your website.
- Create backlinks to important pages that you want to rank on Google's first page.
- Utilize digital PR, events, sponsorships, and influencer marketing to generate good brand mentions.
- Use popular social media channels such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram to promote your business.
- Claim and optimise relevant third-party profiles like Google My Company, Yelp, Trustpilot, and business profiles where you have content control.
When it comes to reputation management SEO, keep in mind that Google almost always favours authoritative, reliable sources. Focus on improving the authority and trustworthiness of your own website, as well as optimising your presence on authoritative third-party sites, in light of this.
5. Use public relations to your advantage
By producing positive news for your brand, good public relations can help you boost your internet reputation. This press can take a variety of forms, including:
- Guest posts on high-quality websites are a great way to get your name out there.
- Interviews with business leaders
- Publications
- Personalized events
- Organize charitable events
- Co-marketing with well-known people or companies in your field Podcast appearances
- You'll be doing live streams where you'll be answering any and all queries.
- Any serious errors made by your company should be addressed in public statements.
In terms of online reputation management, the purpose of your public relations operations is to showcase your main values and develop trust and expertise.
6. Encourage customers to leave feedback.
Encourage customers to post reviews on sites like Google, Yelp, Trustpilot, Capterra, and others as part of your online reputation management strategy. Because favourable evaluations can take up significant space in Google's search results and influence customer behaviour, this is a good thing.
You can do a few things to encourage customers to submit reviews, including:
- Send emails to your consumers asking them to review your business.
- Provide explicit directions on where and how they may leave a review to make it simple for them.
- Offer them discounts or other unique offers in exchange for submitting a review.
- Respond to all reviews, favourable and negative, to make customers feel as if their input is valued
Customer reviews are one of your most valuable tools when it comes to managing your internet reputation. Encourage customers to submit feedback on relevant, reputable review sites to take advantage of this.
See how Stridec transformed one of our clients' Trustpilot profile from three bad ratings to over 12,000 five-star "Excellent" evaluations.
7. Encourage people to share positive stuff.
Finally, promote content that promotes your brand positively, such as:
- Testimonials and reviews should be clearly displayed on your website.
- Sharing favourable reviews on social media once in a while, along with a thank you to the reviewer
- displaying substantial third-party brand endorsements
- collaborating with influencers to market your material
- Sharing content in which you are referenced positively
- promoting any collaborative activities with individuals or companies
When you create a link between what your brand does and what your audience cares about, you've succeeded in self-promotion.
There are nine tools for managing your online reputation.
Managing and tracking one's online reputation takes a lot of effort and time. Many tools exist to assist you track your internet reputation and monitor how your brand is perceived.
Here are nine of our favourite tools for managing your online reputation:
BrandMentions
BrandMentions gives you access to every social media platform as well as a range of blogs, news, and review sites. It then gives you an overview of how and by whom your brand is being discussed. You may also observe who is talking about your competitors, giving you an idea of their reputation management strategies.
Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo is a website that allows you to search the internet for material based on keywords or brand names. You can check how far a piece of information has been shared, as well as who has shared it and where. This is an excellent tool for detecting unfavourable sentiment against your business and measuring your online share of voice.
Mention
Brands can use Mention to monitor social media and online conversations about their products. The platform gives you detailed information on who is mentioning your brand and what they are saying. You can directly respond to specific social media conversations and produce social media content depending on audience trends you've noticed.
Google Alerts
Google Alerts is a free application that allows you to keep track of any mentions of your company, brand, products, keywords, and competitors. It will automatically send you an email with a link once it discovers a mention of the terms you typed.
Socialmention
Socialmention is a search engine that allows you to enter a term and select from a number of search possibilities. It can search blogs, microblogs, pictures, and more, displaying the most recent results. Filtering at a granular level allows you to identify comments about your brand that you might otherwise overlook.
Reputology
Reputology is a review monitoring technology that can assist a company in managing its online reputation. It can keep track of your brand's evaluations across numerous platforms and allow you to reply to them. It also allows you to poll clients automatically at important moments in the customer experience, allowing you to discover and address issues before they become major.
Birdeye
To provide great client experiences, Birdeye provides enterprise-level internet reputation management technologies. Its ability to automatically solicit evaluations from customers and then reply to those reviews on more than 150 review sites is one of its strongest features. This makes obtaining positive consumer feedback as well as responding to any negative feedback more easier.
GatherUp
GatherUp is a comprehensive set of solutions that focuses on both the customer experience and the administration of online reviews. It has review request, review response, and social media options that make it simple to share your favourable feedback. It also includes a review widget that can be integrated into any website. As a result, you may collect feedback from customers and keep track of your internet reputation.
Meltwater
Meltwater is a brand reputation monitoring platform that is all-in-one. It allows you to track social media, internet news, print media, podcasts, review sites, and more. It also comes with a social media management tool for sharing material and interacting with followers. It also comes with a social influencer management tool that can be used to find relevant influencers and perform reputation management campaigns.
When should you engage a company to manage your internet reputation?
When it comes to selecting online reputation management services, there are numerous factors to consider. Before reaching a final decision, ask yourself the following questions.
- Do you have any experience dealing with enterprise brands such as ours?
- Can you describe your data management, privacy, and security systems?
- Can you show a track record of long-term results, not just short-term successes?
- Do you have any customers who can be contacted for references?
- Have you been in business for a long time?
For Fortune 1000 companies, the stakes are quite high. Hiring, retention, sales, and investor confidence are all impacted by a bad reputation. As a result, working with a company that properly knows Google's operations is important.
Your success is a success for us. Inquire about how we can assist you with establishing a much stronger online presence for your brand.
FAQs
What is the definition of online reputation management?
The process of controlling online information about a person, company, or brand is known as online reputation management, or ORM. ORM's main purpose is to create an accurate, long-lasting, and manageable search landscape that reflects an organization's or CEO's entire life cycle.
What are the functions of online reputation management services?
To dominate the first page of Google, online reputation management entails publishing and optimising digital material. Review management, social media marketing, public relations, search engine optimization, and customer service methods are all common components of an ORM strategy.