Online Reputation Management: Best Tips

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Just a decade ago, companies and celebrities seemed concerned about issues like PR and reputation management. Brand perceptions were one-sided, customers had little room for feedback, and it seemed small brands had little to worry about.

After all, they could just ignore the company’s products and services, but it had little impact on their perception. Now, however, we are in an era where people are constantly voicing their opinions about brands and services on multiple platforms online.

Online marketing experts have spent a lot of time advising local businesses on how to manage ratings and reviews – but reputation can have a much bigger impact than Yelp and Google reviews. There’s hardly a business out there that does not occasionally have issues with a customer.

Before things are resolved, a customer believes that the only way to satisfy them is through a public forum, and they feel that they should let people know about their business. The Internet is thus significantly breaking down barriers between customers – word of mouth can now literally spread at the speed of light.

For businesses of all sizes and industries, the occasional dissatisfied customer is inevitable. With a phone or email resolution, most customer concerns can be resolved quickly and efficiently. However, when your customer represents themselves by leaving negative reviews about your business online, things can become increasingly complicated – and potentially problematic. The internet has significantly narrowed the gap between customers, allowing word-of-mouth to spread much faster and better than ever before.

Successful online reputation management (ORM) is much more than social media monitoring or traditional PR management. With the increasing popularity of social media platforms, news apps, blogs, third-party review portals, video platforms, and forums, it’s more important than ever to be strong online. Even for businesses that do not sell products or offer internet services, ORM is now considered important. In this post, we present the best tips for a successful ORM.

What is ORM (Online Reputation Management)?

ORM is a multi-faceted concept that aims to create a positive public perception of a brand, company, or individual. Reputation management involves monitoring reputation, addressing content or customer reviews that may be damaging to the brand, and applying policies to prevent and resolve reputation issues.

How does Online Reputation Management work?

In short, ORM focuses on monitoring and managing your brand’s reputation online, ensuring that your business is portrayed accurately and that potential customers get an impression of who you are and what you do.

This means that online reputation management encompasses multiple channels, and since it may seem overwhelming at first glance to cover these channels, let us look at them in terms of the PESO model. You can find a fairly comprehensive article on this topic here.

Why is Online Reputation Management important for companies?

Online reputation management for your brand has already been explained. But now let us see how your business can benefit from an effective ORM strategy.

1. Your feedback is valuable.

Monitoring is a key component of online reputation management. You can start gathering useful insights about customer satisfaction and feedback about your product or service. So, you can simply pay attention to what your customers have to say about your business before you do any surveys or go around the world soliciting customer feedback.

2. Influence decision-making.

Your customer base may have a lack of management of your online reputation. With 81% of buyers researching online before making a purchase, your online reputation is the deciding factor in their buying decision. And your online reputation is a true test of quality for your business. 88% of consumers read reviews to see if your business is reliable enough.

3. The “delete” button for negative reviews is not available.

It’s not just the North that remembers. The internet captures almost everything. Whatever people say about your online business will likely stay online, but you can change the negative opinions about your business. You can turn a dissatisfied customer into a loyal fan by giving the right answer.

4. It’s the online version of word of mouth.

85% of consumers consider online reviews their recommendations and trust them as much as a tip from a friend. If your reviews are flawless, that’s great, but what if there’s a bump and someone posts a well-reasoned negative comment? That can be a real bummer in this day and age of social media where news spreads like wildfire.

Best Online Reputation Management Tips:

1. Pay attention to your social media accounts.

It’s important to keep your company’s social media accounts updated regularly to create an organic following, simply by having multiple accounts for your business. By continually adding relevant and interesting content to your Social Media feeds, you can increase your influence, boost engagement, and interact with existing and potential customers. If you do not keep your social media accounts up to date, they may be too weak to outweigh negative comments on your account on the social platform.

2. Create a presence on all relevant web properties.

At the very least, your company should already be represented on the Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ accounts. If you are in a highly competitive and vertical market, you may also need to be active on some additional social media sites – there are dozens of them, sometimes specific to your industry.

For many B2B companies in the high-tech and/or professional space, it can also be useful to include LinkedIn managers and employees. Pinterest, Instagram, and Flickr may be necessary for visually-oriented products. Most companies will also benefit from certain videos posted on sites like YouTube and Vimeo.

3. Conduct an Online Reputation audit.

You need to conduct a comprehensive online reputation audit before implementing an ORM process. An online reputation audit is essentially about how you are perceived online and what problems you face when you challenge that perception. And to do that, you need to monitor your brand.

There is, of course, a way to do a quick audit of your brand name manually:

• Simply open an incognito Google search window and type in your brand name.
• Look closely at the pages on the very first page of that site.
• Identify and evaluate the Google My Business features on that page: ratings, comments, reviews, user-generated photos, etc.
• Separate sites that you control and have limited authority over. They are very manageable, you can reach the site owners and add/remove misleading posts through your social media accounts.
• For critical posts, you can reach out to the author and talk to them about their dissatisfaction or convince them that their company or product is being misperceived.
• Please read the review of these pages and try to understand the general feelings; this is an important step in further prioritizing the most pressing platforms.

4. Improve the visibility of your brand and your products on the Internet.

You may need to expand your website presence and social profiles if your company has brands and products whose visibility extends beyond your company name. Develop websites for all areas of your business that potential customers can search for by name, social media profiles, and other promotable material. If you do not claim your company’s additional brands and products, it could get complicated – and potentially expensive – if someone else reserves online use first.

5. Protect the people involved in the business.

Develop a strong social media presence for your names, owners, or managers, especially if they are distinctive. As I described above, if you withhold your privacy online, you are vulnerable to interference.

Some businesses are quite involved with their managers’ identities, and for them, a solid reputation management strategy is essential. Consumers often search for doctors, dentists, and lawyers by name (to name a few), so create guarantees for these individuals if they do not have any.

6. Update your blog regularly.

For several reasons, blogging is great for managing your online reputation. First and foremost, blogging regularly allows you to demonstrate your expertise and thinking in your field. Your blog also allows you to remain loyal by answering many common industry-related questions for your readers. In addition, blogging boosts local SEO rankings and creates content that can be shared on social media.

7. Encourage successful customers to give an evaluation.

Businesses that do not encourage satisfied customers to leave reviews on Google, Facebook, Yelp, Trip Advisor, and other platforms are at a disadvantage because people tend to complain about a good product or service rather than praise it.

Satisfied customers or customers who write online reviews are not hard to get, but they need some encouragement. It’s especially important to encourage satisfied customers to leave a review when your business responds to negative reviews in public to show that it cares about customer feedback.

Make sure your preferred review site offers the easiest and quickest way to do so. Businesses usually place links to popular review sites on their website. In the social media section of a company’s website, you can usually find Google Maps, Yelp, Facebook, and other sites. Be sure to focus on the site where your satisfied customers can easily leave positive reviews.

8. Develop an online strategy for reputation management

Now that you know what your brand’s online landscape looks like, it’s time to develop an online reputation management strategy. Before we get into the details, though, you need to be clear about your priorities.

• Prioritizing ORM

It can seem overwhelming to get started with online reputation management. Prioritization is therefore of utmost importance, as not every mention can be taken as a leap. Once your audit is complete, it should be easier to prioritize what to focus on first. Try to weigh some of the factors that your decision should have:

Determine your goals for online reputation management: it is advisable to focus on platforms that you have direct access to when it comes to response time. Within the tool Brand Monitoring, you can filter and monitor your information accordingly.

Set your constraints and limits: cheque how many resources can be allocated to the ORM project. And remember that this is an ongoing process. So make a realistic assessment.

Make your ORM a priority by impact: be realistic about the scope of the task. The impact is the main criterion for your selection because you need to try to allocate your resources to the channels that are most important to your business.

Task priority: which tasks should be tackled first and which are critical? There should be a plan in place to tackle critical and challenging tasks. It is not always the best option to do the easier tasks first.

Considering these factors, a matrix like the following can be created and the channels you start working on can most likely appear within these criteria.

9. Publish great content online

Your target audience will judge the content you publish online in various formats based on the nature of your brand and offerings. For example, if a company publishes blogs, videos, podcasts, infographics, illustrations, etc. online in an informative and insightful manner, the target audience will begin to see it as an authority on the subject of authority that cares about service quality and customers.

CONCLUSION

Following these tips can strengthen your company’s position when you leave a negative comment or review if you improve your online reputation management strategy. Although proactive reputation management will likely require an initial investment, it will also save you money when it’s almost inevitable. 

Think of it as a form of insurance – it will not prevent your company’s reputation from being attacked, but it will mitigate and prevent the damage. It’s important to plan for the worst-case scenario: if you and your business are criticized online, there are several strategies you can use to repair the damage.