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Guess what is the thing more important than data security for a company? Obviously, Reputation! And it cannot be handed off just to anyone unless the person has a lot of experience. And not only experience, unless the person proves himself to be worthy to your business empire.
If we talk about reality, then most big businesses, various brands, and personalities all of them have Public Relations experts and Online Reputation Management experts who are specifically dedicated to managing brand and media mentions of your business.
Social media is a big player in the field of marketing. It has the capability of taking a small out of context story to a trending topic across the world. And since in the absence of right person actively monitoring your brand and media mentions, it is impossible to know what is being said about you and where.
Moreover, it is necessary as you need to know how to respond to each incident accurately. Here, we have listed 7 Most Important Questions that you need to ask while hiring a PR or ORM firm to protect and manage your brand as well as reputation online.
Questions to Ask While Hiring a PR or ORM agency
1. Which services that you include in your Public Relation (PR) and Operation Relation Management (ORM)?
This is the most important question that you can ask for a PR and ORM agency. As there are so many services that can fall under the category of PR and ORM. If an agency is asking you to pay a fixed amount, then it is quite important to know for which services you are paying before signing a contract.
Also, you should ask about various potential tasks such as brand monitoring, legal representation, defamation, negative customer reviews, suppression of negative search listings, positive PR and content creation.
2. When you get a potential problem in front of you, what steps do you take?
Majorly, all the ORM agencies offer services that range from online monitoring to entire management as well as brand restoration. And the investment of time and money varies heavily in these cases.
If you don’t have any clue about which action is being taken while a problem comes, then you will not be able to manage your reputation online. Also, you will not be able to know what to expect once an attack comes.
3. Do you guarantee that you will monitor my brand online across all the platforms?
This question has two inbuilt questions. First is, it asks whether your brand is going to be monitored online. Secondly, it asks where it will be monitored and how. It is really important to know as there are various tools such as Google alerts which are good for monitoring brand mentions. But its limitation is that it only works when new content appears within Google.
Who will take care of blogs, search results, videos, forums and more? Hence, you need to first make sure that your ORM agency monitors brand mentions on all the platforms.
4. Can you remove existing harmful content ranking in Google?
The major business behind several Online Reputation Management Agencies is to remove negative rankings in the search results. Every case has its own complications and this can result in heavy variation in pricing.
In order to remove rankings from the search results, it usually takes legal action and direct contact to Google. An agency requires creating new content and rank it above the negative content just to push the negative content down. But it can affect the future reputation once the negative content comes up in the results.
5. Which kind of information would you require in order to know about me or my business?
Reputation management comes in various shapes and sizes. Will you want to protect your personal name, brand name, reviews for products within the company or you would want to secure almost everything?
Prior to meet an Online Reputation Management agency, you should have a clear picture of which type of services you are looking for and then how would you want them to be taken care of. Bigger firms actively include their employees within their monitoring.
Whatever is the size of your business and brand, putting everything out there for your Online Reputation Management agency to consider first is the best option.
6. How much time would it require to clean up the existing media disaster we have?
In the majority of cases, no one goes to Online Reputation Management until a problem comes. It means that there are already various issues that need to be resolved first.
Neither all the ORM cases are the same nor the way they are resolved. Suppression of search engine listings can take a long duration of months while removal of online companies and reviews can be cleared up in days.
Since time is always going to be billed, please ensure that you know what needs to be addressed, how much time will it take and what it will cost.
7. How can I help in the ORM process?
There is nothing free in this world. If we talk about reputation, you will want to save money on it. You can ask your ORM process what exactly they are going to be working on and tell that you have the required skills to perform some tasks on your end.
In this way, you will be able to save some money and can accelerate the overall process.
Prior to Hiring Your Next Online Reputation Management or Public Relations Agency
A lot of money is spent on reputation management, Public relations and disaster discovery every year. Majority of this money is spent at the time when brands are already damaged and trying to repair.
In order to minimize the costs and exposure, you should have a reputation management plan before the disaster comes. Also, you should have your own questions which are not covered in this blog.
