What is Online Reputation Management
Managing Reputation Online - An Introduction to ORM
Nov 4, 2009
Online Reputation Management (ORM), may be defined as the process of monitoring a brand online, effectively dealing with any adverse or negative publicity as also pro-actively protecting the brand via conversation channels. ORM, in other words, is being watchful about the status of the brand and the adverse comments reviewers make about the brand and taking prompt steps to mitigate any damage that could potentially endanger its standing in the market.
Need for Online Reputation Management (ORM)
All businesses today have to cope with the pressures of free market economy where competition is rife. It is common knowledge that to build a great brand, it takes a long time, lot of money and untiring efforts. For instance, a product launch may entail countless TV commercials, a plethora of press and electronic media advertisements and other large-scale publicity measures.
But the fact is, people are freely commenting all the time about a business or its products and principally the brand. Any negative publicity of a brand can spread like a virus and businesses have to be always on the alert to defend its brand. Without a proper ORM in place, the sedulously built brand image can be quickly and easily destroyed by external forces.
Internet Reputation or Online Reputation
In today’s age of the Internet, the fair image of a company’s brand is ever at risk. It hardly takes time for something negative to be posted on the web to render incalculable harm and damage the brand. Reconstructing the brand image thereafter will become a Herculean task.
One thing that never works is to persuade the reviewer or a critic to delete the negative information off the web. This only will further strengthen the obduracy of the critics to post more negative blog entries and even publicize the fact the company cannot digest constructive criticism.
The most effective way to overcome the negative web pages is to take steps to prevent it by getting into the first page of search results. Instead ensure popular web engines get comments that are positive onto the first page of the web results.
This is an exercise in search engine optimization (SEO) and there are two ways to achieve this. If there are already enough web pages that refer to the brand in a positive light but are not outranking the negative pages, steps must be taken to bolster these pages up in the search rankings to defeat the negative pages.
If, on the other hand there are not many positive web pages, immediate steps must be taken to create fresh pages. Think of ways to get some links to these new pages so they get crawled and indexed by the search engines. The more links one gets to those pages, the higher they will appear in the search results trouncing the damaging web pages.
Reputation management is critically important even if there are no online negative reviews about the brand. The best defense for online reputation is to take a few proactive and preventive measures. As such, one should be constantly creating positive pages that come up high in the search results. If this is done, then a bad post, whenever it happens, will go unnoticed.
Managing Reputation Online
But this is not to say that all criticisms about a brand should be brushed aside and shoved under the carpet. All genuine concerns and fair criticisms must be professionally addressed in the new web pages without any reference to the negative pages to keep the mischief-mongers at bay.
Online reputation management is today an emerging industry and many companies seriously consider outsourcing ORM to ward off all possible damages to the brand. The simple question is - why should any company chance losing valuable brand reputation and market image when ORM is both effective and inexpensive.
 |
