Online Reputation Management
Online Reputation Management (ORM) is the process of maintaining a positive reputation of your online presence by minimizing negative comments or information about your company. This is done primarily through the process of Search Engine Optimization and this process helps in Search Engine Marketing and Social Media Marketing.
Your business heavily depends on your reputation. If your reputation is being slandered, it will reflect in irreplaceable damages to your business. And if that happens online, you can only imagine how fast the negative publicity will travel and how much harm that can cause you. Imagine if the fist page of your company’s website is full of negative reviews by dissatisfied customers? Do you think a visitor to your page will wait to browse your website further after reading the negative remarks? That is why Online Reputation Management is of paramount importance for your business.
The primary concern while managing your online reputation is to be humble. Even the way you manage your online reputation reflects on your reputation. If you are a business in a competitive market, you have to be prepared to tackle negative opinions and slandering by your competitors as well as dissatisfied clientele. You have to be prepared and ready. The best way to tackle this situation is to humbly accept your faults, if any and divert attention to your positive points. Your public acceptance of faults doesn’t decrease your credibility. Rather it makes your presence authentic and reliable. Since the market is full of competitions and a customer is most often spoilt for choice, he will look for services that are trustworthy and responsible. If your company did something to deserve the negative criticism, be responsible enough to own up to it. This helps to bring out your humane side, which actually makes your customer base identify with you. Chances are that he will go for your company even if he is provided with a spotless choice, because the choice most probably looks fake to him. Thus, a part of Online Reputation Management is to be skilled enough to take advantage of even the negative reviews and making them work in your favor.
Angry counter attacks and reactions rarely work. It will only further damage your reputation by strengthening the negative reviews about your organization. Since dealing with such situation needs quality expertise, you need a dedicated PR team that is solely responsible for your online presence and repute. Your PR team not only helps you rectify negative publicity, but also helps create positive publicity to take attention away from the former.
SEO is of prime importance to help your online reputation grow. The more you create positive and relevant content for your website, the more your page will become searchable. Building a positive reputation includes creating powerful content, building backlinks, taking part in threads and forums discussing your services and products and engaging in the interactions, posting SEO optimized press releases and articles and regularly maintaining a corporate blog. Optimized advertising, direct mail campaigning, posting videos and podcasting are also relevant in Online Reputation Management.
Thus, in a nutshell, Online Reputation Management helps you achieve the following:
• Spread your name throughout the online society, thus generating increasing responses.
• Tackle negative reviews and minimize slanderous attacks by competitors and dissatisfied customers.
• Create a powerful online personal brand
• Increase SEM and Social Media marketing.
• Increase positive traffic generation to your online domains.
• Generate business, thus increasing the ROI.
