Understanding Online Reputation Management
Businesses are plagued by the same things individuals face: the fast moving, unforgiving internet. Whatever is said or written about a company will be recorded on the worldwide web. One comment or a single mistake can go viral, leading to repeated references and a crash in online web reputation.
How Does This Happen?
You might wonder why some companies manage to maintain a 100% perfect record and some do not. One firm might legitimately have received no complaints. Another might have handled several or suffered from a poor reputation owing to bad choices at the management level.
Perhaps, however, a rogue employee spread untrue rumors. Maybe a disgruntled customer chose to post mucky comments that could drag a business down. And maybe, just maybe, a team with great ratings knew what to do about that sort of thing.
Online Reputation Management
A company’s PR manager is tasked to mitigate the damage caused by negative reviews which could involve hiring an online reputation management firm. These firms handle the elements of PR which a Public Relations Officer is not concerned with; the ones behind the scenes traveling around the worldwide web. If you do not have a PR department, your ORM, on a contractual basis, can offer this service. He will provide confidential, customized support during business hours and beyond.
What an Online Reputation Manager Does
At the beginning, an ORM first assesses the current state of a client’s reputation. The client can learn some of the details via a link on the ORM website if they offer it. This will reveal the real state of a company’s reputation without the background details a professional will discover and address.
When the ORM discovers negative content, he waters it down. Extreme comments are reduced or erased. This is particularly helpful when someone is able to rant about a company uncontrollably without having to provide solid evidence to support any of his statements. Comments like these are emotionally motivated and frequently inaccurate. Even if the writer wanted to retract them he might have trouble, but the ORM can do it.
As a reputation manager, one needs to do more than dampen the flames of criticism. He must also make his client more fire-retardant by promoting him, using content to give his reputation a stronger basis for customers’ trust.
A Day in the Life of Online Reputation Management
When the Online Reputation Management firm gets started, he has a busy job ahead of him. There is plenty to do: finding every one of potentially millions of comments about the client’s business or personal behavior which link back to his professional reputation and just might be preventing him from expanding. Software tracks down these references and also finds the positives. By the end of that first few days or weeks, the figures will show where negative and positive comments sit on a scale.
Having located these items, the ORM must now get rid of some comments and decide how to maintain the company’s reputation from here. One way to do that is to write content on social media on a regular basis so the client is perceived as current and involved. This also ensures a social media site (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc.) continues to function. In a busy day, short updates to these sites are some of the first things to be forgotten. Professionals in this field frequently use SEO techniques to the client’s advantage.
The ORM monitors content using the same software that found bad press and deals with negatives, also advising the client about solutions. These could include regular or syndicated blog entries to increase a professional but friendly profile.
An Online Reputation Management consultant also teaches clients to understand what can be done without professional services to perpetuate a good situation. He will offer internet PR training, explaining the way Word Press and Facebook can be used to enhance a profile and how doing nothing will eventually cause a company to disappear, which is even worse than sustaining a bad reputation.