Bad PR, negative press and damaging reviews happen. You can’t always prevent it but you can mitigate its effects. This is where Online Reputation Management comes in, using detailed, effective methods to deal with bad media exposure. Anyone using the Internet knows how quickly anything can go viral, like videos, photos, and tweets have all have made the front page, headline news regardless of whether it’s an individual in the public eye, mega-corporation, or small business. Once the damaging information is out there and gains traction, you’re already behind the eight balls and are playing catch up. Timely, professional, and targeted online reputation management helps you manage the effects and take charge of your message. Online Reputation Management (ORM) is a key component of your web search marketing strategy, how to reverse search engine optimization (SEO) fits into your ORM efforts, and how online public relations differs from ORM.
An effective search engine marketing campaign serves to build trust and create a positive reputation among current and future customers. The appearance of bad reviews and negative comments on search engines can undo the hard work of your marketing strategy. Add to this the increasing prevalence of results from social media sites. And, a negative tweet or rating posting has the potential to reap damaging effects. And, these are tough to minimize once they’re posted.
This is why ORM is a crucial aspect of your marketing efforts. Without it, you don’t control the site results surrounding your business and prone to being the victim of bad press.
Benchmark Your Current Online Brand Position.
Monitoring of website, social media pages and blog visits are a basic metric of every online reputation management campaign. The first steps of measurement should begin with a benchmark for a number of visits, unique visitors, page views per visit, and time spent on the online brand site. From there, you can graduate to measuring a visitor’s progress, activity associated with pages, the success of campaign components, then begin to calculate the ROI of your online marketing efforts.
Any basic, free analytics program, Google Analytics, StatCounter, even your weblog files, can give you basic numbers of web visitors. However, to find deeper stats in online reputation management, you may want to consider a paid research and monitoring service that uses a full-service professional analytics package.
Consider Trends of Associated Brand Discussions.
Online brand management considers monitoring stats which answer these questions: What do people say about your brand? What is their mood, tone, and voice associated with brand discussions? Where are they talking about your brand? What demographic is listening and responding to brand discussions?
These questions are important in B2C and B2B marketing. It is because consumers are more likely to listen to each other than they are to react to brand advertising. They respond to family and friends first. Within social media platforms such as Linked In, Facebook and Twitter, social blog platforms of WordPress and Blogger, people are speaking about your products and services. They will tell their friends when they are happy or displeased with your brand. Monitoring of this activity enables brand managers to pick up comments and activity associated with a brand, immediately. And, while activity is taking place, and respond before negative sentiment spins out of control.
Evaluate Your Competition.
Reputation management includes competitive brand monitoring. There are competitors, partners, vendors, and other people who can affect the reputation of your brand. Monitoring their activity assists you in measuring the success of your online reputation management efforts. For example, is your biggest competitor ranked in search engine results within industry targeted categories? Are your vendors and partners talking about you in their online communication or within social media?
Determining the success in online reputation management enables brand managers and individuals to understand trends of discussions happening within social media. They are associated with the brand and could be affecting brand value and acceptance. Evaluating competitive strategy and associated brand positions provide additional insight. Online brand strategy today requires a fluid position, one that considers the newest technologies and emerging platforms for measurement. Moreover, brand success will be determine by current and future trends in technology of online and mobile brand management.
Online Reputation Search Engine Optimization: Cornerstone for ORM Strategy
Part of the online reputation management technique is using online reputation SEO strategies. In contrast, to reverse SEO which is used to lessen the appearances of negative publicity, ORM SEO is the effort made to dominate the SERP landscape with your own content before negative press shows up and has an opportunity to gain traction. When you have positive, company-controlled and -monitored content ranking high on search engines, then it’s more difficult for reputation-damaging mentions to show up ahead of your positive content.
Online Reputation Management Protects Your Company
Your company’s web search marketing plan should involve the important aspect of ORM. When you use the multiple techniques involved in ORM, you protect your image from the negative effects of damaging publicity. Reverse SEO tactics decrease the search engine rank of potentially negative press that is already appearing on the first page of SERPs. Proactive ORM SEO techniques then protect against future instances of negative mentions and prevent them from gaining visibility in search engines results. With vigilant monitoring of your company’s online presence, you’ll ready to quickly recognize potentially damaging mentions and respond in a timely manner to mitigate the possible issue.
Unfortunately, many companies don’t acknowledge the need for ORM until after they’re already in damage control mode. Thus, protecting the hard work that you put into your business is best to perform with preventative action.