Online Reputation Management - Protect Your Brand
Online Reputation Management is a combination of online public relations and search engine marketing to help protect a brand on the internet.
More people are researching and sharing information online about brands relevant to them. And with the emergence of social media, consumers are looking beyond corporate websites and communications. This is where Online Reputation Management helps businesses to track and control what is being said about their brand. Are people building brand communities by discussing their positive experiences, or are they criticising a product or service that didn't deliver on its promise? Information can spread like wildfire on the internet, and a brand may be destroyed overnight by a blogger upset with a company.
Online Reputation Management ensures a brand attains high visibility and the top search engine rankings for all the good publicity. This subsequently pushes any negative or harmful results down the search engine listings and out of the public eye. But the focus is to capitalise on the positive stories about a brand as well as be an honest voice for the company when trouble does strike. A company’s brand may be affected by some or all of the sources listed below:
- Blogs
- Forums
- Consumer opinion websites
- Consumer complaint websites
- Social network sites including MySpace and Facebook
- Trademark infringement issues
- Competitor attacks
- Crisis management development
Monitor, Analyse, and Influence
Most marketing agencies that provide services in Online Reputation Management follow three steps:
- Monitor
- Analyse
- Influence
Employing this strategy can help maximise a brand's online opportunities while eliminate threats to a company’s image. There are a number of tools that can be used to monitor a brand's reputation - Marketing Pilgrim offers free tips on this. During analysis, it is important to discover the complete picture of the scenario before dealing with bad publicity. Then, influencing the search results involves responding honestly to negative stories, and possibly offering insight into the company's side of the story.
