No matter where you are in the business journey, it’s likely that you need Online Reputation Management, or ORM. This consists of the control of the narrative surrounding your brand. People should be able to hear your name, see your logo and have a good feeling about you. They might not know what that feeling is based on, but you’ll know: it’s based on your efforts to improve your online presence.
So, what does that consist of? We’re breaking down the steps to cultivating and managing a good online presence.
Why is online reputation management important?
Developing a brand reputation is important for many reasons. There are only three options: a good reputation, no reputation, and a bad reputation. However, there are really only two options, because people see no reputation and fear the worst. Brands without a fully informed presence online will be deemed untrustworthy or unprofessional, which is why a brand reputation management team is vital from the start of any business venture.
In turn, your brand reputation will directly affect sales. In an age of “voting with your wallet”, people refuse to support brands they find to have a bad reputation, whether it’s due to bad business operations or products.
There are two sides to online reputation management: the proactive and the reactive. This is the difference between knowing there is a hereditary disease in the family and taking steps to improve your health or trying to treat symptoms after the tests confirm you have the disease. Proactive is insurance and reactive is dealing with the fallout. It’s important to put proactive plans in place to ease the impact down the road, and reactive plans in place to lower the stress and side effects of managing a reputational scandal.
Proactive reputation management
Proactive reputation management is definitely the preferred approach, but although both are required to ensure a successful business, proactive is woefully ignored. This is probably due to the perception that it will cost, but like insurance, you’re paying a little now to not pay a lot down the line. Furthermore, proactive reputation management will ensure that a good reputation turns into sales, and therefore profits, better talent looking to work for you, and a gentler touch from authorities and the press in the future, should a reputational risk show itself.
Proactive reputation management involves creating a narrative around your company with the use of social media, but also gaining trust by causing your website to rise in SEO and adding as much information to external sources such as Wikipedia to ensure that people know you positively. As mentioned, without this online presence, brands are considered untrustworthy and unprofessional.
However, the other side of proactive reputation management is the lack of risks that can be exposed in the first place. You will need to get a team to look at the operations of your business and identify anywhere that might be a risk in the future. From there, the team can create a crisis management plan to give you a blueprint of how to handle these situations.
In the meantime, you can take steps to ensure that these risks don’t become problems, and then exposure. Make sure your compliance team is steadfast to ensure that no talk of employee or business operation problems get out into the world. Users today aren’t going to stand for employee mistreatment or unethically sourced materials and will vote with their wallet in the age of blacklisting businesses.
Reactive reputation management
Reactive reputational management is the other side of this coin. An Online Reputation Management team will not only create the crisis management plan, but ensure that you follow it to the letter and roll with the many punches that might befall you.
Every scenario is different, which is the strength of an online reputation management team, rather than trying to deal with it yourself: they will be able to adapt to the evolving narrative around you and make moves to deflate it. They might believe that the situation calls for a head-on approach, with a press conference and exposure, or a quiet dealing with the problem and the persons involved.
Online, this mostly revolves around SERPs, or Search Engine Results Page. If your problem was high profile enough to make the news, even a local blogger, chances are it’s going to appear on Google high up when people search your name. An online reputation management team can make moves to try and suppress these articles and webpages but it is easier to do when you already have a solid grasp of SEO amongst your already posted content.
Conclusion
An Online Reputation Management team can take your business’s hand and walk you through any turbulent times that might arise. They will take you through what content to post, what message to enforce, and what business practices to tighten up to put forward your brand’s best foot.
