If you are a business person, you may have already heard about online reputation management (ORM) all over the web before. But do you really understand what online reputation management means? If done right, reputation management makes a big impact to an organization, person, or an entity’s overall betterment. Having an excellent public image brings so many opportunities especially to a business; it is actually a proven way to boost sales and increase revenue. However, online reputation management is not as easy as ABC; there is definitely a broader definition and study about it. Unfortunately though, not everyone fully understands the ins-and-outs of online reputation management and many tend to believe the things that are not actually true about it.
This article aims to let the reader know about the most common misconceptions of reputation management and the actual facts behind it. You will also get to know some tips to having a stronger public perception towards your brand and a quick guide to choosing an online reputation management service if you already have too much on your plate and you don’t want to sacrifice the job of ORM.
Myths and the Actual Facts
- No Reviews, No Problem – many business owners tend to think that if there is no review about their business online, there is nothing to worry about. If there aren’t any things said about you, whether negative or positive, then, you don’t need reputation management anymore.
Fact: If your business’ website or social media pages do not have any reviews, people will never have hindsight whether your product or services are any good. Factor like star ratings and customer feedbacks are proven to potentially drive more traffic and sales to a business.
- It Is Better to Ignore Negative Feedbacks – not responding to negative comments is going to make things better as it will help you avoid getting into an argument. There is no way you can help or please embittered customers, and thus, ignoring them is the best thing to do.
Fact: Ignoring negative feedbacks and comments is actually wrong as it will only make the customer get annoyed at you even more. Reply to them and try to offer the best solutions you can give instead. Asking them to talk about their issue through a private message is always better.
- Online Perceptions Don’t Matter – online reviews, comments, and conversation thrown about your brand does not matter if you are well established offline. It is completely okay to ignore all the bad press thrown about you on the web as other brands also experience that.
Fact: The online world is such a huge community. What is being said about you online has great potential to hurt your sales offline. Not being able to address negative perceptions about you on the web is going to ruin your reputation management strategy.
- Deleting Negative Comments Solves It All – erasing negative feedbacks from your post, web pages, and all your other web pages can help in maintaining a good brand reputation. You have all the right to do it because it’s your own property.
Fact: deleting negative comments from customers will help you eliminate negative perceptions about your brand but that’s only for a short while. Deleting those comments does not solve the problem itself. You need to come up with the right remedy for your customer’s issues instead of deleting their comments.
- It Is Okay to Pay for Fake Reviews – paying people to write positive reviews about your brand is great to increase positive perceptions. No one will find out anyway, and it will help you drive more sales too.
Fact: Asking for fake reviews is a massive NO-GO for your reputation management online. If people will find out, not only will it ruin your brands image but will also hurt your sales big time.
How to Maintain a Strong Public Image?
Having a strong positive public image is what every business owners are after. Having people’s trust is the lifeblood of your venture, and you should do the things that will keep it. Maintaining a good public perception definitely does not happen overnight; you need to be consistently working for it. Below are some tips and guidelines in keeping a positive public image for your brand.
- Respond Professionally – having negative comments, reviews, and criticisms thrown at you is part of being in the business industry. As a professional business person, you also need to respond professionally, whether that’s positive or negative, nice or rude comments, choose to respond politely. Never let your personal thoughts and beliefs get through the way you address customer comments.
- Ask for Genuine Reviews – as mentioned earlier, paying for fake reviews is a massive mistake any reputation manager could ever make. One great reputation management tip is to ask customers for reviews whenever they made a purchase or availed a service. You may simply send them a friendly reminder asking for a brief feedback and that’s it. It would also be great to reward them for leaving feedbacks and comments; for example, a next purchase discount or points.
- Create Helpful Contents – one of the main tools for reputation management system is the creation of positive pieces of content about your brand and publishing it to your web channels for the public to see and read. To make it more relatable for your audience, try to make informative contents that people would find helpful. It’s okay to create campaigns for the purpose of marketing but do not over do it as your audience will get bored and will find your contents redundant and uninteresting. Learn to balance the concept of your contents.
- Extend Gratitude – there is nothing better than being appreciated. Same goes to your customers; being thanked and acknowledged makes them feel genuine and valued. This eventually results to a stronger customer bond and encourages the word-of-mouth.
- Apologize if Needed – being a business professional does not exclude you in committing mistakes. Having some lapses, big or small, is completely normal. In case these mistakes are passed through to your customer, it is completely okay to admit it and ask for an apology. People do appreciate humility and sincerity especially if it is coming from a well-established venture.
Those are some of the tips to a better reputation management for big companies or even small businesses. There are definitely more to mention and that is up for you to discover. Dedicating time and effort is very important to achieving a successful ORM. However, many business professionals like you may already have a lot of responsibilities, and you don’t have long to do reputation management tasks on your daily schedule. Therefore, you might need to consider outsourcing the job to reputation management firms.
What About Reputation Management?
Outsourcing to a reputation management agency can be a great help for you to better shape your brand’s public image. If you take the time to carefully hand pick a shortlist of the top online reputation management services of your choice and carefully conduct a screening process for each. If you have already come up with your best choice of the service provider to invest to, then, you will enjoy the benefits listed below based on the article Reputation Management – VJGInteractive.com.
- Prevent Negative Reputation – the purpose of ORM is essentially to prevent negative reputation towards a brand. Online reputation management professionals have better expertise in terms of preventing reputation dilemmas to occur, as they are paid to do the job, which means they have enough time to conduct monitoring making it easier for them to see if there are any issues that needs to be addressed.
- Better Crisis Management – the internet is such a massive community. A single piece of negative content towards your brand will take no time to ruin your reputation. ORM professionals are well skilled individuals in terms of resolving reputation crisis as they have access to the latest tools and techniques in terms of counteracting the problem.
- Brand Building – one of the main benefits of outsourcing to reputation management companies is they can help in successfully building your brand. Establishing a name on the web for people to recognize takes up a lot of time and dedication, which can be found in the right ORM service.
Knowing the importance of having a reputation management policy is crucial to every business. A good reputation management helps a lot on the overall wellness of an organization, person, and entity or on an ordinary business. If you are not working on with ORM for your company, then, you better start now, and you will see the massive difference it will give.
As a final tip, if you are thinking about outsourcing to an ORM service, don’t be fooled by a lot of false promises. To help you with that, online reputation management services reviews from CrowdReviews.com gives you a list of authentic feedbacks from real customers. You may also want to check the latest recap of the top online reputation management services and see which one is currently on the lead.
Keith Moore
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