Reputation Management: The Good and the Bad Side

The way the majority perceives about your brand makes a big impact to your sales; it can hurt it or boost it. As a business owner, you might be thinking about possible ways to shape up people’s perception about you in the most desirable way. Your audience is definitely the people whom you do not have full control with, thus, what they say about you leaves you no choice but to accept it. However, there is a way to increase good contents about you and decrease negative organic ones. You may have heard about Online Reputation Management all over the internet but never really knew what it is all about.

Online Reputation Management refers to the practice of shaping public perception towards an organization or person. It involves monitoring a brand’s web and social media channels, creation of campaigns to increase positive visibility, and more. Some companies often hand the job to reputation management firms to ensure quality. Some also chooses to do it in-house as they find it more practical; either way, reputation management if done right, could lead to so many benefits. Moreover, reputation management may also go through some challenges that if not addressed, could potentially ruin the whole goal for a good brand image.

At the end of this article, the reader will be able to:

1. Know the benefits of reputation management
2. Recognize possible challenges about ORM
3. Know the current top reputation management agencies

The Good Sides

Reputation management is an excellent tool to the overall wellness of a business, only if done the right way. To give you a bit of a rough idea as to why reputation management is important for your business, here are some of the advantages given by the article Top 5 Benefits of Online Reputation Management – InteractiveBees.com:

1. Tells Your Best Story – one of the best practice in reputation management is the creation of contents about a business, organization, person’s information, etc. in order to convey a more positive outlook to the audiences. It is also a great way to narrate about the best of your brand, thus, inflicting a more positive perception among prospects.
2. Removes Inappropriate Listings – online reputation management can help remove your brand in negative listings where it doesn’t actually belong. Being in a negative listing could hurt your sales and degrade your brand’s reputation. Reputation management also helps in removing inappropriate contents, therefore making more space for helpful listings of keywords relevant to your business.
3. Cost-effective – if you consider all the costs incurred out of battling through online reputation issues and compare it to the cost of investing to reputation management agencies, you’ll come to a conclusion that reputation management is worth the money. What is allocating some budget for reputation management cost when having more trust from customers and gradual sales increase is the return?
4. Promotes Online Word-of-Mouth – having great posts, reviews, or messages about your brand could increase digital word-of-mouth. All of these positive feedbacks from customers who had great experiences about your product or service will all pile up and will eventually make your brand be loved and recommendable to others.
5. Controls Your Google Ranking – as a basis for online reputation management, SEO provides Google top 10 management of keywords related to your brand and niche. These top 10 results are believed to be the most watched search results. An excellent reputation management allows you to take part in the top 10 search query results to Google whenever relevant keywords are entered.

So those are some of the many benefits of online reputation management to your brand. To make all these merits achievable, make sure you do the right practices when dealing with ORM. If you don’t have the capacity to do it in-house, you may outsource it to the professionals. Seeing reliable reputation management agency reviews could greatly help in selecting the right service to invest to.

The Bad Sides

Out of all the excellent benefits of online reputation management are some drawbacks that every business manager should know. To be able to have a successful reputation management, one must also learn how to deal with the challenges that goes along with it. To give you a shortlist of these drawbacks, read this article from LinkedIn.com – Online Reputation Management Challenges:

1. Bad Press – press, blog posts, reviews, and other form of content that addresses your brand is something out of your control. One of the biggest challenges in reputation management is the dealing of negative contents. Reputation management is basically all about this challenge; attempting to eliminate or at least limit all the bad press on the web.
2. Business Owners Tend To Neglect Their Online Reputation Because They Are Doing Well Offline. This is one of the most common mistakes ever committed by business owners, which still happens nowadays. It is important to also take into consideration about how the digital majority perceives about your brand since a lot of offline purchases nowadays are results of online research.
3. Many Think There Is Nothing They Could Do About Bad Press. Many business owners are aware about negative contents about them; in fact, they even know who made it. However, they believe that there is nothing they can do about it.

Tips to an Effective Reputation Management

Those are examples of the challenges of reputation management that if not given attention, may lead to some serious damage to your brand reputation. According to the same article, there are possible ways business owners can do in order to combat those challenges:

1. Assess Online Reputation – before taking further steps, first thing you need to do is know what the current status of your business is. You may do so by conducting searches on search engines and whichever you can think of. Look for contents pertaining about your company whether that’s bad, good or in the middle. Scribble everything in a spreadsheet to make it easier for you to come up to a conclusion.
2. Secure Your Brand – it is extremely important that you secure your company’s name; otherwise, someone could easily take advantage of it and ruin your image. You may register your business’ website or blog under your name. Registering your company’s name to social media sites like LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook, and Twitter could also increase your brand’s credibility.
3. Join Conversations – once your website or blog page is up and secured, you may finally join discussions. Create a blog post and encourage readers to give their point of view through the comments. You may also use the social media by doing Q&A’s on twitter or start a poll on Facebook.
4. Be Proactive With Feed backs – from the very first pace of a prospect converting to a paying customer and afterwards, you must always encourage those people to give feed backs and convey their concerns on your social media channels or on your company’s blog.
5. Establish Authority – establishing authority will increase your credibility; as a return, people will pay you more respect and increase their trust. This greatly helps your online reputation management as customers will say more positive things about you and will seek you out online.
6. Set Up Online Customer Support Service – your business may have a hotline or email address for customer support; however, not everybody are aware about that. It is always better to create an online customer support service where customers can easily address their complaints or give feed backs about a great experience. Many people tend to publish their feed backs on their social media page simply because they do not know where else to; this leaves other people a perception about how good or bad your brand is; if you are not there to clear things up and assess the said customer, negative perceptions about you could easily grow without you knowing.
7. Gather and Publish Client Testimonials – each testimony made by customers can be a great tool for reputation management. You may gather them and post it on your company’s blog or social media pages. Positive Facebook posts, tweets, and reviews from your customers are strongly helpful; they can be used to improve a good brand image for your business.
8. Know About SEO – online reputation management is not actually all about SEO; however, the two likely goes together. Because to have an effective reputation management, you need to know the qualified keywords relevant to your niche to make it easier for you to create contents that will promote your brand. SEO can be too complex at some point, reputation management agencies have people in them who specializes with the course.
9. Track Online Reputation – one of the keys to a successful e reputation management is to constantly monitor your brand’s reputation. This can be the most laborious bit if you try and do it manually; using reputation management tools will allow you to easily track your current stand.
10. Make Perpetual ORM Effort – you may have already established your reputation management with social media, your website is already secured, and your contents are already published; well dear friend, the job does not end there. Nowadays, online reputation tend to change faster than that of offline; thus, if you don’t dedicate enough time to constantly monitor and update your brand’s reputation, you might just open your web browser one day and see something you won’t like.

Those are the good and the bad sides of reputation management that every businessmen need to know. To have a successful brand, you must need to first know the ins and outs of reputation management as it is the key to a better brand reputation, otherwise, you rely the job to a reputation management company that is also a great deal as they know the job better.

Ever wondered how to improve online reputation management of your business? A list of top reputation management agencies may help you with your needs. Reputation management agency reviews from CrowdReviews.com provides you a reliable, genuine, and up to date feed backs from real customers.

• About
• Latest Posts

Keith Moore

Keith Moore has worked with several leading Android development agencies to build customized mobile apps enabling businesses to extend the use of their services to smart phones and mobile devices.

Latest posts by Keith Moore (see all)

• What Is the Best PoS Software and How to Choose It? - January 12, 2017
• What Does Database Management Software Do for Small Businesses? - January 9, 2017
• What Are the Distinct Features of the Top App Development Software? - January 8, 2017