Online Reputation Management (ORM) – Why you need it
Inevitably in the lifespan of a business there is bound to be an unhappy customer or two. In the current age of social media, an angry customer has a more powerful voice. In fact, one disgruntled person can reek havoc on your businesses reputation. Perhaps they leave a negative remark on an online review site, or a comment on a blog. Or worse, your business receives bad press that gets picked up by several media outlets. Before you know it, you could find that negative reviews dominate the first page of google search results when potential customers or clients search on your company name.
What to do?
Online reputation management ideally should be implemented long before there ever is a problem. But realistically, in most cases that isn’t the case and your company is faced with some cleaning up to do.
In my experience here are some effective measures you can take and tools you can use to help resurrect your businesses reputation.
1. Google Adwords – If you aren’t bidding on your company name, do so. This will help to push the negative listings down a ways on the search results. Your first goal is to get the offending site ‘below the fold’ on the first page of results and ranking for your company name in paid search can achieve that.
2. Build Your Social Identity – Create social profiles for your company name on websites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. All of these sites have authoritative domains and it should be very easy for you to rank for your company name with a well optimized profile on any of the three. Seek out lesser known social networking sites as well and genuinely participate and build your profile. Share with the public who you are, what you offer and the positives about your business. Be open and engage.
3. Press Releases – Have your PR firm send out regular positive press releases that are optimized for your company name. Bookmark the reviews in social bookmarking sites, share them on twitter, build a buzz around what your company is doing that is good and draw public attention to that.
4. Consider a sub-domain – If there is a section of your website that could warrant a subdomain – consider implementing that. For example you might have a careers section on your site where you post open positions. Have the section be careers.yourdomain.com. It’s possible that the sub-domain could secure a position in the search results and further push the negative site down in the listings.
5. Link Build to positive mentions – Build links to any page that is talking about your company in a positive light. This will help that page to gain authority and could potentially move the positive site up higher in the search results.
6. Monitor your company on Wikipedia – Wikipedia generally ranks highly for company names which is wonderful. However anyone can make changes to a wikipedia entry. You should constantly monitor yours by using a service like Wiki Alarm which will email you when the entry has been modified.
7. Get a Good SEO who understands ORM – An SEO can work together with your PR firm to do the tasks above for you, monitor social media and website mentions of your company and work continually to promote positive press about your business.
These are just a few suggestions for implementing an online reputation management campaign. The main goal is to interact with the public, share positive information about your company, and create positive news and buzz. The more quality information that is on the web, and the more accessible and responsive you are to your customers — the easier it will be to dominate the first page of search results with beneficial listings that present your company in a positive light.
Twitter Updates
I think this blog post was really a sweet beginning to a potential series of write ups about this topic. So many users act like they know what they’re talking about when it comes to this topic and really, nearly no one actually get it. You seem to really dominate it though, so I think you need to take it and run. Thank you!
Hi Val,
Thanks for your encouragement. I haven’t officially ‘launched’ yet so wasn’t really expecting visitors — excuse my dust!
Take care,
Lori
ORM has really become a very important part of any online marketing campaign. Thanks for sharing these tips.
Social media is something you just cannot ignore. This is a very broad term so let’s look at a few of the key ways to use this strategy to get more traffic.
Good read … headline catchy … good points, some of which I have learned along the way as well (humility, grace, layoff the controversial stuff). Will share with my colleagues at work as we begin blogging from a corporate perspective. Thanks!
I’m generally not the guy to post my opinion on other’s articles, but for your post I just needed to do it. I have been searching in your blog a lot recently and I’m really impressed, I think you could potentially emerge as one of the main voices for your niche. Not sure what your workload is like in life, but if you began devoting more time to posting here, I would bet you would begin getting a mass of visitors eventually. With advertisements, it might emerge as a sweet second income stream. Just a concept to ponder. Good luck!
Everyone does have access on the internet and either its a traditional business or online business you should be monitoring your online reputation. One mistake and a customer can cause bad reputation towards your business, and you’ll never know what effect it’ll bring towards your business. Monitoring and managing your online reputation is very important as knowing it ahead of time will give you the chance to do something about it.