#1 Captivating How-to guide for Online Reputation Management

Our Online Reputation dictates how well a customer perceives our brand. Online Reputation Management helps you get ahead in the game and remain competitive. However, it takes time and you need to craft a strategy to build an unforgettable reputation online.

The fact that 97% of people read reviews for local businesses further states the importance of your online reputation. There is a saying as below

“A product is as good as what customer says about it”

This saying summarizes the fact that your product should be robust in the eyes of the customer. By putting a strategy and investing in Online Reputation Management you are giving your product a chance to get ahead in the game.

In this world where everybody is free to express their opinion, it’s beyond your control to stop others from writing about your brand. However, when you have an Online Reputation Management system in place you give structure to how your online reputation will be managed.

Let’s look at the steps as part of that system.

Monitor Your Reputation

You need to invest time and energy to ensure that you are giving attention to all the channels associated with your brand. While you may say that I am already monitoring and building my reputation on social media via content and another mechanism. However, The question that you need to ask is is that enough? There are various other places apart from social media where you need to keep an eye. For e.g. your reviews on Google My Business, Yelp are other mediums.

Below are two specific examples that will help you understand more and build your Online Reputation Management plan accordingly.

Say you are in the food business, while you may be busy writing fantastic content and promoting your business on social media, you need to spare time to look at the what are customer saying about your on the delivery apps (UberEats, Just Eat, GrubHub, etc.). If you miss monitoring that all the efforts you put in on social media will go in vain.

If you are selling products on Amazon, eBay, Etsy, or other such platforms you need to regularly monitor and track the reviews about what customers are saying there.

As per research, over 70% of people only act after reading a review and if your product is dominated by the negative review you can imagine how much it will impact your brand and sales.

There are billions of bloggers and channels where your brand might be getting talked about but it’s not humanly possible to manually track them that’s where below online tools come handy.

• Reputology
• Mention
• Google Alerts

Build a Response Action Plan

Now you have put in the time and analyzed your presence and reputation online. However, this is just the tip of the iceberg as the journey to build and maintain the reputation begins now.

After the thorough analysis, as a business owner, you need to put together a team of professionals to build an Online Reputation Management team headed by an ORM (Online Reputation Manager). The first task of the ORM will be to study the analysis and put together a content strategy to build a positive image. He needs to train the other team members on the values and vision of the company and begin the process of replying to the negative reviews.

Along with that, he needs to work with the content writer, graphics designer, and also the product/service team to ensure that adequate action is being taken on the negative reviews posted. He then needs to work on identifying the right keywords and build and promote positive content. A review once posted cannot be overturned but if you work on getting the product/service better and prepare the right content it can always be suppressed.

Once the framework and strategy have been finalized. The ORM assigns roles to different people and works on executing the strategy to perfection.

“Ideas don’t make you rich. The correct execution of ideas does.” – Felix Dennis

Continue Reading if you want to build a solid system to manage your reputation.