5 Steps to Managing Your Business' Online Reputation

THIS IS PART 3 IN A SERIES ABOUT MANAGING YOUR ONLINE REPUTATION. READ Part 1 & Part 2

There's a ton of work that goes into managing your reputation online. In fact, it can get so involved that there are ORM firms (like us) specializing in taking care of businesses' online image.

Although it is a complex operation with many moving parts, it's easy for anyone to understand the process if we break it down into its five key steps. Even a small business with little experience or resources can use these five key steps to manage its reputation in a simple, straightforward way.

Assess Your Current Reputation

The first step is to research your online reputation and assess it. You'll gain a general understanding of how people see your company and find any negative content that you need to deal with.

Search the Internet

Start by simply searching for your name in Google or another major search engine. This is self-explanatory and you've undoubtedly done it before, but there are a few ways to make your search more effective.

First, you should go anonymous. Your browser brings back specific results tailored to you based on your preferences, browsing history, filters, and other factors. You want to see yourself the way any other web user would see you. There are three simple ways to go anonymous:

Use a private mode On Google Chrome, this is called "Incognito." Each browser has its own private browsing feature such as this. It doesn't save any data from your activity, which includes your preferences and search history.

Log out

If you're using Google, log out of all Google products such as Gmail and YouTube. They're all interconnected and what you've done on Gmail or YouTube influences your Google search results.

Wipe the slate

Delete your browsing history and search history (the disadvantage here is that you'll lose your history and it's not as effective as the other two methods).

Another way to improve your search results is to refine your search by adding other keywords. One way to do this is to add a geographic marker, for example: "(business name) Las Vegas." This may turn up more specific results and weed out businesses with a similar name.

You can get creative with the keywords you add, but here are some ideas:

• "(Your business' name) best" 
• "(Your business' name) worst"
• "(Your business' name) review"
• "(Your business' name) unhappy"
• "(Your business' name) scam"

You can also add products names or keywords related to your products or services. Add misspellings into the mix as well, just in case a comment has your name misspelled. 

In addition to regular Google search, you should conduct an image search and a video search. Other places to search include:

• Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, whether you use them or not
• Business listing sites like Google My Business, Yelp, and CitySearch
• Amazon.com, eBay, and other ecommerce sites where your products are sold

Set Up Alerts

For ongoing monitoring, it's best to set up alerts. An alert notifies you whenever content that mentions you is posted anywhere on the Internet. This is important because you don't have time to search the Internet every day to see what's been posted about you. Alerts bring this information to you directly. Furthermore, you get notified in real time, which is important when there are negative comments that require immediate action.

Google Alerts

The most comprehensive alert program is Google Alerts and it's completely free. Google Alerts has a simple form where you add the keywords you'd like to be alerted for. Enter the keywords and your email, and Google will send you a message whenever you're mentioned online.

Social Media Alerts At the time of writing, social media sites don't have their own built-in native alert systems, but you can get alerts through some social media dashboards like Hootsuite Insights. A good comprehensive program that brings alerts from social media sites like Facebook and YouTube is SocialMention. SocialMention offers other tools like a keyword analyzer as well.

If This Then That (IFTTT)

If This Then That, or IFTTT, is a website that automates various online tasks. Users create "recipes" that the site follows. You can create one to scan for keywords on websites chosen by you. This is useful for closely monitoring industry websites rather than just the entire web. Like Google Alerts, you choose keywords and websites, and it searches and sends you alerts.

Just like your web search above, set up alerts for various keywords that are related to your brand. Set alerts for misspellings of your name, your name with a geographical marker, product names, your website URL, your name along with "review" and other keywords, and so on.

 Identify Changes Needed

From your web searches and your alerts, you should be able to find several pieces of content about your business. Now, it's time to evaluate this content.

The favorable content that you find gives you feedback and helps you understand how your advocates see your brand. Are they saying what you hoped they’d say? Are there any surprises? Are the comments accurate? Try to create a "big picture” and extrapolate from these results:

Natural Strengths Judging from your results, which things do you do well. For example, you might find that people are consistently pleased with how quickly you deliver your product or service. Whether you realized this or not, this is a natural strength and you can now make it a part of your marketing.

Which Efforts are Paying Off.

This feedback can help you see which of your efforts currently underway are paying off. For example, you might have created an updated product with a particular feature that you feel is beneficial to your customers. If you see them singing the praises of this feature, you know that you've done something right. 

The negative content, however, should be the highest priority. When looking at the negative content, consider these questions:

• Is there a misunderstanding underlying the negativity?
• Is there truth to what people are saying?
• Does the content warrant a response?
• Should the content be buried or removed?

The negative content will also contribute to your "big picture" and help you create a viable online reputation management strategy.

Determine Your Best Arenas

Aside from the content of comments and reviews, you should consider your best arenas online. This means the websites or platforms where people are talking about your brand. You might find that people are discussing you most on Facebook or Twitter, or that your own blog's comment threads have become a hot discussion spot. Customers may be talking about you on a forum or some other social media site you haven't started using yet.

Identifying your best arenas is important for your reputation management strategy because this is where you're going to focus your content and communication efforts. You'll also discover where your target market spends its time online, which is beneficial to all your marketing efforts as well. 

Create a Reputation Management Strategy

Now that you have a “big picture” idea of what people are saying about you and where, you can create your reputation management strategy. This includes what type of content will work best, where to publish it, and how to respond to both positive and negative comments.

Since content creation is a central part of online reputation management, you'll make decisions such as how long content should be, what it should be about, how often you'll publish it, and where you'll publish it. These are decisions you should make at first but refine over time by monitoring your efforts. We'll get into this in more detail in the next few modules.

Start Building

The final step is to start creating and publishing your content. You discover what works and what doesn't through trial and error. If one piece of content garnered a great response, you should figure out why and try to replicate its success. This doesn't mean creating the same or even necessarily a similar piece of content, but rather one that gets the same effect.

For example, you might find that a piece of content that answers one simple question in detail with resources got a great deal of social media engagement. You published it and it found its way to the top of the Google search results. The result is that when people Google your company's name, they'll see this informative article which answers an important question and points to further resources.

A good content strategy here would be to find other key questions your target market has and produce more articles that explain the answers in detail and point to further resources. Eventually, you'll have a large number of helpful articles out there, and this is the first thing people will see about your company when they search for it.

Here are some best practices for creating and publishing your content.

Use Consistent Branding

Every piece of content you publish online helps to create the image of your brand. This is the image people have of you in their mind. Using the example above, people will see you as a helpful resource for information when they have a question. Decide what type of image you want to create in your target audience's minds and produce content accordingly. 

Also, make sure that this image is consistent. Don't publish content that is "off-brand" or clashes with your image. 

Publish in the Right Places at the Right Times

Publish content regularly in the right places and at the right times. Create a schedule for publishing that includes where you'll publish and how often. You might say something like, "A weekly post on my own blog on Friday, a guest post on someone else's blog around the 1st and 15th of the month, one Facebook post each morning and one each afternoon, check for comments every morning," and so on.

Make this schedule based on what your research tells you is best, what you can handle, and what you think will work. The key is that you'll monitor your efforts and, through trial and error, discover what produces results. Make monitoring part of your schedule.

Respond to Audience Engagement

An important part of any online reputation management strategy is responding to customer engagement. Whether comments are good or bad, you need to respond to them and interact with your customers. This shows that you're a real human being and that you're there for them, listening, interacting, and offering help where needed. Try to say something of substance in your replies, rather than just "Thanks for the comment."

Some things you can do when you respond include:

• Thanking people for their information, opinion, etc.
• Thanking people for correcting you
• Clarifying with more information
• Answering questions
• Providing further help or resources

All of your responses should be positive, friendly, and personal. Focus on helping people and letting them get to know you. Make sure nothing you say could be taken the wrong way.

• Make all of your responses positive, friendly, and personal
• Focus on helping people and given them the opportunity to get to know you
• Make sure nothing can be taken the wrong way

Part 4 of this series can be found here.

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David Baer is a Digital Marketing Consultant helping consultants, advisors, and service professionals become more profitable online.

He is also a certified partner with the Reputation Management Service ReviewLead

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