Online Reputation Management

Shape the Buzz around Your Company with Social Media Content

Many businesses are scared or nervous about the "Web 2.0" phenomenon - not the least of which because they fear having their corporate reputation damaged by "god knows what" being written about them at blogs, social networking sites and other online forms of sharing, voting, reviewing, rating. How do you mitigate the risk involved in all that cyber-chatter, right?

It's natural to fear the unknown, and who likes a bad review? But remember - as we always tell our clients: The conversation about your brand is going on anyway online; isn't it better that you know about it?

And better still, that you DO something about what's being said online about your company. There are basically two ways you can go about online reputation management (ORM). You can:

• Be reactive: Address opinions about your brand by blogging, leaving comments in other blogs, social networking sites. Listen, then respond, explain, demonstrate, if need be, make amends.
• Be proactive: Set the tone around your brand online by creating social media spaces, and take the time to nuture these spots and grow fan-sumers.
  

You can see how the benefits of social media are so interconnected. Using social media for the purposes of ORM provides an early warning system for defensive PR.

One cool offshoot of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is that you can manipulate the page 1 search results for a term related to your brand/business by create a lot of search-engine-optimized positive content. Your search results - generated in large part by content on social media sites - will bump any negative coverage off on Google's page 1.

Online reputation monitoring results in turning up all kinds of people research: from discovering who the real influencers are in your market space online, to uncovering customer evangelists.