| Online reputation management means monitoring and managing your business' brand perception in the online world. The reputation management definition can be separated into three different categories.
Obviously, it is managing the reputation of a company, but it can be for a company of any size, whether it is a larger company who wants to self-promote, or a just-established company which wants to get its name out there.
With the help of Brick Marketing, you can use any of these types of reputation management:
• Building – This type of reputation management has to do with building the reputation for a business that is just getting started. It includes building a good reputation to maintaining it for your business.
• Maintenance – Reputation management meant to just keep a company’s good image superior in the public eye is called maintenance. This is meant for companies that are already established, and have a good reputation already.
• Recovery – If your business has gotten a bad reputation for any reason, then the recovery portion of reputation management is for you. Brick Marketing works to hide the bad reputation with good marketing and self-promotion.
Why do you need an online reputation?
There are more opportunities than ever before to quickly rank negative or slanderous results. If you don’t protect yourself, someone can easily post a comment, make a video, create a blog post, file a complaint, promote your competition, develop a hate site and more.
Or even worse, an angry employee will leave the company with revenge on their mind and reek havoc with to yours. Managing your online reputation isn’t shameless promotion, it’s a means of defense and best practice.
Who cares about your online reputation?
Your online reputation can be seen in a number of ways. Whether you’re seeking employment, selling a product, looking for an investor or trying to score a date, someone is going to turn to a search engine to learn more about you.
The most common groups are:
• Consumers
• Business partners
• Stock holders
• Marketers
• Journalists
• Prospective employers
• Co-workers
• Personal contacts
How can a negative online reputation affect you?
The results of a negative online reputation may be as subtle as a user clicking on a competitor’s search result instead of yours or as damaging as an industry-wide boycott of your products and/or services. Besides the obvious financial implications of having a company’s credibility called into question, there are potential legal ramifications that could dominate your time and cripple your financial sustainability, as well.
This will often cement trusted news and legal results in the top search rankings so that even if a case is dismissed or resolved, you’ll be living with the consequences for years to come. Things like, determining who is responsible for the negative reputation, if you’ll have to reposition or remove certain employees or dealing with potential losses in workforce, add further monetary, morale and growth consequences.
How do you assess your online reputation?
Most users won’t look past the first page or two of search results, so you only need to look at a couple pages for each keyword on the major search engines. Start with simple searches on Google, Yahoo and MSN for all that apply:
• Your Name
• Company
• Brand(s)
• Product(s)
• High profile employees
• Handles/usernames
Build Your Reputation:
The following are simple steps you can take to build your own online reputation.
Protect Your Name:
The first step to building your online reputation is to register your username. Purchase all relevant domains and TLDs. If you haven’t yet, also register your username with the essential social networks.
Set Privacy Settings:
Once you’ve secured your username, you need to protect it. If it’s a personal account, manage your privacy settings. With the widespread adoption of social networking, more and more users have found themselves facing a reputation disaster at the hand of drunk photos, inappropriate remarks, slanderous statements or other poor decisions.
Online Reputation Monitoring:
An important component to building your online reputation is to monitor what is already being said.
Tools to Track Your Online Reputation:
Finally set up alerts and feeds to catch every mention of your name, company, brand, employees, domain, etc. You want to get notification before a problem escalates or enters the top search results. There are hundreds of tools that can help you manage your online reputation.
And final steps are :
• Get Involved
• Be Accessible
• Own Your Negatives
• Build Credibility
• Respond to Criticism
reputation management |
