The other day, I started talking about where to check your reputation management, but I didn’t realised that I hadn’t made an introduction to what reputation management was. Glen Allsopp made me realise this with his comment.
So, What is Online Reputation Management?
Online Reputation Management (ORM) are the different techniques used to monitor and manage what people is saying about your brand, your product or even about you. For example, what is people saying about you on forums or blogs, or even what the search engine rankings say about you.
Why should you monitor your ORM?
Lets put it this way, if you were to hire a new company that would deliver food for you and your employees everyday, you would probably want to know what other people is saying about them, so you would go to Google and type their name, there you would enter to all results that seem to give their opinion on the company. All this opinions that you would see on different websites, would be really valuable for you as you will find them real, not paid by the company and not posted on testimonials page of the company’s website.
So what if someone do this with your company and they see all negative results? They would probably run away and never come back, that is the reason why you should monitor your ORM.
There are different types of results you can get when doing a search for any company’s name:
Possitive: results that have feedback that would encourage you to hire that company.
Neutral: probably informative results that wouldn’t change your opinion on the company.
Negative: resuts that have feedback that would make you not even call the company.
How can you monitor ORM?
I already gave some ways on the other post I made about ORM but will soon continue writing about more of them.
What can we do if there is a negative result?
It would really depend on the type of website the result is at:
Blogs: you could contact the blog administrator to let him know why what he wrote is wrong or leave a comment on the blog post.
Forums: you could register and post in the thread with your answer to the negative feedback.
Static Websites: you could contact the site administrator and ask him to remove the negative feedback if it is not correct.
But what can we do if we made a mistake and we can’t answer to them?
Here I will just talk what you can do with search engines, but I will try to cover more things about this in future posts.
What you can and should do is try to generate neutral/possitive pages and rank them above the negative ones, if you can manage to control the first 30 results of the serps, that should give you total control lon your search engine reputation.
