Online Reputation Management

Once starting to socialize your brand on the web, you are getting to face the consumer generated media(CGM), and since search engines find relevant users opinions it is an important factor for the online reputation and marketing. CGM began to affect internet search results more meaningfully, because the users find relevant the other people's opinions, the desire to change those results naturally follows. The online reputation management is the activity that claims to manage your brand's online reputation, it combines public relations, online marketing and search engine marketing, it enables you to protect and manage your web activity, resulting a positive web presence of  it.

An ORM strategy can be divided into tree main stages:

Monitoring is the first step when starting an ORM activity. Due to the complexity and size of the Internet it can be difficult to continuously monitor everything that was being said about your brand, or your business. Monitoring is an essential and useful tactic for controlling adverse information within your search engine space. There are services available that do internet monitoring, beside that they can also monitor the demands and  trends on the market. Monitoring is a cost-effective strategy. For best results, it should be done daily. If  you haven't done ORM, and there is negative information about your brand in the pages of the search engine results, it will require a major campaign in order to clean up the results.  Here  we list some of  the existing monitoring tools:  www.goole.com/alerts – alerting when a keyterm is used or in news or in blog posts (similar are also www.news.google.com, www.blogsearch.google.com), www.video.google.com/videosearch – will return video results matching the keywords,  www.blogpulse.com and www.technoratti.com  supply RSS feeds for updates, www.boardtracker.com can send SMSes about updates reffering specified keywords. Yahoo has a number of coworking companies (www.del.icio.us, www.flickr.com, www.pipes.yahoo.com/pipes, www.upcoming.yahoo.com,) offering similar services, RSS alerts posts from social media.  Also you can set up a custom search engine that will browse only some specified sites.
Analysing how your brand and reputation are affected by the  user created content. With RSS feed you can stay in touch with everything that is being said around your company and your brand from a  centralized service, without visiting many websites. Analysing your search engine space and the RSS feeds, you can develop an understanding of your competition and your environment. It is the need to determine what sites are listed in the search results of your brand or your company name, by categorizing them into consumer reviews, blogs, forums etc. Find which of these results you'd like to move up or down, find their quality value  - page rank, link number, subscriber number, influence. Analyse your internet tools that you have in control and can help you to influence over the consumer generated data. These can be the blogs of your company, press release, articles, corporate sites, product/services sites, other sister/micro sites of your company, partner sites etc. Aggregating this data it will help you to make a picture of the reputation of your company and its search engine reputation over time.
Influencing.  Being actively involved in the conversations online is the main criteria that should be followed when influencing the online conversations and posts. Sources of potential reputation problems are also sources of new oportunities(like improving the perception about your brand), if taking regular activity in this domain. Positive postings about your brand is great,  responding to these shows acknowledgement, that the company is listening, it can place these conversations upper in the SERPs. When the posts have a negative character,  it's more difficult to deal with, but some of them can give guidelines of improvement they can show consumer's discontent and what has been done wrong, the others can be criticism, all of them  require tedious work to clean them up or to make them to get lower places in the SERP.  
Responding is an efficient way to be in touch with your customers, bloggers or the publishers, it shows transparency, honesty and openess toward the public.  Sometimes the counter-attack may need a payed advertising campaign  to get immediate placement in the search engine results. Social Media is a great tool for leading conversations about your brand or company. As mentioned in WebPR chapter Social Media is your online assets that helps to influence the results, therefore make sure  that your corporate sites, corporate blogs are fully search engine optimized.  Being aware of  that your brand is exposed to attacks you can choose to do also proactive actions, by buying the negative name domains (like www.yourcompanysucks.com), to prevent competitors or angry customers from buying these, leading to their presence in the SERPs.
ORM is linked to  webPR, whilst online reputation managemet is about monitoring and analysing, webPR is helping a company to respond, engage, to prevent a reputation crisis or to recover from it. Having a good ORM strategy you have the oportunity to identify new sources and build new links, which will bring brand recognition.

Online Reputation Management Benefits

Online Reputation Management has become rapidly an essencial strategy for the companies marketing online. Bad reputation can cost companies loss of considerable amounts of money. Well planned reputation management requires persistence and can ensure the ongoing success of the company, it can improve customer satisfaction by gaining insights from consumers about what is good and bad about your products or services. ORM provides early warning systems for reactive and defensive PR. It helps to identify gaps for products and services which can be developed for profitable niche markets. You can increase perceptions of brand by creating opportunities to listen to and engage consumers.  It gives oportunities to gain insights into online networks, keywords and key phrases found in user-generated content, which can help to strengthen  natural search results about the company, product, or business.