Let’s understand what does this term actually mean before going into how to manage.

You can understand by the word itself that it means managing your reputation. – Easy isn’t it?

Well, Reputation Management is a practice to take control of the online conversation. It has several strategies and techniques to ensure people their requisite materials. It also involves observing and influencing your business’s online reputation. You can control the search results by manipulating rankings and search manner.

Why is Online Reputation Management Important?

Online Reputation Management is important for you to survive and also excel in the competitive online market. This enables you to reflect your company in the users’ search results.  Your business earns multitude of optimistic reviews if you offer excellent services and products.

Sometimes, few negative reviews are not your fault at all. Don’t worry; having negative comment your website is very common. People have such psychological behavior to embrace negativity more than positivity. Therefore, they tend to be pessimistic online very easily.

However, few negative reviews can affect a business with thousands of positive reviews. Hence, reputation management is a necessary step to play in long run.

It lasts forever

These comments and reviews are online. They last forever and are accessed by millions of people. Sometimes even when you take down comments from one site, other domains still have it. So, this will have bad effect on you personally and professionally. You have to handle your critics very patiently and professionally without letting it affect your image.

Have Offline Impacts

These reputations have ever lasting impact on people and your business. However, they have offline impacts also in your organization. It affects your revenue, hiring, business deals, funding opportunities and retention. Consequently, all these jeopardize your further office running abilities.

There are other supportive arguments to start Online Reputation Management:

• Ensures a good Brand Image
• Proves your authenticity
• Builds trust and credibility
• Establish your authority on social networks or internet as whole

Why you need ORM?

Won’t you love if all problems go away on their own? Unfortunately, this cannot happen.

Online Reputation problem is not a digital issue but human problems. You need to manage this as well as your business. Therefore, unburden yourself with one aspect of reputation management with us.

How to Establish an Online Management?

If you just started a business or are looking for reputation management strategies, the best platform is online. With working online, you can reach millions of users at a time via different platforms. There are few ways you can adopt to build your online reputation;

Have a Blog

You must have a blog and update posts daily to reach out to your audience. Cover everything from your business activities and maintaining public relations to your products and services. The most noteworthy thing is to keep your blogs up-to-date. You must upload relevant content periodically like at least twice a week.

Get Registered in Directories

Have your site listed in some categories or directories to establish authenticity and foundation of trust. This will help in driving traffic to your site and furthermore assist in reputation building.

Encourage Reviews

Reviews are very essential to your business. Hence, ask your consumers to write review on your service, product or company. Moreover, you can write reviews on your suppliers or other partnered companies for increasing your reputation.

Gain Public Recognition

Publicity is a must to survive the competitive online market. You cannot build your reputation without any effort. You need to be recognized in public which can be done via blogs, advertisement and promotion.

Socialize your business

Make use of social media and its million users. As discussed earlier, people rely on internet and social media reviews before purchasing. Therefore, take into account such people and form an ORM strategy. If your business becomes social, you are more likely to have a better reputation.

 Steps to Protect Reputation

Recognize what you can manage

You must have a firm knowledge of what you can control and what you cannot. When you encourage your customers to write reviews, you cannot control on what they write. Therefore, just observe and respond to them in an affirmative manner as best as you can. This might take longer but it will definitely pay off.

Know how to Observe your Reputation

You can monitor your reputation in many ways. Some enterprises trust reputation management companies while others prefer Google Alerts, Monitor This or Social Mention. They track specific keywords and provide you immediate results. You will definitely be very busy with your business; therefore, you can trust us for reputation management strategy of your business.

Internet is Essential

May be you don’t rely on internet but your users and customers do. Therefore, you must take steps to monitor your online reputation. Internet gives you the best idea of both online and offline reputation of your business.

Mistakes Reputation Manager makes:

There are few common mistakes enterprises adopt to repair their reputation. However, these mistakes do a lot more damage than repairing the reputation. Let’s go through such mistakes briefly.

Paid Positive Reviews:

It is quite enticing to enhance your reputation with reputation management companies. These reputation managers take on varied measures like paying for positive reviews on websites. This might seem correct to you but it actually works opposite. It hurts your company’s reputation especially when appears in Google Search results.

Google actually reprimand such websites. It pushes the websites lower in results which will damage your reputation further. Therefore, keep your reviews authentic and genuine. Serve best products and services to your customers. Ask your customers to write review on your website and other relevant sites.

Support Trolls:

Trolls stay in internet forever. Hence, don’t engage yourself with negative comments too much. People post negative or defaming comments which could damage your reputation. Ensure never to fight or get caught up in some negative comments. Many company’s reputations have been damaged when negative comments were replied with fire backs. All these makes managers and companies look unprofessional.

Just consider them as another comment or ask them to contact you directly via email or other media.

Deceitful:

You must not be deceitful to your customer regarding your products or services. This is highly unethical but some companies do it anyway. You can make sale initially by lying but it will harm your long run play. Furthermore, you should be transparent and open to your clients.

Ignoring Customers:

Never ignore your customers because your business is all because of them. Handle your customers patiently whether they are optimistic or not to your business. Therefore, try to respond them and address them everything. This will bring you in the good books of your customer and will build a strong online presence.

Astroturfing

Astroturfing is the act of making anonymous accounts on different sites to create positive reviews, post advertising or even react to negative ones. This is similar to the paid positive reviews. It does more harm than good to your reputation. However, this also changes the purposes of reviews. Reviews are meant to be true and it should reflect your services. This gives wrong idea to people about your products and services. Hence, avoid astroturfing no matter how persuasive it sounds.
A bad reputation is bad for your business whether online or not. How do you respond to this? What measures you adopt to repair it? We have listed out some methods you can apply to mend your reputation.

Hostile SEO:

Implement SEO. Search engine is important in managing your reputation and your online presence. You need to optimize your website for it to appear in first or second page of search results. This is important for your website. If someone defames you online, you need to form a marketing strategy to increase the ranking of positive contents.

Remove Reviews:

You always have the option of removing some reviews which are not relevant to your service or false. Therefore, remove the reviews that are in improper language and damages your reputation.

Online Analysis:

When your business is under some serious reputation attack, you can go for cyber investigation. Hence, you can hire some professional investigators to search untraceable threats and attackers. These attacks can be via data cross-indexing, email tracing and other techniques.

Tips to Repair for Reputation