Online Reputation Management

Do you know what customers – and potential customers – think about you?

Whether you’re a restaurant chain, a hot tech startup, or an agency with a host
of clients, it’s vital that you understand what the public says about you.
No matter how strong your products, they’re only as good as
buyers think they are.

It’s increasingly difficult for companies to protect their own image online. Social
media lets pretty much anyone say pretty much anything about you – and it
feels like there’s not much you can do about it.

A hands-on reputation management strategy can make a huge difference. By

paying close attention to what people say, you can give your brand some much-
needed prestige. That “it” factor.

Why is brand reputation important?

 Everyone lives online, and so does your brand
 Thanks to social media, blogs, and forums, gossip and rumors spread
quickly
 Potential buyers look for information online before making a purchase
 Misinformation and negative reviews can lead people to take their
business elsewhere
 A brand with a negative image has a very hard time selling

Steps for ORM

Step 1: Monitor your reputation

The first step is the most important. Without this, you really can’t do the rest.
This whole action plan is based on the premise that you hear what people say
about you, and then you respond.

So, first, you need to listen.

What you monitor depends on where your brand is present. Do people talk
about you on social media, on forums, or on review sites like TripAdvisor or
Amazon? Do you even know?

For starters, if you’re a restaurant, bar, or tourist attraction, you need to monitor
review sites. If you have a physical location, you can bet that people give their
opinions about you on Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Google. Even Google’s Paris office
gets reviews:
If you sell physical products, you also need to keep an eye on Amazon, eBay,
and other online retailers. Buyers rely on internet reviews before
choosing their phone, laptop, and even their car. In fact, 69% of
shoppers consult reviews before buying anything online.

On top of these obvious review sites, you also need to think about blogs.
Countless thousands (millions, even) of bloggers write and publish reviews
about anything from the best brunch spots to the perfect basketball shoes. So
you should be tracking these.

What about the social media conversations happening every day? To truly
manage your brand’s reputation, you need to track these too.

Conduct an online audit. If you already have an online monitoring program, you
already know what’s there, but it doesn’t hurt to do a Google search, see what is being
said, and where it lands in search results (second listing, first page). Do this both logged
into your Google account and logged out (or you can open an incognito tab in your
browser without having to actually log out by going to file > new incognito window).

I hope one thing is clear: people talk about your brand all over the internet, all
the time. Trying to monitor all these conversations on your own is a losing
battle. You need help.
Luckily, there are tools that do this for you. Since you can’t possibly hope to scan
every social media platform, forum, blog, and review site manually, you need an
app or a tool to monitor this online. Watch the video till the end because I am
going to tell you about them a little later
2. Build a Response Action Plan
If your business is a one-man-band, the answer to all of these questions might
be “me.” But if you have a larger organization you need to make the process
clear.

Assign someone (or a team) to do the work. They will need usernames and
passwords, branding guidelines, sign-off on copy/images, and the power to make
changes without a laborious approval process. It’s not critical this person be in
marketing or PR, as long as it’s someone who understands what you’re trying to
accomplish and can get you the information and answers you need in a timely manner.
You need to set expectations for the kinds of comments that they are free to
respond to, and those that require advice from management. Of course, this will
often be a case of common sense, but it’s important to identify these kinds of
comments from the beginning.

Design a framework for various situations and outcomes. Some examples

include:
 "Replacement" of content
 Review improvement
 Rating improvement
 Suppression of negative results
 Promotion of positive results
 Development of new third-party content
 Article placement

3. Handle negative comments with grace and humility

What do you do when you get that one-star review? It’s tempting to brush it off,
pretend it never happened, and hope that it gets buried in a sea of happy
customers.

But you can’t just ignore bad comments. They’re public, and they’ll probably be
online forever.
So what’s the right approach?
Polite. Professional. Friendly.- tone is always important. It doesn’t help your
cause to make things personal or take offense at every comment.

Reduce Response Time-  response time is one of the most important factors in
recovering from a harsh review. If you’re quick to help people who’ve had a bad
experience, they’re much more likely to change their opinion. There are two approaches
to it, proactive and reactive. Both have to co-exist, run in tandem and complement each other.

Follow up and assist privately- If the complaint is too severe, or if the individual
in question is past the point of winning over, ask for an email address or
phone number and smooth things over privately.
This definitely does not mean that you should try to remove complaints from
sites just because aren’t flattering. That’s asking for trouble. But if you don’t
think you can solve the issue in public, it’s best to do so one-on-on

Eg. JetBlue

Having your flight delayed or cancelled is annoying for any

customer and many must already be familiar with the feeling.
Things don’t get better when staff members can’t provide enough
information or dismiss customer complaints. When this happens,
many customers take out their frustration on social media,
including Twitter.

JetBlue recognized the issues the airline industry is facing from a

reputational perspective and worked to position itself as a
company that prioritizes customer service.
So, when a customer complains about a flight delay or
cancellation, JetBlue makes sure to communicate with the client
quickly and provide helpful responses. This way JetBlue managed
to build a positive online reputation in a troubled industry.

3. Reverse SEO- Find high-traffic articles that negatively reflect your brand…
then fix them!-

People have probably mentioned your brand, products or services in their articles in

the past.
This may be in reviews, guides, stories, competitor comparisons (i.e., “your
brand vs. competitor”), etc.
What if these mentions unfairly portray you and your company, or are simply
outdated and inaccurate?
And what if such articles receive thousands of visitors organic search traffic each
month?
That’s a lot of people reading negative, outdated or inaccurate things about your
company.
The solution? Find such articles and nip them in the bud asap!

Reverse Seo for the particular keyword or title, check the content. Reverse SEO
is a reputation management tactic that involves pushing down the search
rankings of a web page by optimizing other websites or web pages for the same
target keyword.

A typical reputation management best-practice is to attempt to contact the

author and resolve the problem that led to his or her negative opinion about
your business. But assuming the author complied with Google and Bing’s
guidelines, neither search engine will remove it from their search results.

The good news is you can prevent negative reviews and press releases from
harming your business’s reputation by performing reverse SEO. Start
by identifying the specific keywords that trigger higher search rankings for the
negative web page. If you have a subscription to Moz or SEMrush, you can use
one of their rank-tracking solutions. Regardless, you should create a list of all
the keywords for which the negative web page ranks high in the search results.
Now it’s time to bury the negative web page for those keywords by creating
and optimizing other websites for the same keywords. If a negative review
ranks on the first page of Google for your business’s name, consider
optimizing your business’s website to specifically rank high for your business’s
name. 

Step 4: Build on the positives

Just as you shouldn’t ignore bad comments, it pays to respond to good ones
too. These are the posts that actually enhance your online reputation. Not only
will you reward customers for saying nice things, but you’ll also encourage
others to do the same.

So that’s easy. You thank people for their kind reviews and hope they share your
response with their friends.

But how can you generate even more positive reviews?

Actively manage your online profiles
You may have heard of the “90/9/1” rule. According to Susan Kuchinskas, only
1% of social media users create content. Another 9% percent comment or
interact with that content. But 90% of visitors – a massive majority – are there
simply to read a review, and then leave.

take active control of your review pages and social profiles. Add pictures
(and encourage them from your community), share great content, and make
your brand seem more appealing to those who just discovered you

5. Create Content and promote your search results

 Create engagement and content that drives value- could be through contests,
campaigns that give a push to user generated content

Build community. Mitch Joel famously (at least to me) once said you don’t have a community
until people begin talking to one another without the help of the blog’s author.

 Paid content supports both owned and earned content

Done right, paid promotion can have a high ROI. Powerful forms include guest
posts on relevant, high-authority websites and blogs, paid discovery using tools,
sponsored content on high-authority media websites and paid search campaigns.
 Collaborate with micro or big time influencers

6. Follow Through

Don’t forget to follow through with promises you make in

responses to positive and negative reviews.

If you said you’d contact a customer for more information, give

them a call. If you offer a discount for bad service, make sure
they received it.

You are making offers online, which is considered in public. If

you don’t follow through and a customer leaves a second poor
review, that is devastating to your business. People are watching
and they want to know how the story ends.

If you had a nice time, I’d really appreciate it if you would leave me a review.”

This is hugely effective where there has been a one-to-one interaction – a server
in a restaurant, or a customer service rep who has solved a sticky issue for a
customer.

If you know you’ve delivered a good service, you can be confident that the
review will be positive. And by asking personally, the customer will be more
likely to go a small step out of their way to help.

7. Measure your progress

You’re investing in your reputation because you want to protect it. More likely,
you want it to improve. So you need to track whether that’s working.
If you’re using a monitoring tool, this can be incredibly simple. Review sites
come with scores, and you can watch these grow as you provide value to your
community. As your average moves from three stars to four, or from 50% to
70% positive, you can be sure that you’re moving in the right direction.
You can do the same on social media. Mention (among others) comes with
built-in sentiment analysis. You’ll be able to watch as positive sentiment about
your soars following the work you’ve done:

IMPLEMENTATION FRAMEWORK…HOW TO GO ABOUT THIS?

If you plan to do ORM in house:

1. Build an ORM team at your workplace that looks into social mentions, reviews, and
customer support, damage control through tools and tactics. Use Tools to assist you
on this.

2. A tool like Reputology is perfect for this. Their entire focus is on review

sites, and they know what they’re doing. To know what people say about
you on all these sources, you’ll need a media monitoring tool
like Mention. Media monitoring lets you track the whole lot from a single
dashboard, so you don’t have to go looking. The other benefit of such
tools is that they’ll tell you when people talk about you, not
just to you. 

3. Build a Cutting edge SEO strategy- create keyword search that is relevant and
beneficial to you, on-page SEO makes your site more user-friendly, makes it
easier for search engines to index your pages, will increase your search ranking,
and will help you focus on optimizing essential elements like visuals. Using
sensible and easy-to-read URLs. Writing meta descriptions to improve visibility
on a search engine results page and improve relevance

If you plan to outsource ORM

1. Hire an effective Digital Marketing Agency that will help you get results in an increase in
traffic, and better ranking in search engines. Additionally they can provide service for
online reputation as well. This helps in having one agency on board to manage both the
functions
 2. There are even full service reputation management services available,
where you pay someone else to worry about this for you. That’s great, and
maybe they save you a lot of time.

Conclusion

Here are two strategies to consider, reactive and proactive. Reactive is to

have accounts set up and people in place to quickly respond to conversations
(positive or negative) that come up. Additionally, you should identify at what
point is an issue serious enough that it should be escalated to a higher level
for the correct response.

Acting proactively is an important part of any reputation strategy as you plan

positive messages, articles, press releases, etc. to insure you have a constant
flow of content that you have planned in advance from your editorial calendar.

Remember that this is a cycled process. Once you are done with this last
step, you need to start over and listen and monitor to see if your efforts have
made an impact.