Brand Monitoring and ORM | The Digital Clicks Blog
The Internet is a vast and largely uncontrollable space where anyone can post an opinion in seconds. For your brand, these disclosures could be the difference between a potential customer purchasing your product or deciding to give it a miss based on the accounts of others in similar situations. ORM (online reputation management) is a method of counteracting negative content regarding your brand and is an essential part of an internet marketing campaign. While only an ultra-efficient service could prevent bad reviews entirely, efficient monitoring of online conversations and appropriate responses can have a major impact on the influence of counterproductive online content. It's important to consider the wealth of channels available to customers on the Internet (websites, blogs, discussion boards, and social media, to name a few). When monitoring your brand reputation, brands should attempt to tie in every aspect of their integrated online campaigns, as the channels that they use for SEO results could be turned against them by a disgruntled customer and his or her choice of medium. ORM is both a proactive and reactive strategy. Prevention is more effective than attempting to remedy existing damage. Brands should always aim to provide a good service, maintain a visible presence online, and release a consistent stream of quality content in order to stimulate positive conversations on multiple platforms. In times when reputations may be potentially tarnished, positive content that ranks well could go a long way towards limiting negative exposure. It might be advantageous to make continuous use of alert services for search engines, news feeds, blogs, and message boards so that any negative posts can be halted before they rank highly on SERPs, trending topics, or elsewhere. The reactive side of ORM comes into play when considering how to respond to potentially damaging content. Brands will often do well to be publicly answerable on each medium being used to rally negative opinions, which might entail real-time responses via the brand's social media accounts or replies on forums and blogs.