What is ORM?
It has always been essential to show potential customers the best side of your business in order to encourage their patronage. In today’s modern society, that translates to how you appear on the internet: your online reputation. Do you have a bad review on Yelp or Trip Advisor? A bad comment or star rating on Google? If you engage with your customers through social media, has a recent tweet or even retweet blown out of proportion negatively? Managing this is the purpose of Online Reputation Management (ORM). ORM can be defined as a purposeful effort to maximise your positive appearance in the internet while limiting the negative appearances. One of the aims of online reputation management is to have a “clear page one”, meaning that any negative results are bumped down to page 2 of Google (or further!). A study showed that 91{06e29518e582b1cc2da09f8f2ea316dadc41c520023bcca83a4deb5e6ad0a3c6} of users will not search past page one, so this dramatically lessens any damage to your business from those negative reviews. The main way to achieve results like this is by increasing or improving your online presence. One of the most common methods is via your social media presence. First of all, you should identify your current social media presence so that you know what to improve. You can use free services such as Google Alerts to do this. Next: are you on Twitter? Facebook? LinkedIn? Are your profiles fully fleshed out and active? Active, intelligent engagement in social media should create lots of links and recommendations which drive you up the search engine rankings. For further increase, you could treat your name as a keyword and embed it in your copy wherever practical. The most important point to remember about managing your online reputation is that if you only start doing it when you have been bombed by something negative that is really harming your online reputation, then you are starting too late. You should begin monitoring your online presence as soon as you feasibly can. If you are unlucky enough to find a negative review, you already know everything else around it and can better plan to ameliorate the situation. And what sort of crisis management should you be doing? KissMetrics’ guide to reputation management recommends that the key is not simply “reacting well to what people say about you, your brand, or your products and services, but also about whether to react at all and, if so, when. Sometimes a reaction is not necessary, and sometimes a reaction that is too late can cost you millions”. Some further advice includes: “Take your time. A negative review most likely made you angry. Resist the temptation to reply quickly because, unless you have superhuman emotional control, the reply is likely to sound angry.” The question of responding to negative comments, tweets or reviews is a thorny one. There are numerous guides online for what to do, and even more horror stories from business owners who have engaged incorrectly. It can often be better to get someone impartial in, such as an ORM agency, who will definitely not be defensive in their reply. An agency would also be an alternative to having to hire a permanent member of staff, since as stressed above online reputation management ideally requires constant observation. Remember the old saying: Prevention is better than cure! Thanks for reading What Is Online Reputation Management? Please let us know your opinions on the article, or on ORM as a whole. What is Online Reputation Management? is part 4 of our “What Is …?” series. This series gives the reader a brief introduction to the basics of digital marketing. Check out the rest of the series for information on SEO, PPC and CRO, with more to come. Error: Contact form not found.