How to improve your company’s online reputation – ORM could be the solution!
If you do a search on Google for your company’s name, what do you find? Negative results that could hurt your business? Do you only see a couple results for your website or the blog that you control? Or does your company not show up at all? Don’t worry; with the right strategy you will be able to control your online reputation. When people look for your company name on the Internet, they will find your website, your company blog, and social media accounts, and most probably positive results on consumer review sites for example.
The objective of Online Reputation Management
The main objective of Online Reputation Management (ORM) is to establish your company as a credible business of which people have positive perceptions. Once you have built a good reputation among your current and potential customers, carefully monitoring your brand, products and key executives will help you avoiding any undesirable mentions in social media or negative search engine results.
Online Reputation Management practices
One of the most important aspects to remember when implementing ORM is “listening.” If you listen to them, you will be able to discover what they say about your business online. Moreover, if you make your customers feel heard, they will be more likely to talk to you and thus interact with you. Social media, for example, is all about making people care about what you have to say as a company.
Using social media and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the easiest way to monitor and protect your online reputation. Through a SEO strategy you can achieve good rankings on Google for keywords including your company, brand and product name. Like discussed before, social media facilitates interaction with your customers and will therefore contribute to monitoring your online reputation. Social media and SEO are probably the most important but definitely not the only points of influence. As you can see below there are more influencers:
- Traditional websites
- Social networks like Facebook and Google+
- Professional networks like LinkedIn
- Blogs and micro blogs like Twitter and Tumblr
- Discussion forums
- Consumer review sites
- Social news or bookmarking sites like del.icio.us
It is most likely that, after having implemented ORM successfully, your (potential) customers will find your business on the very first pages of search engines, and find positive perceptions about and results for your website and your possible weblog. ORM is the answer to how to improve your company’s online reputation and once you have built it, it will help you retaining it.
