How to Manage Your Online Reputation

 

What is reputation management?  Reputation is usually defined as the power to influence and control your reputation as viewed by others.  This was originally a term associated with public relations.

 

How to Influence and Manage Your Online Reputation

 

However with the birth of the internet and growth of social media reputation management has morphed into something much more diverse.  Today your internet and social media presence, along with your search query results have become important for your individual or corporate reputation.

Managing your reputation has become a skill of it’s own, with a name to match it’s importance.  Online Reputation Management (ORM) focuses on the management of your product and service search website results.  

There are ethical grey areas involved which include mug shot removal websites, astroturfing customer review sites, censoring negative complaints, and using certain search engine optimization tactics to influence your results.

 

How to Manage Your Online Reputation in the Digital World

 

With the growth of the internet and social media, reputation management today mainly concerns the results from searches and how you can mold them to your advantage.  Through developments in public relations, there has been growth in the number of reputation management companies working both online and off-line.

 

How to Manage Your Online Reputation

 

Online reputation management focuses on managing product and service search results within the digital space.  Several electronic marketplaces and online communities like e-Bay, Amazon and Alibaba have built in  ORM systems.   These use effective controls that can minimize the threat and protect their systems from possible misuse and abuse by outside influences.

 

How to Manage Your Off-line Reputation

 

Off-line reputation management refers to managing your brands public perception out-side the digital sphere.  This uses select controls and measures to gain the desired result.  It shows what stake-holders think and feel about your brand.  

The most popular controls for off-line reputation management include social responsibility, media visibility, press releases in print media and sponsorship using related tools.

 

How to Pick the Best Reputation Management Tactics

 

Companies and other organizations possess various attributes that influence how others evaluate your corporate reputation.  These attributes include the symbolic features your business possesses.  They include your brand, your industry ranking, and your product prestige.

Organizations can influence their reputations by carefully developing their brand, product, and organization characteristics.  This is accomplished by creating new offerings such as introducing new products or services.  

You can also accomplish this by expanding the scope of your existing offerings, or by associating with desirable influencers.

 

How to Make the Best Reputation Management Tactics Work

 

Reputation management includes monitoring of the reputation of an individual or a brand on the internet.  It means actively addressing potentially damaging content and using customer feedback to try to solve problems before they damage the individual’s or brand’s reputation.

A major part of reputation management involves suppressing negative search results.  This needs to also include highlighting positive ones.  For businesses, reputation management involves bridging the gap between how a company perceives itself and how others view it.

Reputation management is simply the attempt to influence and control the conversation which happens about every product or service.  It’s never about preaching, instead it’s always about the conversation.

 

How Your Business Benefit’s From Reputation Management

 

A necessity for any business, reputation management is acknowledged as a intangible corporate asset and an important competitive edge.  In our competitive world, all companies are under intense scrutiny from their community, regulators and watchdogs.  Sound reputation management practices help firms cope with this scrutiny.

Sound reputation management practices also reinforce and aid a corporation’s branding objectives.  Meeting your marketing and business communication objectives also benefits from a robust and targeted reputation management strategy.   

 

How to Protect Your Reputation

 

A key driver towards increasing profits and its market share is how your reputation is protected.  Good reputation management practices also help any entity manage their staff confidence as a control tool of public perceptions.  

If your reputation is undermined and ignored by negative comments it can be costly.  This may cripple employee confidence, a risk no employer would dare accept since staff morale is one of the most important drivers of company performance.

 

How to Succeed Using Great Reputation Management

 

At it’s core, reputation management monitors your individual reputation or your that of your brand on the internet.  It actively addresses potentially damaging content, using positive customer feedback to try to solve problems before they damage the individual’s or brand’s reputation. 

 

How to Monitor Your Reputation for Free Using Google Alerts

 

Google gives you the ability to set up an Alert for searches that you have already conducted.  Using Alerts, you don’t have to go online every day and search for new results.  Google will do that for you.  Google Alerts is like having your own online research assistant.

 

Google Alerts are emails, sent to you automatically, when there are new Google results for your search terms.

To set up a Google Alert simply sign in to your Google account.  Go to google.com/alerts.  In the Create a Google Alert box type in your search terms.  Click the Show Options down arrow to set up your search parameters.

 

How to Suppress Your Negative Search Results

 

An important part of reputation management involves suppressing negative search results, while highlighting positive ones.  For businesses, reputation management usually involves an attempt to bridge the gap between how a company perceives itself and how others view it.