Tips to protecting your online reputation

 

 

Take ownership of your brand online. Google, the reputation engine, loves exact domain names, so it’s not really hard to rank a .net, .org, or even a .info these days. Prominent brands should purchase ‘yourbrandsucks.com’ too, in order to take that opportunity off the table.

 

Search engines also look at sub-domains as unique domains. The creation of sub-domains off your main domain will allow you to generate increased listings in the search results.  Take a look at search results for Google, Microsoft, and Wikipedia.

 

 

Build profile pages for yourself and/or your business at appropriate social networking sites. These don't have to be actively managed (though they certainly should be). Simply having the profile in place provides more positive content, moving any bad news off the search results pages. 

 

For personal pages, check out sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, StumbleUpon, and the like. Businesses can also use social networks geared specifically towards professionals, like LinkedIn, and FastPitch.

 

 

Connecting with consumers proactively - instead of reactively - creates an opportunity for companies to mediate and resolve any potential disputes before consumers take their complaints to the Web.

 

Businesses that realise the need to connect with customers across multiple channels can develop strong customer relationships and a healthy online reputation. Companies including PepsiCo, Wells Fargo, and Ford Motor are creating new high level jobs to ready themselves for engagement with all forms of social media. Such job titles include; Director of Social Media, Vice President of Experiential Marketing, and Digital Communications manager. The roles of these new executives are to monitor and influence what is being said about their companies on the Internet.

 

When businesses seek feedback from customers, they have the opportunity to resolve issues and turn a positive into a negative—before a dispute escalates into the online realm. With a cache of favorable product or service reviews on their website, customer testimonials become a powerful way to build customer trust and increased loyalty.

 

 

The benefits resulting from available ORM tools include; monitoring and tracking what’s being said about your brand. You can therefore envisage how the online information affects your brand, and finally you are able to influence and modify the results by participating in blogs and other social media platforms. 

 

And it is because the stakes are so high for these online brands that they should track their online reputation at all costs. One of the benefits of tracking yourself online is that it provides you with the opportunity to engage with your critics on a level that was previously too expensive and/or time consuming to achieve. Online Reputation Management is about knowing what people are saying about you, understanding the context and reacting accordingly – if you solve someone’s problem on the phone, nobody knows. If you solve it online, thousands of people are satisfied.

 

 

The switch from traditional media and corporate monologues to recognising the power of word-of-mouth marketing that has now become turbo-charged in today’s digital environment is crucial. Acknowledging this and making use of the tools available will put you in good stead in this unpredictable online environment.