Driving Strategy with Online Reputation Management Tools

Anyone with a poor sense of direction has experienced that overwhelming sense of relief when the dulcet, automated tone of the GPS steers you away from the dimly lit backstreets and towards your destination. This nifty tool, which assimilates information from the external world and uses it to direct you to where you want to go, is invaluable for anyone navigating a tricky or unknown environment.

So how do you navigate the loud, competitive minefield that is today’s marketing landscape?

Online Reputation Management (ORM) is fast becoming vital when it comes to understanding what people really think about your brand, responding quickly to opportunities and putting out the fires of brand crises. In the longer term, an effective ORM tool can add massive value to your strategy, filtering and analysing online conversation around your brand and providing strategic business direction.

We’ve all seen the example of ORM tools being used to drive marketing strategy is that of Barack Obama in the most recent US presidential elections. Obama’s team analysed online usage and population statistics to define his target audience as a younger one, which makes frequent use of social media to stay connected. Responses to other political campaigns (measured online) cried for a leader who was involved and who engaged with the public in a personal, positive and informative way. The result was a message of hope, driven by community involvement and placing the emphasis on the voter (“YOU”). After profiling the needs and wants of the online voter, Obama’s campaign focused on creating grassroots strategies and making integration with social networks such as Facebook easier. Obama wished to become part of the community and respond on the same level, placing the power in the hands of the people.  While competitor McCain ignored online conversation around his shallow online strategy, Obama looked at engagement opportunities such as an activity index that monitored voter activity and gave them a mark out of ten for their participation levels. ORM also allowed for the identification of social influencers and ideal brand affiliations. A combination of good ideas combined with effective ORM led to history’s most successful political campaign.

A recent study by Digital Brand Expressions showed that 52% of social media marketers within large companies are operating without a game plan – which explains the proliferation of inactive company blogs and un-followed Twitter pages. ORM tools are the biggest step in formulating the plan and making sure your efforts, both online and offline, are channeled successfully.

Strategic insights provided by effectively managing your reputation online include:

• Spotting the opportunities in your offering or in the market category by picking up on frequent consumer demands
• Monitoring and measuring competitor activity to provide benchmarking insights
• Demonstrating the benefits of internal adjustments, such as service channel restructuring, based on consumer and media feedback online
• Measuring the response to both online and offline marketing efforts, to determine if these should be adjusted or repeated
• Measuring ROI for online marketing efforts, which will assist in guiding future efforts
  

Not only can ORM tools assist in setting specific, measurable objectives, they also afford a business the opportunity to monitor the response as the strategy is implemented and adjust accordingly.