Creative Uses of ORM

Online Reputation Management is in a state of continual development and we only just starting to understand all the uses. Thankfully most of our clients are WAY smarter than us (yes, I’m sucking up) and they’ve found some interesting uses which we had theorised but not necessarily had the opportunity to implement. In most cases these examples are a little sneaky so I’ve left the brand’s name off the mention (hopefully I can get permission sometime and republish). Below are four which I particularly like.

 

In some specific industries (particularly governmental suppliers) it’s incredibly hard to identify all tenders which come out on a day-to-day basis. One of our clients has solved this problem by using ORM tracking to trawl the many government and parastatal websites where the tenders are available. While this certainly isn’t a typical use of the software this particular client has modified the various variables to provide additional information about the sites themselves. For example: sentiment is used to determine how applicable tenders typically are to their business. Credibility on the other hand is used to determine their success rates for tenders on their particular site. What this allows them to do is identify a list of websites where the tenders are both applicable and their success rates are high. Consequently, time is invested in tenders which score high in both regards. Conversely, marketing is focused on sites which score high in applicability but low in success. A novel and creative use of ORM monitoring – if a little strange from my purist ORM perspective.

 

Corporate espionage is something which happens – whether we like it or not. Brands employees are sharing secrets – be it intentionally or by accident. ORM therefore provides a means of monitoring both what competitors (and your own employees) are saying about future launches.

 

For internal management the process is simple: plug your future product name into your software and hope that nothing pops up until you launch. If something does then put a plan in place to manage it. If not, then launch as normal.

 

For external/competitor use: Monitor competitors and as soon as they make a business move then respond immediately and run some disruption activity to lessen the impact of their launch. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not recommending this and it’s a very messy approach to marketing but the handful of clients that do it periodically (and tell us that they do it) find great success – particularly when the competitive set has very few differentiators.

 

This is something which BrandsEye itself did when we first launched and it did very well for us. Off a zero budget we were able to market directly to those asking about the online reputation management industry. The principle is simple: monitor conversation relating to your specific industry and whenever there is a request for information or intent to purchase then engage with them and see if you can sell to them. 

 

This doesn’t come without its warnings and disclaimers: approaching the wrong person or becoming a conversion whore won’t get you far and comes across as spammy. Rather look to provide a value exchange to the consumer. If they looking for information provide them with information (don’t sell). If they explicitly ask for a vendor to contact them then sell away :)

 

This is one of those activities which has come under some fire over the last while. Do we have the right to screen applicants based on their social media profile? Well, my personal perspective is that provided the information is in the public domain and it got their through natural causes then it’s free game (I reserve the right to change this point of view given THIS). The basics of how this works is simple: somebody applies for a job, you then search within your ORM software and see what/if they’ve said about your business in the past. You then use this to determine if they get an interview and the questions they get asked within the interview. Some of our clients are starting to do this as a little extra information when recruiting – nifty if you ask me!

 

Ultimately, this space is full of unknowns. The core focus of ORM is clear but there increasingly interesting and different applications for the system. Time will tell but there certainly is space for some creative thinking!