Online Reputation Management – What is needed to be taken care.

There was a time when people don’t used to care about what people says about your company but now the days has come where everyone is worried about their online reputation in a market.

Companies has started interacting with their customers in respect to comments, reviews, feedback or ratings. Whether a negative or a positive comment, everything directly or indirectly building your reputation in a market.

There are lot of misconception about  Online Reputation Management as few thinks it is just replying to comments and few thinks its tackling negative reviews and few take it as just social media monitoring activity but its way more than that which you’ll need to understand.

 

World is looking at you!

Whether your business size is small or big, people are eventually talking about you and looking at you. You’re being talked on social platforms with comments about your product or service positively or negatively. If you have customers in your business, which we say yes that is business is for, you’re being discussed among your customers and they might can review you, give feedback on you, can criticize you socially which can damage you in many terms.

A Single Comment can also harm you in thousand pieces.

Approach to tackle negative comments: There are two ways a negative comment can be tackled:

• Appreciate the comment and respond them with care or as token of improvement.
• Do not respond to the comment

In both the cases it is important to know when to respond to the comment and when to appreciate it. Sometimes your instinct reflects aggression in comments which you need not to show as the best strategy to tackle them is to leave them as they are if they don’t require your attention or the comment is spreading false information or is based on a wrong fact.

 

Why you need Online Reputation Management?

Online Reputation Management is the need of today’s business world as no one wants to hear any bad about their business or their reputation. One negative feedback or the hate speech about your business can harm you in many ways which you can’t see (as you can’t track everyone at your own) but can feel as your reputation and business goes down with time.

It might also be possible that your business doesn’t goes down but still you’ll stop growing due to few negative aspects on search engine, social networks or on review sites. So it is necessary to see what people are talking about you and tackle them or loose the various aspects important to you.

Now what could be those aspects that you can loose your hands upon?

• Customer’s Trust

Not only the trust of your existing customers, with a simple negative feedback that thousands are seeing can make your business lack the trust of  the customers all around the market. Once the trust lost, you can’t overcome easily so it is necessary to view, tackle and respond to the comments you’re getting to cover the time reflection that could be saved for future instincts too.

“ Customer always invest in a brand with a great good will and feels trusted.”

• Employee Retention

Bad online reputation not only impact you externally but internally too as employees always prefer work with a good brand either to show it forward or to feel proud and respected working with an organization thus with the negative image in a market can cause you non-retention of employees and you couldn’t even attract more with the prevailing image.

• Leads and Sales Generation

Negative Reputation in a market as you know can impact you while getting leads and making sales in a market. No business would like to trust the company having negative views and place in a market but with a good reputation you can even get leads with making much effort as customers come looking find you themselves with the goodwill you’ll maintain in a market.

 

How Do You React In Such Situation?

• Aggressive SEO

If someone googles your name or business and it appears with negative content on to 1st or 2nd page then you need to worry about your reputation. The most effective method to react to your negative content and tackle it positively is to apply SEO to your or third party’s positive content and overpower them on to your negative ones. This way you can add value to your search results and save your reputation in a market.

 

• Review Removal

This can be happen in cases where the reviewer trying to degrade you for false information or willingly damaging your reputation, you can take actions to remove their reviews from your website. Legal boundary coalitions and speed of responding can reduce the rate of negative reviews and can bind the negative ones to let it affect you online reputation.

 

• Online Investigation

One more way to tackle and react in such situation is to hire the online experts for reacting to the situations you might not very known to. Experts can help you finding the holes your reputation is facing and getting harmed from. Cyber investigation experts know how even a minor thing can affect your reputation so they can build those gaps easily and secure you from any threat and attackers.

 

STEPS INVOLVED IN ONLINE REPUTATION MANAGEMENT

Knowing how it works and which steps it involves is always a good side for your business. So let’s dive into the steps involved in it directly.

1. MONITOR

This step is the most important step as without it you can’t follow the other steps further. This step involves monitoring what people say about you and responding accordingly. So first, you need to analyze and hear.

Monitoring just can’t be blind, you should also be knowing about how and what to monitor.

For this, you first need to know where your brand is actually present in a market. Whether your audience talking about you on social media or online community or forums or review sites or somewhere else. After knowing all these things you’ll start to monitor your audience but you would seriously need an expert for doing it, you can’t do it on your own.

One thing to keep in mind that your audience can talk about you anywhere on internet and to measure it you obviously need an expert otherwise it would be a loosing battle for you, even after knowing almost a things.

 

2. RESPONSE

Now the queries that have been collected in the first step need to be taken care of under this step. Knowing what your audience says about you is essential for you and you need to decide how you would tackle it. There are many strategies and decisions that you need to take while performing this step:

• Like, who’ll look upon the comments a particular brand is getting
• Who’ll decide what and how to respond to the comments
• Who will deliver the response to the giver queries
• And who’ll decide whether the comment requires a response or not

Dividing a responsibility and choosing a right person for the right job is the essential part at every stage. Just make sure you’ve plan all these things before diving further.

 

3. DEALING THE GAPS

Here gaps are referred to the negatives that a business get through its customers. Now, you have to decide how you’ll deal with the negatives. Just imagine what if you got a negative comment with one star rating, what you’ll do? Here are some steps that you can take to deal with them:

• Reply to the comments and clear the air between them and you, its better than leaving it unresponded.
• Mix politeness with professionalism and respond them correctly.
• Try to respond your customer as soon as possible as if you’re quick towards the problem your customers are facing it will satisfy them at least to some extent.
• You can also take your customers talking privately which make them feel prior while being even in trouble that yes a company cares about them.

You can’t make every bad comment turn good for you but its better to have more happy customer that can overcome the bad ones rather than having bad lines in que.

 

4. BUILD POSITIVES

Just as important as the negative comments, positive comments are also of same importance. You need to respond to positive comments in a same way you respond to negatives and get worried getting them.

Thanking your positive sides will spread a positive word of mouth towards others, but not responding them will not take you anywhere near your enhancement in a market. Keeping and maintaining the positive sides with proper care gives you uncountable benefits that you might not see at earlier but will be realised soon.

To know where you stand with your positive sides and what you need to improve, just don’t forget to take feedback of them.

 

5. MEASURE AND TRACK THE RESULTS

The last and final step towards the ORM process is to keep a track of what’s going on with your business and whether you’d able to succeed in providing proper solutions to your queried customers or not. Measure your performance whether going in right direction or not and make changes if needed for making it right.

CONCLUSION:

As you also must have understood until now that keeping your image slate clean is good for you and to do it we need an Online Reputation Management system. Knowing ORM isn’t enough for an individual, knowing doesn’t make you the one that can manage the things on your own but there are many of the experts that can handle this task for you and provide you with the guidelines with the proper skills and tools to be used into it.

I would suggest hire an expert and let them do this or else fight the battle that you might win but couldn’t stop.