Online Reputation Management
In its simplest form, Online Reputation Management (ORM) is “the result of what you do, what you say, and what other people say about you”. How are you managing your reputation, and the reputation of your brand, online?
By Francois Muscat
Being the number one person or company in your industry means that you will need to create and publish content online. You simply cannot be a thought leader if you are not creating content. But what happens when your customers, employees and old business acquaintances, or anyone really, is also publishing content about you? How are you managing your reputation, and the reputation of your brand, online?
ORM is important because it has a direct impact on the image of your company. People want to trust the companies they are supporting, so a positive reputation can have a direct impact on your bottom line.
Listening, Engaging and Measuring
A robust ORM process is all about listening, engaging and measuring. Before you kick-start any type of internet marketing campaign, you need to listen. You need to know what is being said about you, your company and your brand, online. If you want to check your own credibility, simply type your name into Google and see what pops up on the first three pages of the search results. This is what people will see about you. If it’s a Hello Peter complaint or anything that doesn’t accurately reflect what you do and what you offer, you need to start managing your online reputation.
Online searchers generally choose to read only what’s on the first few pages of Google search results. This means that in addition to wanting your own website and content pages to rank well, you also have to manage what’s being said by other people who are generating content about you on any social media channel.
Opinions, reviews and comments are easily shared through the proliferation of network sites, forums, blogs and social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. While these are great tools for connecting with your target audience and attracting new customers, nothing prevents your brand from being the target of a negative note. The buzz around your brand can be positive or negative, either way you need a strategy that allows you to take a proactive approach and speak directly to your customers.
Managing your brand online
Managing your brand online requires that you take action. The first step is to claim your web properties. In addition to your website, you need to register your brand on all the major social media sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, Twitter and Blogger. Make sure your corporate details, logo and contact information is reflected on your profiles so people know the information is coming directly from you.
The second part of ORM is managing the search engine results and protecting your company’s brand from negative exposure on the Internet. If you Google your company name and the top results are negative reviews or include the words ‘scam’ or ‘fraud’, combat this by producing search engine optimized copy to effectively push these pages down in the search result rankings. Purchasing decisions are heavily influenced by what people are saying online, so you don’t want the top pages in Google to showcase negative information about you.
These are the basic first steps, but a significant part of ORM is listening to what is being said, not just what comes up in the top results on Google.
Online listening
There are many highly intelligent business owners (and executives) who shy away from social media because they are worried about negative comments. However, these comments don’t go away just because you turn a blind eye. The good news is that online listening is much more than just dealing with complaints.
Here’s a quick rundown of what you should be keeping your ears peeled for online:
• What people like and dislike about your brand (and by brand I mean products, services, call centre engagements etc.),
• What people like and dislike about your competitor’s brand,
• What the natural tone of talk is amongst your target audience,
• What your target audience talks about in general,
• How, and if, your competitors are converting complaints.
The size and complexity of the Internet, coupled with the speed at which news travels, means it’s hard to continuously monitor what is being said. You need listening tools to tackle this problem.
Social listening tools
When it comes to social listening tools, there are free tools and paid tools. Many of the free tools will be sufficient for picking up on new comments, posts and content about your brand, but the paid options provide more advanced options and settings.
Top free tools
GOOGLE ALERTSProvides email updates of the latest relevant Google results based on your choice of query or topic. Handy features include the ability to monitor a developing news story and keeping current on a competitor or industry.
GOOGLE VIDEOWill alert you when someone tags a video with your brand or company name.
SOCIAL MENTIONIf social awareness is your main social media goal, then be sure to check out Social Mention. It allows you to set up social media alerts so you can measure awareness for specific keywords.
OPEN BOOKA Facebook monitoring site for searches on keywords and names.
TWAZZUPTwazzup operates a leading real-time news platform, making it possible to filter the news out of live Internet content.
HOOTSUITEHootSuite helps organizations use the social web to launch marketing campaigns, identify and grow audiences and distribute targeted messages across multiple channels. Using HootSuite’s unique social media dashboard, teams can collaboratively schedule updates to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, WordPress and other social networks via web, desktop or mobile platforms plus track campaign results and industry trends to rapidly adjust tactics.
Paid tools
HEARTBEAT (by Sysomos)Heartbeat is a cost-effective, real-time social media monitoring and measurement tool. It provides constantly updated snapshots of online conversations and a variety of user-friendly and informative graphics.
RADIAN 6Allows you to listen to, monitor and report online conversations quickly and easily. Advanced configuration options allow you to filter by language, region, or media type. It also allows you to or organize keywords into groups to monitor competitors and industry terms distinctly from your brand or campaign. Get pictorial representations of the raw data in bar graphs or pie charts, and drill down on any segment to get the full picture behind your posts.
LITHIUM (by Scout Labs) Cuts through the noise on the social web and brings you the most relevant posts from Facebook, Twitter and millions of other social media sources. It will help with brand insights, engaging key influencers and expanding social integration across all departments in an organization.
TRACKURMonitor your reputation, your news mentions, your PR campaigns, your employees and your competition. Trackur's social media monitoring tools are easy to use, yet offer a surprising number of features. Trackur also offers a free plan to get you started.
Analysing what’s being said
After the listening comes the analysing. Having gathered data, comments and conversations that could impact your brand, it is important to remember that both negative and positive comments contribute to a healthy conversation. All feedback should be welcomed, because it gives you the opportunity to engage and build relationships with your customers and it provides an opportunity to formulate new and upbeat changes.
A negative comment or review is a chance to make things right rather than the customer simply changing service providers. The fact that they are letting you know that they are disappointed means they want you to make it right.
The first step is to thank them for their comments. Don’t be defensive; be humble, honest and appreciative and don’t give a generic apology. Try to truly understand their problem and do your best to rectify the situation.
Crisis management
While ORM is an ongoing task that every company should be engaging in, crisis management happens once in a while and hopefully it is not something you will ever have to deal with. An “online crisis” can mean different things to different companies. For one organisation it could be pictures of the CEO in compromising situations and for another it could be counterfeit products, attacks from competitors or a disgruntled ex-employee. Regardless of the severity of the crisis, a strategy must be developed so you and your team know how to deal with the situation.
Steps of crisis management
1. Define the scope of the crisisDefine the scope, by assessing whether the crisis is limited to your region, or whether it is a national or even global scope and also consider all the people and organisations involved. Some situations, such as an environmental crisis, will affect local communities first, while takeovers and acquisitions will affect financial markets. Defining the scope of the crisis will help you determine who you should be communicating with first. It is also helpful to find out what other companies in similar situations have done.
2. SpeedBad news spreads quickly, and if you are the target you need to react quickly; you cannot take weeks to start managing the crisis. Monitoring all consumer-generated media will help you trace the root of the problem.
3. Unified responseDevelop and maintain a unified position and supporting messages throughout the crisis. Often, in a crisis, people want to endlessly defend themselves. Your best bet, however, is to keep messages simple, clear and consistent. Before you start communicating with the public, make sure that you have a person who is authorised to distribute messages to the media and public and, if necessary, get clearances from lawyers and other parties involved. Your staff needs to know who the authorised spokesperson is and how they should respond if approached by the public or the media.
4. Be transparentWith everyone today having the power to expose secrets that can quickly turn a private matter into a public one, keeping secrets is no longer a viable option. While you can’t deny that a crisis exists, minimise gossip and rumours by sticking to the facts. Limit your potential exposure by ensuring that there are no inconsistent practices in your business.
5. Develop a central place for informationMake sure that everyone knows where they can find your information. Immediately after the BP/Gulf of Mexico oil spill disaster of 2010, a number of fake BP accounts popped up distributing false and malicious information. To counter this, BP set up a blog to communicate directly with the media and the public. This created the impression of transparency and helped them to manage the information distributed online. A central information point will also help to avoid inconsistencies in media responses and other information released to the public.
6. Monitor and documentDevelop a media monitoring plan so that you can document the crisis. Keep names of reporters, record public conferences and make your information available online.
7. Evaluate and reviewConduct a post-crisis review to establish whether your plan worked, where it failed and how you can improve in the future. Also note how your online reputation has been affected; is there false or negative information on the first pages of Google? If so, contact an ORM expert to help you restore your online reputation.
Case study: How United Airlines lost millions online
Thanks to social media, comments and opinions can spread like wildfire and it doesn’t take a celebrity to tweet about your brand before it gets re-tweeted, shared and posted across various social media channels. This is something United Airlines learned the hard way.
In 2008, a band called Sons of Maxwell were travelling to Nebraska on tour. The band claimed that one of their member’s guitars was damaged by baggage handlers en-route to their destination. The band member tried for months to get United Airlines to compensate him for the damage to his guitar, but to no avail. The result? The band made a song about their experience that went viral.
The song, ‘United Breaks Guitars’ was released in July 2009 and received hundreds and thousands of views. United Airlines took a week to react, by which time it had spread across social media channels, blogs and even got picked up by news agencies. The song didn’t only damage United Airline’s reputation, it severely affected their bottom line. According to socialmediarisk.com, United Airlines’ stock price plunged 10 percent, costing shareholders USD 180-million. The damage to the guitar was only USD 3,500.
While a company can’t change policies to ensure that each and every client walks away happy, there are a number of things United Airlines could have done to better manage the situation. If they were using social listening tools, for example, they would’ve picked up on the video and been aware of the buzz it created. Being able to react quickly, and with humility, are key aspects in successfully diffusing an online situation.
www.wsioms.co.za
francois@wsioms.co.za
+27 11 468 3138
By Francois Muscat
Being the number one person or company in your industry means that you will need to create and publish content online. You simply cannot be a thought leader if you are not creating content. But what happens when your customers, employees and old business acquaintances, or anyone really, is also publishing content about you? How are you managing your reputation, and the reputation of your brand, online?
ORM is important because it has a direct impact on the image of your company. People want to trust the companies they are supporting, so a positive reputation can have a direct impact on your bottom line.
Listening, Engaging and Measuring
A robust ORM process is all about listening, engaging and measuring. Before you kick-start any type of internet marketing campaign, you need to listen. You need to know what is being said about you, your company and your brand, online. If you want to check your own credibility, simply type your name into Google and see what pops up on the first three pages of the search results. This is what people will see about you. If it’s a Hello Peter complaint or anything that doesn’t accurately reflect what you do and what you offer, you need to start managing your online reputation.
Online searchers generally choose to read only what’s on the first few pages of Google search results. This means that in addition to wanting your own website and content pages to rank well, you also have to manage what’s being said by other people who are generating content about you on any social media channel.
Opinions, reviews and comments are easily shared through the proliferation of network sites, forums, blogs and social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. While these are great tools for connecting with your target audience and attracting new customers, nothing prevents your brand from being the target of a negative note. The buzz around your brand can be positive or negative, either way you need a strategy that allows you to take a proactive approach and speak directly to your customers.
Managing your brand online
Managing your brand online requires that you take action. The first step is to claim your web properties. In addition to your website, you need to register your brand on all the major social media sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, Twitter and Blogger. Make sure your corporate details, logo and contact information is reflected on your profiles so people know the information is coming directly from you.
The second part of ORM is managing the search engine results and protecting your company’s brand from negative exposure on the Internet. If you Google your company name and the top results are negative reviews or include the words ‘scam’ or ‘fraud’, combat this by producing search engine optimized copy to effectively push these pages down in the search result rankings. Purchasing decisions are heavily influenced by what people are saying online, so you don’t want the top pages in Google to showcase negative information about you.
These are the basic first steps, but a significant part of ORM is listening to what is being said, not just what comes up in the top results on Google.
Online listening
There are many highly intelligent business owners (and executives) who shy away from social media because they are worried about negative comments. However, these comments don’t go away just because you turn a blind eye. The good news is that online listening is much more than just dealing with complaints.
Here’s a quick rundown of what you should be keeping your ears peeled for online:
• What people like and dislike about your brand (and by brand I mean products, services, call centre engagements etc.),
• What people like and dislike about your competitor’s brand,
• What the natural tone of talk is amongst your target audience,
• What your target audience talks about in general,
• How, and if, your competitors are converting complaints.
The size and complexity of the Internet, coupled with the speed at which news travels, means it’s hard to continuously monitor what is being said. You need listening tools to tackle this problem.
Social listening tools
When it comes to social listening tools, there are free tools and paid tools. Many of the free tools will be sufficient for picking up on new comments, posts and content about your brand, but the paid options provide more advanced options and settings.
Top free tools
GOOGLE ALERTSProvides email updates of the latest relevant Google results based on your choice of query or topic. Handy features include the ability to monitor a developing news story and keeping current on a competitor or industry.
GOOGLE VIDEOWill alert you when someone tags a video with your brand or company name.
SOCIAL MENTIONIf social awareness is your main social media goal, then be sure to check out Social Mention. It allows you to set up social media alerts so you can measure awareness for specific keywords.
OPEN BOOKA Facebook monitoring site for searches on keywords and names.
TWAZZUPTwazzup operates a leading real-time news platform, making it possible to filter the news out of live Internet content.
HOOTSUITEHootSuite helps organizations use the social web to launch marketing campaigns, identify and grow audiences and distribute targeted messages across multiple channels. Using HootSuite’s unique social media dashboard, teams can collaboratively schedule updates to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, WordPress and other social networks via web, desktop or mobile platforms plus track campaign results and industry trends to rapidly adjust tactics.
Paid tools
HEARTBEAT (by Sysomos)Heartbeat is a cost-effective, real-time social media monitoring and measurement tool. It provides constantly updated snapshots of online conversations and a variety of user-friendly and informative graphics.
RADIAN 6Allows you to listen to, monitor and report online conversations quickly and easily. Advanced configuration options allow you to filter by language, region, or media type. It also allows you to or organize keywords into groups to monitor competitors and industry terms distinctly from your brand or campaign. Get pictorial representations of the raw data in bar graphs or pie charts, and drill down on any segment to get the full picture behind your posts.
LITHIUM (by Scout Labs) Cuts through the noise on the social web and brings you the most relevant posts from Facebook, Twitter and millions of other social media sources. It will help with brand insights, engaging key influencers and expanding social integration across all departments in an organization.
TRACKURMonitor your reputation, your news mentions, your PR campaigns, your employees and your competition. Trackur's social media monitoring tools are easy to use, yet offer a surprising number of features. Trackur also offers a free plan to get you started.
Analysing what’s being said
After the listening comes the analysing. Having gathered data, comments and conversations that could impact your brand, it is important to remember that both negative and positive comments contribute to a healthy conversation. All feedback should be welcomed, because it gives you the opportunity to engage and build relationships with your customers and it provides an opportunity to formulate new and upbeat changes.
A negative comment or review is a chance to make things right rather than the customer simply changing service providers. The fact that they are letting you know that they are disappointed means they want you to make it right.
The first step is to thank them for their comments. Don’t be defensive; be humble, honest and appreciative and don’t give a generic apology. Try to truly understand their problem and do your best to rectify the situation.
Crisis management
While ORM is an ongoing task that every company should be engaging in, crisis management happens once in a while and hopefully it is not something you will ever have to deal with. An “online crisis” can mean different things to different companies. For one organisation it could be pictures of the CEO in compromising situations and for another it could be counterfeit products, attacks from competitors or a disgruntled ex-employee. Regardless of the severity of the crisis, a strategy must be developed so you and your team know how to deal with the situation.
Steps of crisis management
1. Define the scope of the crisisDefine the scope, by assessing whether the crisis is limited to your region, or whether it is a national or even global scope and also consider all the people and organisations involved. Some situations, such as an environmental crisis, will affect local communities first, while takeovers and acquisitions will affect financial markets. Defining the scope of the crisis will help you determine who you should be communicating with first. It is also helpful to find out what other companies in similar situations have done.
2. SpeedBad news spreads quickly, and if you are the target you need to react quickly; you cannot take weeks to start managing the crisis. Monitoring all consumer-generated media will help you trace the root of the problem.
3. Unified responseDevelop and maintain a unified position and supporting messages throughout the crisis. Often, in a crisis, people want to endlessly defend themselves. Your best bet, however, is to keep messages simple, clear and consistent. Before you start communicating with the public, make sure that you have a person who is authorised to distribute messages to the media and public and, if necessary, get clearances from lawyers and other parties involved. Your staff needs to know who the authorised spokesperson is and how they should respond if approached by the public or the media.
4. Be transparentWith everyone today having the power to expose secrets that can quickly turn a private matter into a public one, keeping secrets is no longer a viable option. While you can’t deny that a crisis exists, minimise gossip and rumours by sticking to the facts. Limit your potential exposure by ensuring that there are no inconsistent practices in your business.
5. Develop a central place for informationMake sure that everyone knows where they can find your information. Immediately after the BP/Gulf of Mexico oil spill disaster of 2010, a number of fake BP accounts popped up distributing false and malicious information. To counter this, BP set up a blog to communicate directly with the media and the public. This created the impression of transparency and helped them to manage the information distributed online. A central information point will also help to avoid inconsistencies in media responses and other information released to the public.
6. Monitor and documentDevelop a media monitoring plan so that you can document the crisis. Keep names of reporters, record public conferences and make your information available online.
7. Evaluate and reviewConduct a post-crisis review to establish whether your plan worked, where it failed and how you can improve in the future. Also note how your online reputation has been affected; is there false or negative information on the first pages of Google? If so, contact an ORM expert to help you restore your online reputation.
Case study: How United Airlines lost millions online
Thanks to social media, comments and opinions can spread like wildfire and it doesn’t take a celebrity to tweet about your brand before it gets re-tweeted, shared and posted across various social media channels. This is something United Airlines learned the hard way.
In 2008, a band called Sons of Maxwell were travelling to Nebraska on tour. The band claimed that one of their member’s guitars was damaged by baggage handlers en-route to their destination. The band member tried for months to get United Airlines to compensate him for the damage to his guitar, but to no avail. The result? The band made a song about their experience that went viral.
The song, ‘United Breaks Guitars’ was released in July 2009 and received hundreds and thousands of views. United Airlines took a week to react, by which time it had spread across social media channels, blogs and even got picked up by news agencies. The song didn’t only damage United Airline’s reputation, it severely affected their bottom line. According to socialmediarisk.com, United Airlines’ stock price plunged 10 percent, costing shareholders USD 180-million. The damage to the guitar was only USD 3,500.
While a company can’t change policies to ensure that each and every client walks away happy, there are a number of things United Airlines could have done to better manage the situation. If they were using social listening tools, for example, they would’ve picked up on the video and been aware of the buzz it created. Being able to react quickly, and with humility, are key aspects in successfully diffusing an online situation.
www.wsioms.co.za
francois@wsioms.co.za
+27 11 468 3138
According to socialmediarisk.com, United Airlines’ stock price plunged 10 percent, costing shareholders USD 180-million. The damage to the guitar was only USD 3,500. website design muscat
ReplyDeleteOnline Reputation Management is very important to take a business in a direction to success.It's easy to manage your reputation on the web.The above content article is very informative & helpful.
ReplyDeleteBusiness Reputation Management