ORM – Managing Your Brand’s Reputation Online

With more and more people using search engines to research brands and products, it is becoming increasingly important to ensure that your brand has a positive reputation online.  

The internet has become a vehicle for disgruntled customers/clients/employees to air their views about negative experiences they’ve had with a brand. While this is a good thing for the democratisation of e-commerce, it can be a very dangerous weapon in the hands of internet users with bad experiences with or even intentions towards your brand.

Online reputation management or ORM as its otherwise called is an art and a science in the sense that you have to be creative in how you improve your image online as well as have the optimisation skills to ensure that this startegy is executed in the most efficient manner.

So how do you go about managing your reputation online?  Here are a few basic steps to follow:

1. Conduct a search for you brand term in Google (other search engines have less of an effect as Google has the lion share of searches)
2. Analyse the top 10 results and take note of the general sentiment surrounding your brand.
3. Devise a strategy to address/supress negative publicity and maximise positive publicity.
4. Most likely the number one position on Google for your brand name is your own site (if its not then you have bigger challenges to address and should check to see if your site is banned by Google)
5. The second, third, fourth etc. results are crucial.  Look who’s ranking for your brand name in these results.  If you’re a big brand you would probably see a mixture of resutls such as Wikipedia, news results, YouTube

Point #3 is really crucial.   How do you go about supressing negative publicity?  There are a few steps you can take to address negative publicity, some quick wins, other not so quick but require a more strategic solution that is more long term.  

1. Create subdomains.  Subdomains are considered as semi-stand alone sites by Search engines and therefore if you have sufficient content to place under a subdomain (eg news.brand.com) then that subdomain will have a very high probability of ranking for your brand name (below your main site) 
2. Create Social Media Profiles and link to them.  Examples of social media sites that rank highly in search results include Facebook, Twitter, Technorati, Linkedin, and Flickr.  Creating these social network profiles not only allows your brand to get closer to today’s consumer but also has the secondary benefit increasing the probability that one of “your digital assets” appear in the top 10 results of search engines.
3. Participate in Forums, Blogs, and online discussions. This is a sensitive one.  It is more difficult for bigger brands to directly participate in online discussions but its not entirely out of the question. An example of a big brand that does participate in discussion is Google who are often seen participating in Webmaster communities across the net including WebmasterWorld and SEOMz.
4. Take legal action.  If you spot forum/blog posts that are flat out spreading lies and rumours about you brand, send a strongly worded email to the owner and ask them to remove this libellous information (seize and desist).  If they don’t you can follow it with legal  action.
5. Optimise your News Releases.  Make sure that your press release are optimised for your brand name and/or other industry keywords you’re targeting (brand generic).
6. Optimise non-text based content such as images, videos, pdf’s etc.  Search engine results pages no longer only serve traditional text-based results but also serve images, videos, pdfs, news releases, blog posts, etc.  Therefore optimising all your digital assets has become paramount.
7. Brief you PR agency to produce press releases that address the negative sentiment about your brand.   This is a no-brainer and a good way of addressing negative pr without actually participating in discussions.  If you find a recurring negative PR theme, brief your PR agency and ask them to adress it in future press releases.

The above are basic steps.  There is much more to ORM but the above steps are a good place to start if you’ve not thought about your Brand’s Online reputation.