Tips & Tools to Improve Your Online Reputation Management

What is Online Reputation Management?

Online Reputation Management (ORM) is developing strategies to build or influence the public perception of an organization, individual or other entity online. In other words, your online reputation is what others think about you, your brand or organization based on the information they find online.

Tips& tools on how to manage your online reputation

Don’t wait until you face a bad review or hear negative comments to start reputation management. Build a sustainable reputation strategy and implement it step by step. How do you want to be perceived? What are your values and mission statements? What information about your company do you want to make public?

1. Your employees are also part of your brand!

You are what you tweet. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to expect to keep your personal and professional posts separate, or to think that what you post personally will have no impact on your business. Therefore, separate professional from personal and ask your employees to handle them the same way.

Let them know that the information they post online can have a positive or negative impact on your business. Why not provide them with further training in media competence? Especially managers and those employees who are in close contact with customers and are visible to the outside world should be considered first. Make your employees a part of your reputation management as well.

If your online reputation sinks, you will have a hard time trying to rebuild your reputation. So from the beginning, work out a concept for your reputation management, how you want to appear publicly to the outside world, and who appears publicly to the outside world for you. Be authentic and transparent. If you appear too contrived in what you present to the outside world, you will lack credibility.

2. Deal with negative entries about your brand

To avoid surprises or unexpected problems, it is necessary to have at least one community manager who has the necessary training to manage and develop your brand in terms of online reputation. Social networks are a very powerful tool where you need to interact, listen and create a sense of community around a brand, not just to promote products or services. After reviewing and adjusting your own content, start monitoring all the review portals where you are listed.

Never let a negative comment about your company, brands, products and services go uncommented, but react immediately when your tools and software notify you.

For negative comments, make it believable that you are genuinely interested in fixing a faux pas or even structural difficulties that led to the dissatisfaction. Don’t pass it off as “We apologize for any inconvenience,” but instead say — “I’m sorry this happened. Here’s what we’re going to do to make it better.”

3. Set up social listening tools to know what is being said about your brand!

In order to know what is being said about your brands and your company, it is necessary to set up an active social listening that allows you to identify what kind of comments about your company are prevalent in the public networks, what tone they have and whether they are positive or negative. Text analytics mechanisms that search the web for comments and reviews about your company and analyse comments using artificial intelligence are excellent for this purpose. Modern text analysis mechanisms have become an indispensable part of reputation management and will help you improve your online reputation in the long term!

4. Keep up with your customers through surveys

Conduct regular customer surveys and measure the loyalty of your customers. Stimulate customer feedback! Actively solicit customer feedback and create channels for it, for example on your website or in social networks.

Use the option of feedback promotion, which means that you actively give your customers the opportunity to share positive feedback on social networks, for example from customer surveys or resolved complaints. In this way, you can actually positively influence your online reputation.

When it comes to reputation management, also look inside your own company — satisfied employees carry their positive experiences to the outside world and thus also improve your online reputation. Therefore, it is important for companies to establish an employer branding strategy. Therefore, conduct employee surveys on a regular basis. With innovative software, you can conduct employee surveys easily, quickly, regularly and cost-effectively.