Thanks to the Internet and the widespread ease users have to publish anything they’d like at anytime, the problem of maintaining an acceptable online reputation for your company can become a real headache. For this reason, companies need to develop an ORM plan.
Online Reputation Management (ORM) is the action of monitoring the online reputation of a brand, company or person with the intent to control, reverse or at least reduce adverse situations that may affect public perception.
What creates a negative reputation online? In its most basic form, if the public believes that a brand is not good or that the services offered do not meet customer expectations or are not delivered as promised, the impact can be reflected directly in consumer preferences, and currently due to the power of social networks, the negative commentary or perceptions can spread much faster than before.
An ORM plan has 3 stages:
Identify:
In this stage publications, images, videos, conversations or negative comments alluding to the brand are detected. This is done with specialized software (referred to a little below).
Many believe that only social networks should be considered during this stage but that is a serious error because not all damage occurs just in those forums. We should consider the comments expressed on the website, which in turn are indexed in Google and appear in searches made by users. If a person seeks a listing on Google and the first thing that appears is negative comments about the brand, logically will look for another option.
To the surprise of many, there are websites that have been created specifically for users to complain publicly about brands. Among them are: Apestan.com, Quejasonline.com, Complaintnow.com and Scambook.com.
Analyze:
This is the stage that requires more time because from the information selected in the previous step we extract what can really become a threat to the reputation of a brand and, in each case, design a plan to counter that negativity.
Act:
According to what is generated in the previous steps, what follows is to take immediate and customized for each case. For example, if there are negative comments on social networks, ORM strategy seeks to generate more positive messages than negative to cause the detrimental comments to disappear between the volumes of postings. The ORM process requires expertise.
Pay-for-use tools such as Radian6 and Reputation Level offer options to help monitor brands online.
Google Alerts and Yahoo Pipes are free tools that fulfill the same function on a more basic level.
In Puerto Vallarta, a city that survives on tourism, Trip Advisor is an essential tool for measuring the reputation of hotels and restaurants.
With a quick search a brand on this site, we can understand how well the brand is positioned in the eyes of consumers.
Jorge Chavez Senior Editor Mijo! Brands.
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