Brand Reputation Management

Brand Reputation Management

So, what is brand reputation management and how can it help your business?

Its not necessary to be a professional programmer or web site developer to get your opinion viewed and read by others around the world. This fact should alarm any company concerned with their reputation. Imagine that you've spent years of hard work constructing a good brand reputation for your product or service, invested money in public relations, marketing and website design. Still, a few people will be enough to undo all this effort overnight. Fortunately, there are brand reputation management professionals that will help you maintain a robust online presence and save you from bad publicity.

There are plenty of people who may want to damage your company. Activist groups, unsatisfied clients, unhappy employees, all use the web as a way to promote their points of view. Sometimes, the sites containing your company’s name in an unpleasant surrounding of such words as “bad” and “awful” will rank even higher than your main corporate web site. Each day your reputation is thoroughly scrutinized. How can you prevent anyone from noticing the tiniest stain on it?

In the past, things such as brand reputation management and search engine marketing were separate activities. These days, with the advent of user-driven blogs, forums, social networks and other sources of content, they have to be carried out jointly.

Generally, any negative information appearing in the search engine results pages can be responded to by writing favorable content and knowing where and how to submit it. If the search engines consider this positive data more relevant, informative, and it appears on reliable web sites, the negative mentions of your company’s will be pushed down the result pages until that nasty article by a disgruntled client or a vengeful ex-employee is on page twenty and your good name is safe and secure.

Actually, it’s quite easy to get good rankings for a company name key word as there is usually less competition for these words than for the product its sells or services provided. Informative, high-quality content, such as press releases, is a great tool for managing traffic driven to your site and influencing the search engine results. A good brand reputation management specialist will use comprehensive and constantly evolving skills and knowledge of how the search engines evaluate web sites to work out both proactive strategies to avoid any damage to your brand reputation now and take steps to prevent it in the future. The more unique the name of the company whose brand reputation you’re striving to defend, the more significant and faster the effect you’ll achieve by implementing even the simplest brand reputation management techniques.

Reputation Management Software

Reputation Management Software paves the way
With the diversity of information that can be found on the web and the number of web sites that users have to choose from, they need some guidance in making their choices. Usually people follow the advice of search engines and pick out one of the top links offered to them by their search. Reputation management is essential for a company that wants people to find only those links that will lead them to the web sites with favorable or positive information about the organization, and its products and services. And reputation management software makes the process easier.

Reputation management software can take over a large part of the time consuming and complex activity of monitoring and improving your company’s online presence. There are various useful tools which help you to find your bearings in the overload of information presented on the web.

The reputation management software itself will not help to actually change or dismiss the things that people say about your company, products or actions, but once you are aware of what’s going on, you will have a better idea of which strategy to choose when interacting with the online world. For example, if most negative reviews come from common users in a forum, just a couple of positive posts in the same forum can influence the opinion of all readers. But when it comes to more credible sources, like popular professional blogs, or conventional media, the task of improving your reputation will require quite a different approach. Anyway, all managing should be left for humans, though reputation management software can give your people a target to focus on.

To start searching for the information about your company with the help of these tools you just need to specify certain key phrases that will be used to find any mention regarding your business online and their sources. No matter where or when your brand was mentioned - on corporate sites, forums or blogs - reputation management software will find it out and inform you. It will display every relevant link and content and let you view the detailed description of the one you may get interested in.

It will sort the results according to their relevance and level of harm to your company’s reputation and then present everything in a clear informative manner. With this kind of tool it becomes extremely easy to keep track of any information concerning your business that emerges on the web and take immediate actions if needed. This constant awareness allows you to identify trends and examine the strength of your brand’s position online. Most reputation management software is even capable of identifying and removing duplicate entries from its results.


Reputation Risk Management

With the ever increasing number of Internet users and places for them to freely express their opinion, online reputation risk management is something that should be paid plenty of attention too. When you discover that your reputation on the web is being assaulted, either on purpose or unintentionally, you should take measures immediately.

Any reputation management begins with clarifying of who is attacking your good name. It can be a malicious competitor, an ex-employee whom you fired, or a client dissatisfied with the quality of service rendered to him or her. Often you’ll learn that the offending post is written without any knowledge of the exact facts about your business. Sometimes it’s a single negative post in a blog, sometimes it’s a series of deliberately created articles that are aimed at ruining your reputation. Still, no matter how it turned up, the negative publicity is quite difficult to get rid of.

If you’re experiencing one of the above mentioned problems with your online reputation, hiring a good reputation risk management company can be a perfect decision.

Are there many positive online reviews and articles already associated with your business, or is your companies name rarely found on the Internet? Reputation risk management also includes maintaining and promoting existing web sites that positively mention your name, not just reacting against the bad publicity. New content is also very important. From posting in different professional blogs to creating your own pages in different social networks, there are many ways to introduce positive information, thus growing and managing your online reputation.

While implementing various useful reputation management practices, do not forget that monitoring your online reputation should be an ongoing process. It seems impossible to find anything in the avalanche of information on the Internet, still there is reputation management software that can help automate the process. All these various tools do basically the same things. They search the web according to the key words you specified in order to find any references to your company or its products in blogs, forums, corporate web sites, and so on. The best way to have control over the situation is to know when your internet reputation is being compromised and take appropriate actions.

Reputation risk management can seem tough and, to tell the truth, it is. The average reputation management project may take months to get visible results. Moreover, serious threats to your business reputation should be handled by professional reputation management companies, not by amateurs. Something will threaten your online reputation whether you employ reputation risk management or not. Still, if you are warned about problems quickly and take appropriate measures, you can lessen the impact they have on your reputation.

What CIOs Should Know About Online Brand Management

Managing corporate brands and identities online is a black art that combines Web technology savvy, a deep understanding of how search engines and social networking sites work, and an appreciation for the power of perception. Although this task doesn't typically fall on the CIO's shoulders, technology executives need to understand the issues at hand and the role they can play in helping to manage their company's brands.

Just as company executives charged the CIO's office looking for help in the 1990s with the emergence of domain squatting - setting up a Web site with a name similar to a certain company or brand and spreading misinformation about that company or holding the URL for ransom - upper management will no doubt look to the resident technology expert for rescue should the company's online reputation become compromised.

CIOs can help prevent this scenario by working with marketing and communications departments to optimize corporate Web sites for generating positive search-engine results, develop employee online conduct policies that dictate what can and cannot be said publically about the company, and evaluate online reputation management tools and services, experts say.

Online reputation management is more than just making sure that naked photos of the latest Hollywood starlet don't end up on someone's Facebook page. For corporations, protecting brands online is becoming an essential function as more and more consumers turn to search engines and social networking sites to gather the information that forms their opinion about a particular brand or company.

"The switch from traditional media and corporate monologues on websites to social media on the Internet makes every Internet user a journalist.

"People will judge you, your company, and your brand. Reputation management requires new skills in this radically transparent world."

Why does a company's online reputation need to be managed, especially if the business believes it has nothing to hide? Because the top search results from Google and other engines have become trusted sources of information for most consumers, and companies can't control what other Web sites are saying about them, who's reading them, and how those comments are ranked by search engines.

"Among users who search on a daily basis, 90 percent of them trust what's on Google page one [of search results], and 70 percent of those users rarely read beyond page two,". "That gives companies a narrow window to control their brands and reputations."
Many companies provide programs and services that - among other things -- manage the order in which information about their clients is ranked by search engines. There is also cadre of online monitoring tools available that alert a company whenever a brand name or keyword relevant to the company is posted.

Brand management tools and services employ techniques such as search-engine optimization of keywords to help their clients bring the most pertinent information about their companies to the top of the search results, burying older, more random, or less flattering links deeper within the results.

But managing a company's reputation doesn't end with search engine techniques; there's also the issue of monitoring what is being said on social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook, and who's saying it. There have been reports of companies having unauthorized Twitter accounts opened with names similar to the corporation or brand name; in one case a company's competitor did just that, and the tweets it sent out were less than flattering.

For the most part, sites like Twitter won't verify the authenticity of a new user account, so it's up to companies to monitor these sites themselves for unflattering comments or for the spread of confidential information, which sometimes can come from within. Beyond employing online monitoring services and tools, CIOs should make sure that the company's policies regarding online use by employees specify what kind of information can be posted about the company on a public forum. That means working closely with the marketing folks to come up with these guidelines, something many IT professionals aren't necessarily used to.

"Today, it is more essential than ever to have IT and marketing on the same page," in a blog post earlier this year. "As data becomes the currency of relevance and customers demand real-time interaction with the brands they do business with, it is even more important for marketing and IT to join together and drive efficiency for the business and value for the customer."