Managing Online Reputation
The concept of “managing online reputation” is very broad, and everyone understands it differently. Many companies working in this direction use different tools and approaches to provide this service.
The activity of managing online reputation involves the involvement of many processes. Among such processes, we would like to highlight SERM (Search Engine Reputation Management), ORM (Online Reputation Management), HM (Hidden Marketing), native advertising, monitoring reviews online, and auditing reputation online.
It should be noted that only in the comprehensive application of these reputation management tools can a good effect be achieved. Often, to achieve the goal of one process, another process is applied. If you understand the essence of each process, you can understand why this happens.
Online Reputation Management (ORM)
Online Reputation Management (ORM) is the process of monitoring and controlling what is being said about your company, brand, product or personal reputation online.
ORM involves monitoring various online channels such as social media, blogs, forums, news sites, etc. to identify any mentions of your company or brand. If negative reviews, comments or news are discovered during monitoring, ORM specialists develop strategies to manage their consequences.
ORM strategies can include:
- Creating positive content such as articles, blogs or videos that highlight the advantages of your company or brand, and publishing them online.
- Active participation in social media and other online forums to create a positive reputation and maintain it in the long run.
- Dealing with negative reviews and comments, including their removal or providing reasonable responses to them.
- Search engine optimization to ensure that positive content is more visible when searching for your company or brand.
Overall, ORM can help establish and maintain a positive reputation online, which is important for business as it can influence the decisions of potential customers.
Let’s start with the fact that we believe that it’s not right to sell the service of “online reputation management” based on the number of reviews. We base our approach on the number of websites we work with.
To select platforms, we also study the search engine’s top results. Then we segment the obtained platforms into manageable and unmanageable ones, which is very important.
Manageable sites are those where negative reviews can be deleted. Often, this is a paid feature, and it is quite expensive, but such an opportunity is still provided. Some sites make concessions for free. The main condition of such sites is that the issue is resolved, and the author of the negative review agrees to its removal.
Unmanageable sites are those that are not willing to remove negative reviews under any circumstances. Of course, this is all conditional, as every site has its price. When this price goes beyond reasonable limits, such sites are perceived as unmanageable.
Next, we further divide each segment into sub-segments, namely positive, neutral, and negative. In the obtained results, we consider each platform separately. We study the situation on the platforms and develop a behavior strategy on them.
The following behavior models are most commonly used:
- discussing the company’s services/products as a whole or separately;
- being active in discussion threads about the company to bring the thread to the top of the forum section;
- protecting the company from black PR, trolling, or helping to solve the issues of real dissatisfied customers;
- creating discussion islands about the company and its services.
When working on each platform, the main thing for us is not to leave a certain number of posts but to achieve the desired result. Sometimes, the desired result is achieved immediately after the first activity on the work resource. However, such cases are unfortunately rare.
For example, to discourage trolls from ruining clients’ reputations, it often takes a long time. There have been cases when trolls did not leave a thread even after a year of work, but this also happens infrequently.
Our brief overview of services does not reflect the full range of actions we take to strengthen your reputation online. Our team of experts in internet marketing and reputation management works with each client individually to create the most effective strategy for improving your online profile. We provide a wide range of services, including reputation monitoring and analysis, review management, development and promotion of positive content, social media management, and much more. Contact us, and we will help you succeed online.
Reputation management in search engine results (SERM)
For us, it’s not just about cleaning up each individual website, but also about cleaning up the search engine results themselves.
Sometimes, websites are intentionally created to spread negative information about others. This is often done by competitors, who create such sites themselves or order black PR. Site administrators also often write unverified or knowingly false information in order to attract attention. After such sites make it to the top of search engine results, company owners often ask the administrators of these resources to remove negative content about their company. Of course, such removal requires payment for services.
But what if the sites refuse to remove the negative content? Should they just be ignored?
Absolutely not! Such sites are always under scrutiny! If it is not possible to remove or cover up the negativity on the site, then the site itself should be removed from the search engine. This is a very difficult and costly process. It is achieved thanks to a tool for managing online reputation called SERM.
SERM stands for Search Engine Reputation Management.
The essence of this process is to promote as many relevant sites as possible to the top of the search engine results. First and foremost, managed sites are promoted, followed by sites with positive content. First and second place does not mean that one is promoted first and the other second. This is just a conditional definition, which means that a list of the first and then the second is compiled, and they are promoted simultaneously.
By promoting the desired sites to the top, we gradually push the sites we don’t need to the background. This means that the further away a site with negativity is, the less likely it is to be seen.
This process is difficult because, in parallel with our efforts to push the unwanted site to the background, the administration of that site will make every effort to keep their site as high in the top as possible.
When implementing SERM and ORM in general, we use a number of other PR tools such as hidden marketing, writing and placing press releases, creating additional sites for the company (landing pages, news sites, promo sites, etc.), native advertising, review monitoring, reputation auditing, and others. Let’s go over each of them.
Hidden marketing (HM)
Hidden marketing (HM), also known as covert advertising or influencer marketing, is a method of promoting goods or services in which advertising is integrated into content in order to not directly evoke consumer awareness of the fact that it is advertising.
Hidden marketing can take various forms, such as:
- a video blogger creates a video about using a certain product without explicitly mentioning it, but implying its use;
- a company pays a famous person to mention their product on social media without indicating that it is an advertisement;
- a company pays for the creation of an article about its product in a publication without indicating that it is sponsored content.
Hidden marketing can be an effective way of promoting because advertising becomes more organic and less intrusive. However, if consumers discover that the content is hidden advertising, it can cause a negative reaction and damage the company’s reputation.
In some countries, there are laws that require hidden marketing to be clearly labeled as advertising. Therefore, companies must be cautious and comply with the rules to avoid legal problems and reputational damage.
Native Advertising
Native advertising is a type of advertising that people are more receptive to than other forms of advertising. This is because the user receives useful information in which advertising for a particular brand, product, or company is discreetly integrated.
In many cases, native advertising is placed as a call to action within an article or post. The call to action must strictly adhere to the theme of the content in which it is placed. Native advertising can also appear as one of the blocks on the website on which it is placed. For example, if you want to place your ad in a block between blog posts, you can visually design the ad to look like a blog post, thus transforming it from a regular advertisement to a native advertisement.
Boosting native advertising can be achieved by placing it on popular resources. Almost always, for placing any material, the website administration requires payment. The average price of placing materials on such sites at the time of writing this article is $500 and has remained at this level for several years.
Famous personalities and bloggers, opinion leaders, or industry experts who are respected by their audience are often used for native advertising. However, due to incorrect task setting and/or improper execution, native advertising can often turn into direct advertising and have less impact.
The main characteristics of native advertising are:
- It adapts to the design of the platform;
- It is informative;
- It has an attractive appearance;
- It always includes a call to action.
Review Monitoring
Many PR companies conduct review monitoring using automated services, both paid and free. The essence of such services is that when a company is mentioned online, the service sends a notification.
Companies often claim that they have all sites under control because they use super tariffs in such services. But it should be understood that this is a big exaggeration. The monitoring services themselves claim that monitoring is carried out on a maximum of 10% of all available sites.
In most cases, these 10% occupy the top search results, but there are often exceptions! Sites that are not in the monitoring database often occupy the top search results repeatedly and even en masse. Yes, such sites are likely to be added to the monitoring database sooner or later, but by that time, the site may already have received a bright negative coloration, which will be difficult to work with.
It is also worth considering that the robots that monitor mentions are just programs that work according to a clearly defined algorithm. Therefore, if someone writes “this company,” the robot will not understand which one specifically, even if it is written in a thread about that company. As a result, the notification will not be sent, and the review runs the risk of going unnoticed. For example, robots will not see reviews such as “this is a scam,” “they cheated me, wasted my money in this company,” “this company is a complete fraud” … This is a huge disadvantage because only a small percentage of reviews contain the company name.
It is worth mentioning separately that automated reputation monitoring services do not rank reviews by tonality, from negative to positive, or do so extremely mediocrely.
The second option is manual monitoring. When each mention is tracked by a real person who determines its tonality, etc. This approach helps to form a clearer and higher quality picture of the company’s reputation status, but at the same time, it requires an order of magnitude more time and resources. For example, if there are 1,000 mentions about your company per day, it is very difficult to process them manually. That is why a combination of automated and manual monitoring systems is often used.
Review monitoring is needed to timely see the review or comment left and respond to it if necessary in the optimal time. Often, people ask questions before buying something, and if they do not find answers to them, there is a chance that they will simply choose another similar option for which the information was more accessible.
It is important to notice the emergence of negativity when deploying “black PR” at the very beginning. This will make it possible to prevent the implementation of black PR at the very beginning and timely prevent its spread.
Reputation audit
A reputation audit is used to evaluate a company’s reputation at the current moment. It is also capable of reflecting the effectiveness of a PR campaign and provides an opportunity to redirect it in the right direction.
Not many companies involved in online reputation management use this tool. The reason why such a powerful tool is ignored is unknown to us. It can only be assumed that not everyone is able to conduct a quality audit. At the same time, paying someone else to conduct such an audit is not feasible due to greed.
A reputation audit should be conducted every 3-6 months. The very first audit is conducted just before the start of a PR campaign to evaluate its effectiveness.
If you order our services, the reputation audit is already included by default and is conducted as needed. For those who are not our clients, we provide such audits for a fee.
What do our services ultimately provide? How much does it cost?
Many people confuse the concepts of reputation management and customer acquisition. Promoting a company as a whole is a combination of customer acquisition and reputation management. Often, customer acquisition and reputation management are intertwined, with the same work being done, but with slightly different goals.
Customer acquisition involves actions aimed at obtaining useful traffic to the company’s website, from which the client ultimately benefits from new customers, sales, inquiries, contact information, etc. These actions include various types of advertising, such as banner advertising on websites and forums, contextual advertising in search engines, targeted advertising in social networks, advertising on radio and TV, etc.
Among the general processes for customer acquisition and reputation management, one can highlight the placement of press releases, native advertising, blogger services, creating informative threads about the company, etc. All of this attracts the attention of the target audience, increases engagement, loyalty, and brand recognition.
Reputation management is a more complex process. Its main goal is to push a potential customer who is already ready to make a purchase to choose a particular brand. A positive reputation and good recommendations serve as such a push.
Another main goal of reputation management is to retain those customers who are already real. As a result, it turns out that customer acquisition is also to some extent involved in reputation management.
We often get the question, will our services benefit in terms of attracting new customers? Yes, there should be an influx of customers, but we cannot guarantee its strength. In addition, in the process of reputation management, unlike customer acquisition, it is not acceptable to use various types of promo codes, special links, and other similar materials that could identify a person as someone brought in by us.
Before starting to attract customers, it is necessary to initiate reputation management because a large portion of traffic will be wasted. People will see the offer, click on the link, want to learn more about the company and see reviews, but in the end, they will not see anything that convinces them to buy the services. And all because nobody instilled confidence in the company in them.
At the beginning of promoting a company, such as attracting customers, reputation management is a loss for the company. But over time, with proper organization, these processes pay off and bring profit.
Do we provide any guarantees? Yes, we guarantee that we will perform our part of the job with quality. But much also depends on the offer itself. If the company offers interesting services, it is much easier to promote such a company, and the effect of promotion will be much greater!
We are often offered to work for a percentage of the profit generated. We immediately refuse such offers. We refuse not because we are unsure of our actions, but because the benefit of our activities cannot be measured in figures, applications, or leads, as, for example, in contextual advertising.
In addition, we spend a significant portion of our fee on the implementation of our services. And the benefit of our actions is foreseen not only at the moment of work but also in the distant future. A written review or article today can work as well on the day of writing as it can in several years!
As for the cost of our services, each case is discussed individually. Everyone has different situations, requirements, and goals. If you are interested in our services and want to know the price for online reputation management, write to us, and we will calculate the cost of our services for you.
If you have any questions for us, I recommend looking for answers on the frequently asked questions page (FAQ), or asking us through any convenient contact method, or using the feedback form.