Develop your Online Reputation Management Strategy

Online reputation management is a critical component of many businesses branding. With so much online chatter happening, the ability to keep a positive vibe about your business is crucial. You should know what is being said about you, your brand and your business.

Developing a strategy to stay on top of your online reputation management is essential, and following this 3 step strategy will ensure your business stays ahead of the game.

Step 1 – Track and monitor

As a business, the first thing to do is learn what is being written and said about you and get a feel for how others view your business. Google your company’s name and the names of the heads of your business. Also, search for keywords that relate to your business and see if your business features on the results. Check out sites like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and blogs to see any buzz about your company.

Step 2 – Evaluate and interpret.

It is easy to miss this step and react to positive and harmful content on the internet – but it is crucial to read through the results and interpret them before responding. Set up a process that identifies critical statements and with these statements, discusses them with your team and try and analyse what is really being said. The discussion may also help provide you with the right solutions and react to what is being said about your company. It can be beneficial to put content found into categories that you will address in the next step. Some of these categories might be:

• Positive content
• Negative content
• Genuine complaints
• Brand information
• Personnel
• Industry-related

Step 3 – Engage and act

Now that you have broken down the content found into a list of categories, you need to address what you have found. For each of your categories identified, you should plan a specific action you will take to manage them. For example, you may want to directly comment on a blog post, or you may wish to write your own blog that addresses a specific concern.

Reactive and proactive

There are two main approaches to consider, reactive and proactive.

Reactive is to have a quick response to conversations (positive or negative) that come up.

Acting proactively is an essential part of any reputation strategy. Do this by publishing positive messages, articles, and press releases to ensure you have a constant flow of content planned in advance.

Remember that this 3 step process is not a one-off strategy, and your business needs to constantly monitor the online activity and stay up to date.