There’s an old adage in business: It can take years to build a solid reputation. It can take just a few seconds and one mistake to bring it all crashing down.
In the past, your reputation was built mainly on service, relationships and brand messaging. Nowadays we have digital marketing and social media marketing that allow us to reach out to individuals around the world. It’s the marketing equivalent of supercharging word of mouth advertising.
This is however a double-edged sword, as many businesses have found out the hard way. While it is easy to develop an online persona, it can be more difficult to control, especially with regards to what people say about your business on review sites and social media.
What is Online Reputation Management?
Online Reputation Management (or ORM) is a wide-ranging area of business development and marketing.
It’s not only about ensuring that any negative news about your company is addressed and managed, it’s everything from your brand development, the way you build your reputation and how you put in process and procedures that ensure your business can realise its full potential.
ORM isn’t just important for large corporations either. It’s vital for small business enterprises as well, particularly if they are looking to grow and become more successful.
Why is ORM So Important?
Building an online reputation isn’t that difficult. Building a great online reputation, however, is a whole different story. The public’s perception of your business is vital to its future success. If you are perceived as a reliable, trustworthy business, customers are likely to buy your products or hire your services. If you are perceived negatively, they are more likely to work with your competitors.
Online reputation management is challenging because you can be mentioned just about anywhere online at any time.
Let’s take social media as an example.
What happens if someone on Twitter posts a bad review of your support services and tells all their friends and family what a bad experience they have had? What if five or six people retweet this complaint? And five or six of their followers then do the same?
It’s easy to see how one bad review can suddenly spread like wildfire, cutting your hard-earned reputation to the quick. Of course, part of your online reputation management would be to respond to this review and manage it accordingly. Damage management is time-sensitive and there’s not a lot of it going around.
How ORM Works on Different Platforms
The complication with online reputation management is that it spreads across a broad range of different platforms. A complaint on Facebook is slightly different from one on Twitter. On Facebook, for example, you can go into a lot more detail and there are more groups that can help spread a message whether it’s positive or negative.
Then there are review sites. Recent research suggests that 85% of us trust online reviews and more than half of us prefer to see a 4-star rating or greater before we commit to buy. You ignore these at your peril.
For small businesses, coping with ORM can be challenging. The biggest reason for this is lack of budget and lack of resources. There are certain steps you should be taking, however:
- The first is to have a presence on all sites where you are likely to be talked about. If you are not aware of what’s being said, then you can’t do anything about it.
- The second is to have a process in place for dealing with complaints or adverse press about your business. There is a right way and a wrong way to do this and being confrontational is not the solution.
- Finally, you have to have a positive online reputation management process in place to counteract any bad press but also to spread the good word about your business.
These are three small things that can have wide-ranging consequences for your business when it comes to reputation management. If you would like to find out more about ORM and how it should fit into your business operation, contact the team at WoYa Digital today.