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3 Steps Involved in Online Reputation Management

We will talk about the first two steps in this article and talk about the 3rd step, Influencing, in the next article...

Step 1: Monitoring

Social media has become the personal journal of everyone since it is very easy for anyone to publish information on channels such as blogs, discussion boards and opinion forums. Unfortunately, not everyone can be pleased all of the time.

The Internet is a great way to judge what people think of a particular service or product. People tend to be more honest; the only downside is you are more likely to get negative feedback rather than positive ones. People who received very good service will rarely write about it, whereas people who received bad service will tell everyone and also write about it.

If you want to know what is being said about your brand, you must monitor these online conversations. However, the size and complexity of the Internet coupled with the speed at which news travels means it is difficult to continuously monitor all that is being said. To tackle this problem, you need an early warning system to alert you of all news relating to your brand, so you may remedy when needed. There are several social monitoring services available that do the work for you.

Examples of Social Monitoring Tools

1. Google and Yahoo! Alerts

Receive email alerts every time someone mentions brands that you are tracking. Google Alerts allows you to set up keyword searches for the name of your company or competitors and receive updates in your email inbox or through an RSS feed.

2. Social Mention

Social Mention tracks blogs, blog comments, Twitter, mainstream news, images, video and audio. Searches can be saved as an RSS feed, so you can easily stay up-to-date.

3. Radian6

Radian6 is a powerhouse that gives you the ability to slice-and-dice your data until your head spins. This social media monitoring tool offers integrated workflow, alerts, sentiment, monitoring across blogs, forums, news, Twitter and more.

4. HootSuite

HootSuite is a popular tool that can be used to manage multiple accounts across Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, WordPress, Foursquare and LinkedIn. You can push updates to one or more profiles, track click-through, deploy timed updates, monitor your social media buzz across multiple web services and assign tasks among team members based on roles.

5. Technorati

This is one of the largest blog search engine directories that can also be searched for keywords related to your brand (or those of your competition).

6. Addict-O-Matic

This tool has a consolidated page with search matches across sites like Twitter, Flickr and more. Featuring an appealing interface and one-page dashboard, Addict-o-matic is one of the best free tools available for summarizing your entire "buzz" in one place.

7. ReputationDefender

Created for the specific purpose of helping you preserve and restore your reputation in social media, Reputation Defender offers a robust monitoring service that will help you keep track of your brand. A feature called MyEdge helps you deal with the results that Google serves up about you.

Once you have adopted a monitoring system for your brand you should also track other information, such as competing brands and organizations, industry terms as well as general industry news. Monitoring gives you instant notice if bad information appears. You may want to include positive and negative modifiers like "fail," "sucks," etc. This will help to target your search.

Monitoring is an essential and useful tactic for controlling bad information within the search engine space. Unfortunately, monitoring by itself is not enough if it is too late and damage has already been done. The best outcomes occur if you proactively control your space and what people read about your brand. It is important to analyze your current space in order to take action and control it.

Step 2: Analyzing

Although monitoring systems are in place, the work is not yet over. It is crucial to analyze your social reviews to improve your brand. The analysis part consists of going though all the key comments, feedback and identified concerns that are being expressed online.

Healthy Conversations Comprise of Both Positive and Negative Feedback

Once you have learned what is being said about your company online, you need to evaluate the impact this has or will have on you. You need to understand that healthy discussions comprise of both positive and negative feedback. This feedback (negative/positive) will bring about many opportunities to formulate new and upbeat changes for the better.

Let your audience know that you have been following them and their feedback has helped you enhance your product/service. Invite them to give more feedback to enable you to provide them with a better product/service. Let your audience know about the new improvements you are making and ask for their advice. Make your audience feel involved and let them know you are listening to them.

For instance, if someone left a negative comment or review about your company, they’re giving you a chance to change the conversation and make things better. They did not silently vow to never do business with your company again or trash you to their friends. They told you what happened, why they are disappointed, and now they are looking to you to make things better. Instead of just deleting the comments, listen to what they are telling you. Understand their problem and where the communication has failed. Do not fear the biggest critics. You just need to know how to handle harsh criticism in a positive and subtle way.

Even with the help of monitoring tools, there may be too much information out there. It is wise to begin brand management internally to avoid any confusion. You may start with: Corporate Sites Product Sites Corporate Blogs Employee Blogs Partner Sites (supplier sites, recruitment sites) Corporate Communications