1. Having a website, social media profiles, blog etc is not enough for a company to promote its brand online ? .

2. There should be somebody monitoring your brand reputation on web to see if any of your customers are asking any questions, suggestions, complaints related to your brand or company. These might be positive or negative, it is important that you stay informed about these activities related to your company/brand as soon as they come on web. 3. So, how to go about this? Monitoring your reputation online is known as online reputation Management. I will be explaining some basics of what is online reputation management and also give you some tips on how to maintain your online reputation easily. 4. Online Reputation Management (ORM). 5 years back one of my client had a financial crisis in his company so he decided to lay off 25% of his employees and retain the rest as it was the year of worst hit recession [2008]. 5. After which some of his ex-employees started posting bad reviews about my clients company in websites like rip-off report, complaint board and other review sites using duplicate names. As a result within two months these review sites links started coming in first page of Google on position 3 and 4. 6. Our client neglected these initially as he felt his product quality was good and this wont affect his sales. But he was wrong, in 9 months he observed 20 % decline in his sales figure. This was when he realized the importance of maintaining a good online reputation. 7. Now people lookup for search engine to check if there are any complaints or bad review on any product they purchase or a company they plan to get associated with. For example, while purchasing a laptop, mobile etc we go through many review sites, comparison sites and choose the best product for us. 8. Same is the case for corporate deals, when a company wants to sign a deal with Xyz Company they will ask their data team to check for all the media channels about reputation of Xyz Company. If they find anything which is not satisfactory then the deal will not go through. 9. Our client had a decent flash website , 2 social media profiles , a blog and yet these review sites link came on first page of search results. Reason for this is he was not active in managing his companys /brands online reputation . 10. Only after losing some customers he started thinking about getting rid of these media agencies link himself and he started contacting SEO agencies who can take care of this and later he found us . Online reputation management must be a integral part of your digital marketing strategy. People who are concerned about your online reputation are: 11. 1. Investors 2. Market research firms 3. Prospective Employee 4. Partners 5. Present clients 6. Prospective clients. 12. Sites which damage our online reputation There are many types of sites which damage your online reputation; sites which are associated with reviews, voting/ public polls, comments, forum sites, and community sites etc 13. Review sites: These sites allow users to express their opinion be it positive or negative. Any person can comment on things like how they found our services, our service quality, etc. 14. Based on few reviews about a brand they will calculate percentage of people who like to recommend this company to others etc. There are some good review sites that provide unbiased reviews, but most of the other reviews sites main purpose would be to rank higher in search results and gain more revenue out of their banner ads. 15. Some of the websites which provides reviews options are yelp.com, qype.co.uk, etc . Hate Sites: These are websites where an individual can share his bad experience. These websites help some people who have been really victimized by helping them raise their voice against a cheat or a fraud organization/company. 16. Sometimes these websites are misused by your competitors, an employee whom you have fired for misconduct disguising themselves under duplicate names. These are non-legitimate reviews and they will harm your companys online reputation. 17. There will not be any deciding body to remove these baseless complaints and Google as a search engine shows all the content related on web for our branded keywords. Some of websites which are popular on web are ripoffreport.com, complaintsboard.com , etc. 18. Can we take legal action if there is a false negative review against our company / organization? Freedom of speech is a right of every citizen and many websites which are into reviews/ comment say that they are projecting public opinion. 19. Still under worst cases some legal action can be taken, this is rare. Google for example provides an option to remove content from its result. On such request Google support team will analyse and take action. Cyber investigations team can also help in severe cases . 20. So the best option is BE PROACTIVE in managing your Online Reputation. 21. Quality SEO Perform good quality SEO, build quality links, plan out your on page optimization and also have links to internal pages so that they rank for your branded keywords, optimize the url structure, and include good quality content for your website 22. Use websites like blekko and schema to determine the tag structure and have a well optimized sit. Social Media Create social media profiles in popular social media networks like Facebook , Twitter , LinkedIn , Slideshare , Google plus . 23. Be active, post an update every day, and share good content regularly. If you dont have time to write good content, use content curation method. Be the source of information to people related to your field. 24. Some tools which can help in content curation are Scoopit , Storify , Pearl trees, etc. Blog Create a blog and connect it with website. Write quality and sharable content regularly and share the same on social media sites. 25. Try to create a blog community, plan on collecting E-mail Ids of people who visit your blog. Send them a monthly regular update mail like a newsletter. Setup multiple blogs under same name if the severity of negative reviews is very high. 26. Manual Removal Contact the web master of the review site and explain to them that your website/ brand name is wrongly appearing with negative reviews on their sites . Some of them remove it for free, some of them charge for it. 27. It is left to you if you want to spend money on removing your negative review. You might some across some web masters who ignore your request for various facts. To maintain a good reputation we need to have access to sites which appear in search results. 28. At least, websites which come on top for first 20 positions must be controlled by us either directly or indirectly. Some of this includes our website links, social media profiles, blogs etc. 29. Monitoring Online Reputation There are many monitoring tools which are available and these help you do the job. Some of them are free some of them are paid editions. 30. Google Alerts : It is a free service from Google, one of the basic and simple format of reputation management. Simply signup and set the keywords to which an alert appears as soon as it is on the web. Trackur : This is a premium application which helps in social media monitoring and measurement .The basic package of Trackur is 27$/month . 31. Naymz : This is a free online monitoring and social media measuring application. Rankur : This is also a good ORM application which has a free version and its paid version starts from 14$/ month . Brandwatch : This is a corporate social media monitoring and social CRM solution. Its basic edition costs 800 $ /month. 32. Digimind : This is a corporate social media solution which helps you monitor and manage social profiles of large scale. There are many high end solutions like Sysomos and Adobe products which provide good insights on online reputation, but these for big enterprises. 33. Conclusion: Have you ever seen negative reviews about companies which are popular like Facebook , General Motors , Walmart etc ? Chances are very low, because these companies are very active online and they pump in lot of fresh content every day into web about their company. 34. So I would suggest you to be active online, and update your website regularly. Add at least one page to your website each month. Be active on social media sites, have an ORM monitoring system in place so that you will be aware. 35. If anybody mentions either good or bad reviews about your company / brand. If you need professional on ORM you can contact us. 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