MediaVision Blog : Search Engine Marketing

Online reputation management (ORM) is tracking other people’s responses to your brand, whether they be negative or positive. Whereas Web PR is making a racket, ORM is listening to the noise.

Some companies employ affiliate programs that punt their brands in opposition to their competitors, for example, through reviews on comparison shopping sites. Affiliates have no basis for preference other than that you’re paying their salary, and your competitors are not.

You can argue that any press is good press. That’s fine for movie stars, but for a company offering event management? Not so much. Tracking your movement through the network of other people’s link bait and link development is a means to protecting your brand. You can do this using Google or Yahoo alerts. Also, you can use Copernic to alert and check text edits on Wikipedia or blog posts. DomainTools is useful for tracking competitor brand reputations. You can also periodically check Google, Yahoo and MSN backlinks for sites that are slamming you.

By picking up negative press and creating a marketing conversation in your playing field, you can control the game. In the case of bad press, you’ll need to assess very carefully the nature of the opposition, whether a defensive or transparent response will be most flattering to you, and act on it – quickly. Once the news has aged (or webmasters the net over have bombed your brand) you’ll have an extremely tough time reviving it.

You can also actively pursue positive brand responses. Why not befriend bloggers to write about a product or service in a positive light? You can join forums and other websites that require an indexable profile page, and use your brand as a user name. Write some good questions or content surrounding the brand, and create a social media web page that links with Yahoo Answers or Google Groups or similar socially busy sites. If you have lots of energy, why not publish news interviews and podcasts on the brand, and point them to a number of associated websites as a resource?

The greatest ORM crises occur when negative press finds its way into well-ranked news sites, and important players remember a brand in a bad light. Keeping tabs on what other people are saying, and ensuring that your online persona is well communicated via the various channels of publicity, is the core of ORM. Dealing with negative press usually involves transparency, consistency and sincerity. On the other side of the spectrum, ORM propels traffics and sales in their droves, on account of a well managed and smartly executed brand.