Online reputation management involves the process of monitoring the actions of people, their opinions and their reactions about your brand, products and services. Monitoring can play an important role when you are trying to improve your online reputation and promote your business. Information travels online very quickly; to keep on top of it you might want to use statistical analysis.

Online reputation management is about creating a positive brand image for customers while suppressing negative images. Monitoring customers is one way to find out how customers become aware of your brand, as well as your competitors’ brands. After that data is gathered and analyzed, it can help you figure out where to allocate your resources in order to attract more customers. It tells you what customers think about your brand and what is happening on your competitors’ side.

Your brand reputation can have a positive or negative impact on the buying behavior of potential customers. Currently, online media is the easiest and quickest way to find out about brands, and consumers tend to trust opinions that are given when it comes to purchasing from certain brands. Many factors can build or break your brand reputation. Negative reviews from customers, as well as smears from your competitors or angry ex-employees can definitely hurt. Keep up on what people are saying about your brand.

Your online reputation is made up of two things.

• Marketing
• Public relations

Marketing and public relations both play a major part in online reputation management. Search engine optimization also plays a role. Earning a high rank on search engines will have a positive impact on the publicity of your brand, especially since your ranking depends on the relevance of your site contents and irrelevancy can kill your online reputation.

Three steps are involved in the process of online reputation management that should be considered:

1. Monitoring

Monitoring will help you find out and stay on top of what people are saying about your brand. Pay attention to conversations taking place in discussion forums, on your site and other sites. There are different monitoring services available online that do this work for you. They will tell you where and when people talk about your brand and give you the latest information about different trends. Google Alerts and Yahoo! Alerts are two popular services.

2. Analyzing

Analyzing will help you find out where your brand stands in competition with others. New sites are continuously coming up with updated information, so constantly analyzing your website and brand will help you maintain your position. Search for your brand and each of your keywords in the top search engines. Take note of what pops up. Look at where your website ranks, and also look through the first three pages of results for positive and negative results that mention your brand.

3. Influence

Participating in the different conversations and forums will help you influence your potential customers and to put out a positive feeling about your brand. If you take an active part in these discussions, it will improve your brand reputation with consumers. Blogs are an important source of information because they are short, easy and updated on a regular basis. Industry forums and consumer opinion sites are created to take feedback from customers about different brands. Make sure you monitor these places closely to keep track of your brand.

Tools for online reputation management

There are several tools that can be used for monitoring your online brand reputation.

Google Alerts – Google Alerts is a very easy program to use. It will help you search all of the Google results that are relevant to your specific criteria, or you can search for blogs, videos or discussion forums that mention your brand name or company name in their writings or discussions

Trackur — This new tool scours blogs, news sites, images and videos for you when you ask it to track your name, your company name, a specific brand, industry trends or even news about your competitors.

Technorati — The blog search engine Technorati is a good resource for keeping an eye on what is being said in the blogosphere. The service indexes posts as they are published and shows the results in accordance with the categories that you search for.

MonitorThis — This is an online tool which lets you subscribe to the results from 22 different search engine feeds at the same time, including Google, MSN and Yahoo. Some of the smaller search engines like Plazoo, Blogmarks and Topix are also involved in the search.

Naymz — Naymz is a web profile aggregator and reputation metrics service. It concentrates primarily on making sure you are in command of your name and identity on the internet. To serve this purpose it uses different techniques to link your name and profile to different traits or activities on your profile.

Planet Feedback – This program will look for new contents as often as you want and can provide notification via email, desktop alert or mobile alert. Both the tracking and the alerts can be scheduled and different versions of web pages can be saved. They also offer integration options that allow commands to be integrated into the browser and the OS itself, if desired.

All of these tools will help you analyze your brand trends and compete with the growing online business world. They allow you to have more insight about the progress of your brand when compared to others as well as observing the consumer buying behavior.

References:

1. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_to_manage_your_online_reputation.php
2. http://www.webpronews.com/blogtalk/2007/03/27/online-reputation-management-basics
3. http://www.elixirinteractive.com/interactive-marketing-services/online-reputation-management.php
4. http://fairwindsweb.com/#top
5. http://www.toprankblog.com/2007/03/basics-of-online-reputation-management

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