Reputation defines the high esteem of a person or society or any other object. In this fast growing world, reputation is one of the major factor which people use to measure something. When it comes to business, reputation is unavoidable and very big factor. Every business groups need good reputation, for getting business. Even though the business services are good there will be some customers who are dissatisfied with services due to different reasons like not meeting their expectation, misunderstandings etc, they will try to degrade the reputation of the company. Sometimes competitor business groups will try to degrade the reputation of the company. Now internet is very advanced, it can be used to advertise as well as to complain about a company. For solving this degradation of the reputation through internet, online reputation management (ORM) techniques are used. There are various companies offer ORM services.
Reputation Management is the process which maintains the reputation of a company or brands or any other thing. There are different types of ORM process which are building, maintaining and recovering the reputation.
Building: For newly starting business groups needs good reputation to get business. This type of ORM process helps to create and maintain the reputation.
Maintaining: Already some will have good reputation, that should be maintained.
Recovery: This meant for those whose earned bad reputation.
Online reputation management is the time taking process. It will take around three months to get effective result. SEO techniques likes link building, social media marketing are used in reputation management. Some of strategies used are
- Blogging: Create different blogs and update it regularly.
- Review writing: Hire someone to write positive review about the company.
- Mention about the company in website of branded companies.
- Social networking site: social networking site such as Face book, twitter, LinkedIn etc are used to improve the image of the company.
- Reacting to public criticism wisely, making them feel that they are mistaken.
- SEO techniques such as article submission, forum posting are used to improve the image.
- Improving the rank of the site which has positive review to suppress the site which negative review.
- Comment about the company positively in the site which contain negative comment and suppress the negative comment.
- Positive communication and way in which companies brand is presented to stakeholders.
Why reputation management is important?
In past 50 years branding was the important technique of marketing. Since 2000 all companies switched to reputation maintenance. Branding of the company diminished slowly. Reputation has greater impact over branding. A recent study has shown that company with reputation has advantage over their competitive groups. About 4 to 5 percent annual business occurs due to good reputation. Sometimes government or other stakeholders support the company when they are in trouble. The company with good reputation will do financially better. They will have good talent at lower cost. In 2007 AON, insurance study shows that reputation risk is the major risk for a company. It affects business completely. People judge the company by quality of work and its reputation. Companies which underestimate the online reputation management may be at risk of damaging the reputation that took several years to build. Every people have access to internet and due to its global nature, every companies should understand the importance of online reputation management. One or two negative comments only needed for damaging the reputation of the company. There are some reviews written mainly due to personal grudge towards business or its employee, or some people who simply wish to create trouble. These types of reviews should be handled, so reputation management is important.
ORM has evolved to new industry. There are many firms which provide ORM services. My suggestion is to hire reputation management team or give contract to firm offers ORM services to maintain the reputation of the company.