--By Saurav Raj Verma

 

Have lot of negative posts about the company over the Internet? Have embarrassing photo tags over social media? Private pictures, videos, selfies leaked online? Worried that the employers might find out something undesirable about you over the Internet? 

 

Reputation is something that no one wants to lose. But what do you do, when your fame is endangered throughout Internet? In a blink of an eye, your post could go viral, and create serious problem, unless it is a publicity stunt carried out by yourself. 

 

This is problem both for individuals and businesses. And this is where Online Reputation Management comes into play. 

 

Wikipedia defines Reputation Management as a “process of managing your reputation’.  Here ‘You’ could be a person or an organization. When this is concerned with managing online reputation, it becomes Online Reputation Management 

 

Let us take an example. Airtel is the third largest tele-communication player in the world. In an interview regarding ORM, K. Srinivas, President, Consumer Business, Bharti Airtel said, “We initiated our presence on prevalent social networking sites and online consumer forums in 2009. We created a universal identity named ‘Airtel Presence’ and embarked on a journey to manage online customer sentiment.” He added: “We acknowledge a post/tweet almost instantly. Our acknowledgement time is 10 minutes.” 

 

Reputation management is the understanding or influencing of an individual's or business's reputation. It was originally coined as a public relations term. But advancement in computing, the internet and social media made it primarily an issue of search results

 

Now about how to use ORM. While opting for ORM we should be clear about our objective. Do we want to work for strengthening relationship by being responsible and focusing on the solutions or we just want to get rid of it? Technically, processes for both are ORM. However, they yield to two different perspectives. One helps in the longer term while the later helps temporarily. 

 

Take the instance of German auto manufacturer Volkswagen. They published a full page advertisement on first and last page of the Times of India, with the title, “Feel the shiver of excitement”. The last full page also had the vibrator attached with the newspaper. First the punch line with the vibrator was a classic example of miscommunication. Now when we hear about vibrator, it indicates something else. Lot of tweets followed not favouring the ad at all, though there were few exceptions. Then Volkswagen heated the conversation with tweeting “Women would be dumb to call it a vibrator. Or maybe they just do not understand real driving experience.”

 

In response to this, a follower twitted, “Dear VW, how utterly stupid of you to spend $$$ on a mass media campaign and stuff it all up by hiring a moron for your SM”. (SM would probably stand for Social Marketing). The point is not in the conversation that went on, but in what would have happened about the image of the Brand. VW could have either deleted the thread or actually sorted out the reason as to why this miscommunication happened and get hold of the person accountable. But unfortunately, they just deleted the post and did not tweet anything further. But after few days, they came with the lame message saying that the, “Twitter account was compromised.” They had spent millions to get two full page advertisements and what actually did it yield? A marketer should always remember that a message will not always be perceived right. If it is indeed perceived in a wrong way, the marketers should forget their ego and pride and just apologize to the concerned in the best polite way possible. Everyone makes mistake. It would rather help in regaining the image, re-constructing the value. This is the concept of ORM. Particularly for the above case of VW, I would define this as a negative ORM. The positive ORM could have been first apologizing and then providing some solution in any form.  But VW neither took any responsibility nor provided any resolution.

 

Brands should never think themselves as supreme. A wrong message can literally break or make the company’s reputation. But mistakes do happen. And the next step in this case is to improve it. And the other is to make sure that careful homework is done at the initial stage.

 

Many companies simply ignore the power of ORM which can actually boost  their image, the brand equity, its value and ultimately sales. It takes years to become a strong brand but simple stupid communication can lead to dilution of the image. That is why the business houses should understand the power of ORM.

 

If a business got listed in the top directories or website, say travel site, news site and so on with positive comments, it increases the brand’s equity and its image. But, if otherwise, it results into something highly undesirable. It could be loss in stock value, loss of customer (means loss of business) and most of all: loss of trust and profit. Before a business house plans to work with other player, it is the Online Reputation that plays higher role in decision-making. Everyone checks literally everything over the internet to see what people are talking about the company, what message is being sent by the company to the netizens and to the rest, what has been the company doing actively etc. 

 

Tools

There are lot of free tools with basic options for ORM. Of course to get the advance version, you need to pay. Everyone needs to earn something, someway. Some prime examples are, Google Alert, Trakur, Naymz, Brands eye etc. What these free tools do is that they track you brand name used in any platform, it just like search engine and will keep alerting you. They can analyze and display the report on dashboard with the demographical profile, the user web behaviour, their movement, conversion and so many other aspects. You really don’t need an expert, but sometimes you do, when things are out of hand. Not everyone can be expert of everything.

 

How about scandals that are spread over the news, YouTube video and blogs? Can one get rid of it? Well, at least one can try. There are two approaches of doing it. The first approach would be, ask the blogging site or the webmaster to just remove the contents. Or the next approach would be, working on the good things. For example, say Google search shows something objectionable and that is a blogging site.  What one can do is posting the good things with the same name. You can post contents justifying or some good things that you have done.

 

For example, take the infamous scandal of one of our female celebrities. Even though we are long over it, Internet still has  those things. Since then she has been participating in social matters and other activities. She or her manager could just upload all the good things she has been doing recently. The more updates or add up contents are uploaded, the more the visitors traffic is increased to those pages. This puts the positive content on the top of the Google search results and the bad contents are pushed down. This way one can actually push undesired results down to the next mouse scroll and slowly to the second page of the search engine, which people normally don’t check. This is a very basic technique of doing ORM. There are advanced ways too of doing it.

 

Now the painstaking part is this. There are lot of platforms with millions of people using them. Examples are Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Linkedin, Tumblr, YouTube, etc. It is up to the team to check messages floated across them and work accordingly. Now they need to have paid services to handle this. If there is something that you are concerned of, just put on the Google alert, a free service and be careful about what you share online.

 

Even if a brand is doing all good in its online presence, the company’s ORM strategy still needs to alert about messages floated by other Internet users. Someone can easily tarnish the image of the brand by posting a comment over social media, making a video, creating a blog post with bad contents, file a complaint knowingly, promote competition and develop a hate site or such. An angry employee can leave the company with revenge on their mind and end up posting absurd material about the organization.

 

Managing online reputation isn’t just promotion; it’s a means of defence and best practice, while also letting the world know the right thing about the brand. So are you into the game? Remember, “If you don’t control your brand online, someone else will”.

 

ORM & Numbers

80 per cent of adults are ‘very’ or ‘somewhat’ more likely to consider buying products recommended by real-world friends and family.

 

78 per cent  of executive recruiters routinely use search engines to learn more about candidates, and 35 per cent have eliminated candidates based on the information they found online.

 

52 per cent of survey respondents from developed nations said they find “a person like yourself” to provide the most credible information.

 

87 per cent  believe the CEO’s reputation is an important part of a company’s reputation.

 

90 per cent  of consumers trust recommendations from others.

 

Source: http://www.kudzubizsuccess.com

 

Verma is Brand Strategist at Advantage Group (P) Ltd. He can be reached at saurav@advantage.com.np