Build & Manage Online Reputation

I have come across many people perceiving Online Reputation Management (ORM) as a program to only avoid Negative articles. I don’t blame anybody for this, because the concept of Online Reputation Management started with managing negative articles appearing in the search engines. Though it has been an important program to handle negatively published articles online. This post is not just to educate anybody on what is ORM. But this article will help in looking at broadly.

Let me share my experience with a similar case:

The other day my boss just asked me to do some online analysis to find out whether any negative articles are been published on one of our client’s name. I went through the Search engines, Blog directories, Social Communities to figure out if there is anything negative written or negatively portrayed. Surprisingly I did not find anything on these platforms.

I took almost 2 days to do a complete analysis on a particular brand. Well, let me share.. I had been to many Blog directories Indian & International as the possibilities of something written on a brand, service or an individual is more. So I took this route first. But I could not find anything. I had submitted the report to my boss and he got back to me in a day and the first thing he asked me was “hey there is nothing negative about this client what are we doing then for them. Is this some kind of joke” believe me he literally used these words. I took exactly 5 seconds to collate everything and asked him to give me a second to speak up. So he said yes….. The first thing I told him was that Online Reputation Management is not a program to be carried only when there is a problem. But this a program to be carried out even if there is no problem and nothing negatively published. Every one must have heard this saying “Prevention is better than cure” Same way managing a brand reputation or building a brand reputation is equally important as handling negative published articles. Listening to this my boss just tried smiling on it and gave a satisfied nod. Then he said “OH I never thought of this”.

There have been many circumstances when I come across people who stick to the written concepts or published articles online, books etc or influenced. But if one thinks this way… They may start feeling… “Why Not”

Why do we wait till the damage is done to a brand, why can’t we develop such measures before we anticipate of going something wrong. The search engine really supports well in these matters. If we are building a reputation or managing a reputation for any brand, Service, Product or an individual, we regularly post clear and transparent articles, profiles, and all insights of it. We do it regularly,  so that this process always keeps our real reputation up in the search engines, similarly keeping a track of it would also help us monitoring and also avoid unnecessary interference created by negative or falsely written information. Thus we succeed in avoiding a black mark on the respective brand, products, services etc.