The Difference Between ORM for people and brands

Online reputation management has become common for most companies as they have realized that having a bad reputation will hurt their brand. A number of individuals are starting to realize that they can benefit from the same service and are hiring ORM companies as well. There are some difference s in the way that ORM is handled for individuals as compared to companies and you should be aware of what these are if you are considering hiring one.

The main difference between ORM for people and for brands is that in most cases you can simply get rid of anything that is negative about a person. The end result is that there will likely be no information on the person at all online. This is not something that you can do with a brand since maintaining brand awareness is critical. Therefore you are going to have to change what appears online from negative to positive. This requires a lot more work than simply getting all of the negative stuff removed.

Another key difference between ORM for people and for brands is that there are going to be a lot more sources of negative comments about brands. Except for a very small number of people any threats to the reputation of a person are going to becoming from just a few people at most. It is fairly easy to figure out who is posting the negative comments and why so that you can do something about it. In the case of brands however any customer is a potential source of negative comments so you are going to have a much harder time limiting what is said.

There is an advantage to doing ORM for brands and that is the fact that negative comments can be an opportunity to engage your customers. If there are a lot of negative comments being made about your product you do have the chance to respond to those and show that you are taking the complaints of your customers seriously. You also have the opportunity to explain what steps are being taken to address the problem. This is not something that you are going to do with a person where the comments are likely to be personal in nature.

While there are some differences in the way that online reputation management is done for brands and for people the basics are the same. The bulk of what has to be done is to monitor what is being said about the client and then taking the steps that are necessary when negative comments do appear. The steps taken may vary depending on the nature of the negative comments and who the client is but they usually come down to using the skills of search engine optimization to get the bad stuff off of the first page of the search results so that nobody will ever see it.