What is Online Reputation Management (ORM)?

One of the most important things that you have is your reputation. The problem is that with the internet it is very easy for your reputation to be damaged. As a result a whole industry has developed to help you to manage your online reputation. It is a service that you should very seriously look into if you a running a business or if your livelihood depends on your reputation.

Online reputation management is not surprisingly the task of making sure that your online reputation is as positive as possible. This is important because the internet allows information to be transmitted so quickly. If you start to develop a bad reputation online then it is going to spread very quickly. This is a major problem if you rely on your reputation for business purposes. Almost all companies and many individuals have a financial stake in making sure that they keep their reputation as positive as possible. There are a number of ways that this can be done.

The first thing that has to be done if your online reputation is going to be managed is to determine just what that reputation is. This requires monitoring all of the major social networks, as well as any forums that are related to your field. It is also necessary to see what kind of results come up on the search engines when a search on your name is done. The next step is going to depend in large part on what the result s of this part of the process are.

The main approach that is used in online reputation management is to simply bury all of the negative stuff under a pile of good stuff. In a lot of ways this is going to be related to search engine optimization. What is normally done is that a lot of positive articles about you or your company are posted online and then optimized so that they rank at the top of the search engines. The idea here is that all of the negative stuff will get pushed so far down the search results that nobody will ever see it unless the go through several pages of results looking for it. Since few people do this it will mean that few people will see the negative articles.

Dealing with negative comments on social networks and forums is a little bit more complicated since you can't simply push them down the search results. In this case the best approach that you can take is to be proactive and address the criticism head on. Generally that means acknowledging any criticisms that are legitimate and explaining what kind of steps you are taking to address the problem. Since most of the criticisms will be the result of customers who are dissatisfied this gives you an excellent opportunity to show that you take their feedback seriously.