It must have taken you several years of strenuous efforts to build your online reputation and as such it has to be safeguarded against negative comments and adverse reviews. Here are some ORM tips that you can easily follow without any external professional help:
- Go to major search engines, do a search for your name/your company’s name /your product’s name and make note of what shows up in the search results.
- Watch out for all negative reviews and adverse comments. If the complaints are genuine, take immediate steps to solve the problem.
- If the fault is wholly yours, them you may apologize for the act of omission. Do this transparently so that all your customers/prospects understand that you care.
- If the adverse review is deliberate mischief mongering by some disgruntled individuals or unscrupulous competitor, ask them to remove the bad comments.
- If the comments are not deleted, you should not hesitate to take legal steps to defend your online reputation.
- Online reputation management is a continuous process. You must regularly search the internet for any adverse reviews.
- Send a note of thanks to all those who have posted a favorable review.
- You can even persuade some of your long-standing clients to write positive reviews about your company/products.
- Take steps to highlight all the positive reviews to the maximum extent possible and ensure that negative comments are pushed to the third or fourth page of search results.
- Actively participate in all major social media site like Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube etc and unobtrusively promote your brand/ products.
- Publish relevant, interesting and informative content about your business in social media and on the first page of the search engine results
Online reputation management is all about establishing yourself as a credible and trustworthy business house. Understand the importance of online reputation as most prospective clients read online reviews about your company/products.
Reputation management has become a compelling necessity for many organizations as mobile applications and websites allow unethical competitors and disgruntled individuals to litter the Internet with whatever they choose to write.
If you fail to properly manage your online reputation, you run the risk of losing sales to competitors and gradual shrinking of your customer-base.