Online Reputation Management for Your Brand

Pro-Active Online Reputation Management

The absolute key to effective online reputation management is to be pro-active and on top of situations before they become a problem! You need to be prepared as online attacks against organizations and brands account for damages in the billions of dollars each year. By far the most cost-effective solution is to prevent these problems before they develop.

Angry customers, ex-employees, consumer activists, and a growing number of competitors may have a vested interest in spreading negative information, rumors or hoaxes about your brand.

The effect of this negative information can lead to problems with sales, potential investors, financials, image, and reputation. In other words - damage to your brand.

Online Reputation Monitoring of Your Brand

That is why you should monitor and listen to what is being said about your brand. The size of the Internet and the speed at which news travels means that it is difficult to continuously monitor all that is being said online. Compounding this problem is the fact that it is now very easy for anyone to get their thoughts published.

Therefore, you need an early warning system to alert you for all new information that appears relating to your brand. Such a system not only informs you of potentially damaging news but will also help you to gather market intelligence about your brand and observe developing trends.

Sources of potential problems:

• Consumer Opinion Sites
• Blogs and Forum News
• Competitor Attacks
• Attack or Flame Sites
• Intellectual Property and Infringement Issues
• Counterfeit Products and Wrongful Corporate Affiliations /li>
• Crisis Management Developments

Elixir Systems is experienced in proactive online brand reputation management. If you have an existing problem we can help you solve the issues.

A strong corporate reputation and brand image are the result of years of time, sweat and financial investment. To protect and enhance your organization’s investment, you need to control how your name and brand appears online and in search results.

What is Online Reputation Management for your Brand?

There are 28 million monthly searches for Starbucks. The number 7 listing in the Google results is a site called I Hate Starbucks. This negative result is therefore seen by many potential customers. Corporations are often defined by third party sites and what these sites write about is not always the truth. Many corporate and brand names show positive and also negative results within the search engines.

39% of the top 100 results are consumer generated media such as blogs. Blogs and forum results are becoming a major issue for reputation management.

What are your options when there are negative results relating to your brand? You can send them a ‘cease and desist’ letter or actually enter into litigation with the flame sites. Often this creates more negative publicity for your site especially if it involves the blogging community.

The other alternative is to take control of the search results pages for your brands. 75% of searchers don’t go past the first page of results when searching. Therefore you should monitor and know what is happening to the top ten results. When you look at these listings determine what is being said about your brand. Look at this information from the eyes of a searcher. If you do not like what appears or if there is adverse information on the page you need to influence in your favor. This is the field known as online reputation management.

Online reputation management involves monitoring the top search results for your brand name. Most corporate sites have a network of associated sites including product sites, blogs, press releases, suppliers, partners, articles, affiliates, recruitment sites, etc as well as their main corporate brand site. These sites should all be optimized around your brand name. By optimizing this network you should be able to control the content within the top ten. By keeping watch on these results pages you should be able to pro-actively deal with any potential problems as they occur. If you effectively optimize your network you should be able to prevent anyone from entering your space.