Online Reputation Management 101
A Guide for 2018
Background: What is Online Reputation Management?
With society’s rapid evolution into the digital era, more than often the first place people go to find information about a person or a business is through Internet search. The initial first impression that is received after a search is done is critical, and often determines a course of action. Will a person be considered for a job? Will a company be considered as a future vendor? Is this a person to avoid on a second date? Many of these questions are answered within seconds, based on the search engine results pages (SERPs) that appear.
Needless to say, the results that appear in search engine queries are very important. Whether you’re working on building your personal or company brand, it’s clearly and definitively in your best interest to cultivate a strong online reputation, with positive, informative listings on SERPs.
Online Reputation Management (ORM) is the business of repairing, building, and protecting online reputations. In marketing terms, it is the crossroads of search engine optimization (SEO) and branding. There are some companies, like Repceptional, that focus exclusively on ORM. Many digital agencies do not specialize in ORM, but present it as an offering.
What do ORM Companies Do?
Often the focus of Online Reputation Management companies is on reputation repair. There are countless instances where there is online content somewhere on the web that threatens to damage careers, relationships, etc. You’ll often hear people say that anything on the web is permanent, and there is definite validity to this assertion.
Online reputation management companies can not only solve online reputation problems, but also leverage these situations to create opportunities for their clients. Meaning that over time, they gradually “push down” the older negative listings, and replace them with high-quality, relevant, premium content listings that showcase professional accomplishments and other positive brand attributes. In this respect, a strong ORM company is not just a repair solution, but also a strategic brand builder.
Why not just remove negative listings permanently?
Always be wary of an ORM company that guarantees the removal of a negative listing. There’s very little incentive for anyone, particularly a media company, to remove content from the web, as long as it does not violate a search engine’s terms of service, or isn’t libelous. Removing quality content can hurt SEO and also gives the marketing/sales team less advertising inventory to monetize. Most efforts to remove content do not come to fruition.
With some media companies hurting financially, we’ve heard of instances where people have hired Attorneys to threaten lawsuits and try to “bully” them into pulling stories off the web, or else risk the expense of a lawsuit. We can’t imagine this strategy delivering results. In most cases there’s not a lot of room for interpretation, and the situation is straightforward: A media company has every right to keep its content live, and it can’t set a precedent of removing content anytime someone asks.
Who is Hiring Online Reputation Management Companies in 2018?
More and more people and businesses are hiring ORM companies even if they don’t have a “repair” issue, or a specific listing that needs to be pushed down. Page one search “real estate” becomes more and more valuable every day, and sometimes it requires digital expertise and expert strategy to land some of the coveted spots. ORM companies like Repceptional can deliver those results!
Many ORM companies work with both people and businesses that are looking to build their online brands. There are subtle differences in the way people and businesses are handled, but on a broader scale, the same tactics are applied. ORM companies create good content, and use smart SEO tactics to bring this new content to the top of search.
An increasingly important part of online reputation management for businesses is the reviews they receive on Google, Yelp, and other review sites. ORM companies work hand-in-hand with their clients to protect the vitality of the business, making sure that they are properly set up to receive positive reviews, and equally as important, respond to reviews, both positive and negative, as they appear online. Repceptional recently published a blog on the topic of handling negative online reviews.
Does being active on social media help my online reputation?
Absolutely! For both people and businesses, social media is an integral part of the present day ORM ecosystem. For starter’s there’s the obvious reason: Active social media properties rank high in online searches. If you’re active on one or more social media properties, chances are your profile(s) can be found fairly easily, and the person doing the search suddenly finds her/himself with a wealth of information about you or your business. And that can work to your advantage.
On the flipside, not finding anything can be a negative sign. A lack of social media activity means a person doing a search for you can potentially come up empty-handed, and leads to obvious questions, including, but not restricted to:
- What is he/she trying to hide?
- Has this person never embraced the digital realm?
- Why is this business not active? Is it behind the times?
It’s not simply a matter of being active though – it’s about positivity, and highlighting brand attributes that put you in a good light. On LinkedIn, this means completing your profile, writing a smart, comprehensive, professional summary, and including a sharp, professional headshot. On Twitter, it means dressing your profile with cool, creative header and profile images, and consistently providing your following with smart, fun, thought-provoking, useful content. On Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest, it means bringing your world to life via vibrant, dynamic photos and captions.
For businesses, social media is fast becoming one of the most important areas to engage with their client bases. Many consumers use social media as a communications vehicle, and a failure on a business’s behalf to respond quickly and appropriately on social media can be detrimental to its bottom line.
One very important note as we discuss engagement: Social Media is not the place to engage in comment fights, political arguments, or anything that involves negativity towards someone else. As tempting as it can be to engage in the context of “spirited” discussion, you never know when this might come back to haunt you. It’s worth once again noting that once you post something on the web, it’s permanent.
Negativity aside, how do you create an online social presence that does wonders for your personal brand or business, and bolsters your online reputation? Here are some quick, easy tips to get you started right away:
- Pick one or two properties that you like the most and stay active. Deliver content that people find useful; in doing so you establish yourself as a valuable online community member. You don’t necessarily have to start your own group or page (although this never hurts!) Just stay active, positive.
- Accentuate the visual. People are much more likely to pay attention to an eye-grabbing photo or video. Be creative in dressing up your profile pages. Make sure your name is spelled correctly in captions, tags. Also remember that people will do an image search of you – so the more photos that you post, the better. If you have the resources, it never hurts to invest in professional photography, particularly for a headshot.
- Create positive content and promote it across your social channels. This has potential to rank high in search.
- “Like” content that you appreciate, and engage – particularly on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram where this type of engagement is easily observed. It takes less than a second to do, and contributes to a positive brand experience. Be careful with LinkedIn, as a post “like” is automatically shared on your feed – so don’t go overboard here.
- Create backlinks on your social listings –wherever possible, create links that go from one social property to another. This will help the properties rank higher in search.
How Do I Assess My Online Reputation?
The first step that everyone should take to begin working on strengthening her/his online reputation is doing a simple search of his/her name or business on Google, Bing, and Yahoo. What do you see in the SERPs? First, look for anything even remotely negative. If you find something that you don’t like within the first 3 pages, consider calling a company like Repceptional for a free consultation to see if this is something that needs to be addressed, and how much it might cost.
If you don’t find anything negative – fantastic! You’re ready for the next step.
Step two is to give yourself a page 1 grade on all three search engines. To score yourself, take the number of listings that you find that relate specifically to you, and divide by the total number of listings on the page. For example, if your page one of Bing search yields three listings about you: Your personal website, Your LinkedIn profile and your Twitter feed, and there are 10 total results, your score is 30%.
Many people ask us what a passing grade is. In some ways, this is a difficult question to answer, as many of us face a varying degree of market share challenges. For example, James Smith is going to have a significantly more difficult time garnering a high page 1 grade than Ruby Santaveros, simply because of the commonality of the name. Ruby will have a much easier time of garnering higher-ranking SERPs than James.
On the other hand, it’s easy to set a universal goal that works for all people and businesses alike. Your current score is not a final grade – it’s just a baseline. The objective is to dominate page one of search, and populate it with as many positive listings as possible. Your goal is to score 100%.
Grow and Cultivate Your Online Reputation With a Strategy
As you begin to dive into the world of building an online presence for your brand, it’s important to approach this phase strategically. Blindly creating content, adding listings, and activating social properties without a centralized, well-thought-out strategy can lead to page one listings; but without strategic direction, it can potentially paint a convoluted picture of who you are, what you’re about, etc. And whether you’re doing the work for a person or a business, it’s critical to build a brand that’s easy to understand and appreciate.
To that end, before you decide on a tactical approach to building your online reputation, think carefully about the answers to these questions:
What is the most important thing for people to know about me/my business?
What stories can I tell that put my brand (or my company brand) in the most positive light?
What visual assets do I have (photos, video) that tell a compelling story of my brand?
What am I truly passionate about?
What social media properties (if any) do I enjoy being on, engaging with the most?
Answering these questions after giving them careful thought will guide you on a path to a more strategic approach to the reputation building process, and give you insight into where to focus your attention.
For example, if your goals are professionally/career driven, you might consider paying a lot of attention to your LinkedIn profile – optimizing it, and staying active, so that it ranks higher in your search results. You should also consider creating a personal website, with a blog that offers you the opportunity to showcase your expertise, and bolster the SEO of the site itself.
If your company needs a boost to its reputation, consider starting a campaign to garner more online reviews from satisfied, customers. Then, take some of the strongest and add a testimonial page to your website, if you don’t already have one. You can also think about doing video testimonials, which can be added to your YouTube channel, and pinned to your social profiles. There are countless content strategies that you can employ to tell compelling stories about your company that have potential to garner high search rankings.