Working with a company's reputation on the Internet

All companies, from giant brands to tiny firms, face negativity online. And, unfortunately, for many years they remember not their truly high-quality services and products, but the news about the coolest monkey in the jungle (H&M). So why shouldn’t you hope that the negative will not be noticed or quickly forgotten, and how to generally work with a company’s reputation online these days. Source: Sostav.

What is ORM

There is a widespread belief that online reputation management, also known as ORM (Online Reputation Management), is the publication of a large number of customized positive reviews in the style of “Cool, satisfied, I’ll buy more!” on the company’s services or products, as well as removing negativity from the network. This is not true - at least self-respecting agencies don’t work that way.

Online reputation management is not only and not so much about reviews. If a public management scandal breaks out in your company, it is not enough to simply fill the Internet with custom-made positive reviews. When employees write open letters refusing to work with the new president, a thousand posts praising the new cream will not reassure customers.

Reputation management includes: monitoring mentions - who writes what and where about the brand; working with negativity - we communicate with clients, reassure them, solve problems, and also fight off media attacks; spreading positivity - generating positive media events; working with search results (SERM) - creating hundreds of islands of content around the brand.

What happens if you don't work with your reputation?

What will happen if you just leave all the negativity towards your company on the Internet? Maybe I should just ignore him? On the Internet, every day someone is wrong, and you will quickly be forgotten. However, search engines remember everything

Most people research information about it online before purchasing or simply interacting with a brand. According to a study by AliExpress and Data Insight, 99% of online shoppers read recommendations and reviews on the Internet, and in 9 out of 10 cases they take them into account when placing an online order. And for every fifth purchase, reviews are of decisive importance.

Of course, depending on the business, this number may be lower, but in our experience, 90% of people want to know who they will be doing business with. And based on what they see when searching in Yandex or Google, they decide whether to give you their money. Thus, business income directly depends on the image that has developed online—that is, your reputation.

If you simply give up on the negative, you will miss out on many potential customers, not receive part of the profit, and perhaps over time you will lose your current loyal customers, who will go to competitors who pay more attention to their reputation.

Don't confuse SERM and SEO

Sometimes I hear at conferences or from potential clients that their company is already involved in reputation management, but they have an SEO agency under contract. And it’s a big mistake to think that SEO specialists cover all your ORM needs.

In most cases, SEO agencies do not deal with reputation management. Yes, they promote sites, for example, they make sure that upon request “buy an apartment in Kyiv” your site is displayed in the first lines of search results. We are talking about commercial requests, the sale of services or goods.

Yes, SEO specialists can create a page with reviews on your portal and say that they have optimized the site. However, all this is not enough for reputation management.

Who will promote positive materials on numerous portals? Monitor social networks and communicate with users there? Publish articles in the media? And, most importantly, who will promote this entire array of positive content for key queries that meet the objectives of PR and marketing? This requires slightly different competencies.

Just delete it

One of the very frequent requests that the Sidorin Lab agency receives is “Delete this.” Delete this site, negative YouTube video, objectionable comment or review. And this is a normal reaction to unpleasant information - remove it out of sight, not only of your own, but also of all real and potential clients.

However, you need to understand that the strategy of universally removing negative content does not work well. Firstly, because it is at least very difficult, and more often simply impossible, to completely remove something from the Internet. And secondly, with such behavior you can get the opposite result, which is called the Streisand effect.

Of course, it's impossible to say that a small company's attempt to remove a tiny negative review will have the same effect, but in this era of blogs and the instant dissemination of information, anything is possible. Therefore, we recommend that you resort to removing negativity only if it is untrue. For example, we are talking about an ordered negative review or you are ready to prove in court that the information is not related to reality (and you have the evidence in your hands).

If we are talking about feedback or data that, although unpleasant, is true, negative there is no need to delete it. You need to work with him.

Measuring the negative correctly

Negativity online is normal. The more popular your brand, the more customers you have. And the more people use your services or products, the higher the chance that someone will be dissatisfied. Expectations and reality did not coincide; the service was not sufficiently good. Yes, after all, someone is having a bad day and wants to take the negativity out somewhere.

In a sense, negative comments are one of the indicators of your success. And the complete absence of negativity towards the brand is a reason to think about whether you even have real customers and what place you occupy in the market.

How to measure negativity? Many people count the number: in September we had 5 negative reviews, and in October 100. This means that ORM managers worked well in September, but poorly in October. However, we at Sidorin Lab believe that quantitative measurement is not the most accurate. We look at two metrics. The first of these is coverage. That is, the number of people who could potentially see the negative. A negative post on LiveJournal of a person with 30 subscribers is one thing, and a completely different thing is the Instagram story of a millionaire blogger.

The second metric is engagement. This is a slightly more complex indicator. It includes likes, shares and comments. We look at engagement by the number of these parameters, and we pay the least attention to likes (people often like posts of friends and acquaintances without delving into the essence of the text), but comments must be processed.

At the same time, it is important to understand that when communicating with a dissatisfied client there is not and cannot be a single template for everyone. In an ideal world, each case requires an individual approach, but in general, you can make a list of the most common complaints specifically against your company and prepare some sample answers.

Reactions to attacks from clients must be recorded in writing. How, what, to whom and in what style we answer. This is called tone of voice (ToV), and every brand needs such a document. With its help, each of your employees will know what to do with negativity and how to respond to it correctly, and will not accidentally damage their reputation.

ORM is not a one-time activity

Due to some not entirely conscientious specialists, clients sometimes get the feeling that they can pay a large amount once and everything will be fine with their reputation forever. But that's not how it works.

Of course, some of the work can be done one-time. Remove completely blatant negativity, solve the problems of dissatisfied customers, provide a couple of good quality publications in the media, create cards in Yandex and Google. And that will be enough for a while.

But negative reviews may appear again after a while - or pop up on other sites. The Internet works in such a way that any information can be instantly spread across social networks or other platforms, from where it cannot be easily removed.

Reputation management is always a complex of works. And the first part of it is monitoring, daily, regular, without gaps and with a minimum of days off (or better yet, without them at all, because on Saturdays and Sundays people are happy to discuss everything). If you have a more or less large business, negativity about you most likely appears daily. The problem cannot be solved by one global cleanup.

At the same time, as part of working on your reputation, you need to regularly create positive content - come up with news stories, publish publications in the media, shoot videos for YouTube. And, what is important, promote all this. This kind of work cannot be done once.

You also need to remember that good search results will not appear in a day or two - usually this is the result of long-term work. We give our clients a period of 4-5 months. In general, manage your reputation. Love your customers and communicate with them. Generate more positivity. And if you can’t handle it yourself, turn to professionals.