Online reputation management is a multi-faceted strategy that helps you preserve the integrity of your name online. It includes monitoring every mention of your company and evaluating whether any mention poses a potential problem. ORM also includes having a plan in place to address issues before they can escalate and impact your public relations online.

This article will explain the reasons online reputation management is a critical component of your overall SEM campaign. You’ll learn the basics of ORM and how reverse search engine optimization plays a key role in suppressing bad publicity. We’ll also describe the process of determining whether a given negative comment or blog post requires a response. Lastly, we’ll provide a short list of important tools should you decide to do online reputation management on your own.

Why You Need Online Reputation Management

Twenty years ago, negative press rarely gained traction. If a disgruntled customer or an irritated employee wanted to vent their frustrations, they were limited to writing letters to newspapers and magazines. Both were forgotten by the time new editions hit the store shelves. The internet changed everything.

Today, social media profiles, blog and forum posts, and entire websites devoted to publishing negative commentary about others, remain online. They gain traction in Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Once they do, they can gain momentum in your market. This is the core reason to maintain an ongoing online reputation management program.

By vigilantly monitoring every mention of your company’s name, you can identify issues that threaten to tarnish your reputation. If you discover a public relations disaster in the making, you can immediately respond. You might decide to open a dialogue to present the facts. Or, you might launch a reverse SEO campaign to remove bad press from the search engines. The goal of online reputation management is to prevent negative commentary from gaining momentum.

Basics Of Online Reputation Management

Your online reputation management program should include several tactics to prevent public relations problems. Reverse search engine optimization can remove damaging press from the first page of the natural listings. Once that negative commentary has been pushed onto the second, third, and fourth pages, few people will see it.

Online reputation SEO will help you control the top listings for keywords that are directly related to you and your company. This strategy dovetails with your reverse SEO campaign. As damaging publicity is pushed from Google’s first page, online reputation SEO places the top position in your control. That prevents negative press from gaining exposure in the future.

Consistent monitoring is critical to your online reputation management program. You should track mentions of your name and that of key employees, your company, brand, and products. This is the most effective way to quell potential problems before they can gain traction in the search engines within your market.

Online Reputation Management: Addressing Problems

So, what should you do in the event that someone posts a damaging account about you or your company? It’s important to realize that not every occurrence of negative press requires a personal response. For example, if you enjoy a stellar reputation within your market, others may come to your defense. In some cases, it will be impossible to satisfy the disgruntled party; a response will only ignite the spark, giving momentum to something that was best left ignored.

Your online reputation management campaign should include a process through which you determine if the accusation or bad press in question is accurate. If so, is there an opportunity to engage the accuser and present the facts in a way that avoids exacerbating the situation? If that is not possible, using reverse SEO and online reputation SEO may offer the best solution.

Important Tools For Online Reputation Management

There are dozens of tools that you can use to handle your own online reputation management campaign. For monitoring forums, blogs, social media sites, and other properties, you can use Google and Yahoo alerts. You should also subscribe to RSS feeds from Technorati, BlogPulse, and FeedBurner (currently in Google’s stable of tools). Because Twitter is so popular, you should also subscribe to tools that monitor Tweets (e.g. TweetBleep, TweetLater, etc.).

Search engine optimization is an essential part of online reputation management. To that end, you should incorporate tools for content syndication, keyword analysis, and link-building. While you can perform SEO on your own, be aware that the ranking algorithms used by Google, Yahoo, and Bing are continually growing in complexity.

Protect Yourself With Online Reputation Management

There has never been a greater need for online reputation management. Angry customers, annoyed employees, and even disingenuous competitors can spread damaging rumors about you and your company with a few clicks. If the bad publicity gains traction in the search engines, it can spread quickly. Online reputation management is the most effective solution for controlling the message. The question is, are you using it?