Online Reputation Management sounds a bit morbid – and for reasons more than many – especially for small businesses. Think bad reviews. Think complains. Think online and off critique and shortcomings of your business. Think gruesome verbiage of your services, products, and even people!
However, from a closer examination, we all need some tough love; then why not ORM? It has become imperative for businesses to catapult their online presence in the north direction. So is it all that easy?
Simple – not easy.
Come to think of it: small businesses are proliferating in every nook and cranny of the world. So the competition is only becoming tougher and edgier to pace up with. And when you see all businesses joining the branding and social media fray, doing something different with respect to using online reputation management services has become a USP to reckon with.
Without further ado, here are our 8 crucial ORM tips for all you budding entrepreneurs and owners.
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Get yourself a consistent brand [corporate] imagery. Yes, we talk a lot about it: don’t you think consistency trumps everything else in growing your brand on social media? The first tip up for your consumption is to have a consistent, lucid and personalized imagery. All your social media touch points should have a compelling image, message, objective, and a brand personality: something which communicates your desire to help your target audience. No fluff; no hype; just help.
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Respond with professionalism and care. This sounds trite, but exercising professionalism – regardless of whether someone has written a god or a bad review – underpins the best practices of adopting a sound ORM. Ensure you don’t sound canned or scripted or automated when you are replying to to your prospective or current customers on social media; be real; be you. And be honest and accepting – that quickly builds a bond with your customers.
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Proactively ask for reviews. Be it on Yelp, your Google business page, or your Facebook page, you are being watched by your customers on every possible touch point online. You can always show some social proof of credibility on them by asking your happy customers to write about their experience with your company – by all means, you are curating crème de la crème of positive reviews and experiences to crawl up when your target customer is searching for you. Caution: don’t write spammy reviews for your company; your customers can see right through you when you do that.
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Start your company blog. With respect to Online Reputation Management, you reap the best results via an apt concoction of earned + owned media + paid media [not always]. Not that we are sidelining paid media, but to build a tribe of happy customers, you need third part endorsements coupled with your biggest owned asset – your blog. When you start blogging, you not only improve your rankings on Google, but also build thought leadership that serves your growth in the long-haul. Then slowly venture into guest blogging as well to get link back for your Web site on other blogs and gain enough traction from their audience as well. A win-win proposition for your blog as well as theirs.
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Write press releases. PR can never go unnoticed, whether you submit your press release through online PR directories or use a newswire to reach maximum people in your target audience; writing a press release can give your many benefits: it increases your search rankings and serves as an excellent source of media kit.
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Monitor Intelligently. Whether you hire a reputation management agency or the task come to you monitor ORM activities, ensure that you use all the metrics that define your business goals. Likes, reach, impressions, click-through, comments, reviews, guest blogging comments, third party endorsements or recommendations, tweets, G1s, LinkedIn pulse comments – the list could be endless. However, your goals should be to align the metrics with your ORM’s purpose.
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Take action after collecting feedback. While data is gold, but using that data from effective monitoring via agencies or tools is the real jackpot! Via understanding the reviews and comments that your customers share, you can draw some powerful insights on how to accelerate your business to the next level – from both business and people standpoint. Absorb the feedback with a mindset to improve all the time: that way you will start building a successful corporate reputation.
So if we rethink: ORM is not that negative et al; it is mechanism to improve on our past online activities and ensure a positive momentum of brand’s resonance with your audience.
How do you leverage ORM tips to stay in connect with your audience and customers?
Let us know – and we can carve your ORM strategy from the get-go.
Maximum Value, Achieved.