Online Reputation Management- Part 1
While in Airtel, I initiated, among other digital marketing initiatives, ORM (Online Reputation Management). In India there’s a fairly low level of awareness about ORM, and I thought it will be great to share my experiences and observations.
When I started this in 2007, I looked outside for reference, but didn’t get any! We may assume that this was one of the first ORM initiatives (if not the first) in India.
So here it goes, please do contribute, it will be great to assimilate different ideas:
Let’s start with understanding about Online Reputation Management?
Online Reputation management is the process of tracking our image and perception in the market among stakeholders, recording the relevant perception pointers and opinions in the market; and creating a response strategy and action plan to either strengthen the positive pointers or weaken the negative perception.
Since a large base of customers/prospects/stakeholders access and share information via websites/blogs and search engines, Search Engine Reputation Management (or SERM) tactics are one of the most integral part of an overall ORM strategy.
A typical ORM process entails 3 Prime Steps:
Monitor
Optimize and
Engage
Monitor
We need to monitor : Brand, Products, Company, Key Executives and may be competition.
The key vehicles/platforms to monitor: News, Blogs, Forums, Social Media and Search
Optimize
Most of the reputation management companies (and Corporates) often indulge in reactive measures. What they end up doing is chasing the dissenters and do not put their brand in a position of control.
In-fact, in India a very common (and uneducated) response would be to ask one’s online agency to remove all bad content about oneself from all blogs in the world! (and also from Google) J.
A few others of similar variety would attribute negative imagery on blogs to competition, and would want the agency or online marketing division to retort back with greater vengeance!
While the competition may be involved in spreading a negative word about you, it will be wise to stay stoic and not indulge in a similar reactive strategy.
What many people forget is that the consumer or the reader is much smarter than what they think of him!
What one needs to have, instead is a well thought –out long term strategy to have their digital communication optimized, so that they are present in the form of blogs, articles, or video content across identified set of sites.
Once one starts participating in selected number of strategic sites, their content will grow, communities around these content areas grow, and subsequently this content starts featuring in search results. Since more sites with positive content will feature in search engine, the old negative content sites will automatically be pushed down.
Engage
Let’s say that we encounter a negative article on a blog, what do we do?
Should we react or should we wait before reacting
There’s a merit in understanding the situation
Research about the blogger or the blog owner or the comment source. Discuss the content/coment internally and verify it’s authenticity.
If you feel that the negative content is not genuine and then you should immediately ask the blog owner to remove the same. You should also, if possible, contact the comment owner privately and depending upon the gravity, warn and ask to publish an apology.
However if you find that there has been a mistake from your end, and the comment/content is genuine then you could do the following:
1. Write a mail privately to the person concerned and apologise. Show that you genuinely care and are concerned and offer to rectify or refund.
2. The above can be done in public also-no harm done. You can publicly state that you are listening and that you will be contacting the person soon. The idea is to let the world know that you track and listen to dissatisfied users. What solution you provide is something between you and your consumers.
3. If you feel that there are too many comments (negative) and it’s mushrooming up, then your strategy should be to invite the group member to YOUR OWN BLOG.
It’s always beneficial to break the momentum of a negative thread and deal it on your own turf.
The only advice that I can give here to the marketers is that nothing can replace a genuine concern and an , empathetic response .
A few tips to interact with negative blogs:
Investigate facts internally before taking action - could this be a competitor spreading rumour? Is there really something bad about a particular service which is being complained about?
Do not indulge in direct confrontation.
Be honest!
Explain what you have done to rectify any issue
Offer to resolve any complaints personally - have a senior-level staff member make the offer - try to continue discussion offline and utilize your allies.
Don’t create new “personas” to support your position in blogs, forums and message boards as you’ll likely be caught! As I said the reader/consumer is very smart!
Look forward to the 2nd and concluding part next week! I shall share my ORM Grid as well in the next part.
Resources: http://www.toprankblog.com, http://www.marketingpilgrim.com
Dec 5th, 2008 at 4:13 pm
The idea of initiating the ORM activity was great and the impact was BIG. ORM undoubtedly has become an important part of the online strategy.
Dec 19th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
Hi Saurabh,
My firm, Windchimes Communications had sent a proposal a month back to carry out ORM and using social media to promote Digital TV.
I am glad you carried it out and that it has done good for you
Nimesh
Dec 23rd, 2008 at 1:20 pm
fine points..however, how to tackle if any website having a negative remarks about your product or services, is listed in top search engine results on your product or website name.
Dec 30th, 2008 at 9:03 am
Hi Manish,
ORM is a gradual process and even for biggies like Dell it has taken many months to gradually decrease the density of negative links from search engines.
One will have to follow an integrated process of tracking negative links and comments, and optimising one’s own content (onsite and offsite)
While there cannot be one single strategy for all, in a nutshell:
1. Do not try and populate artificial/dummy positive comments in response to negative comments.
2. See if there is an opportunity to create a paid/unpaid content on the sites which carry negative comments- use the opportunity to create a unique page/url for your positive story
3. Be present on a variety of portals- social network, forums, answers etc and genuinely interact with people and create original and relevant content.
Over a period of time, the density of your pages with positive articles will
increase in search engines and if you are able to update them fast and are able to bring in more users; the rankings will become better and may push down the links with negative comments!
Dec 31st, 2008 at 10:24 am
Thanks Saurabh for these points, however, I am not agree with your first point. For example, if you have a negative listing over any complaint website, where you can not post your content in any manner(whether paid or unpaid), then how will you tackle with such kind of listings. And as you know, these websites are usually strong enough in terms of search engine popularity, so it will not be too easy to remove these listing from search engines. So there would be only one way left that is commenting positive reviews about your services or products, that could restrict others to be influenced by those negative reviews.
Dec 31st, 2008 at 12:41 pm
Manish,
Each situation demands a different strategy,
having said that, let me explain my thoughts once again:
1. If you leave positive comments on the site which has negative comments about you, then you will help the site get updated with content, and hence help the site stay relevant for a search engine. Also the people are intelligent, and can see if the comments are natural or are plugged-in.
2. Tit-for-tat poistive comments may also land your brand in an online brawl with ‘you don’t know who’. This is not a desirable situation for your brand to be in.
3. To Conclude-I could do all or some of these:
3.1 Contact the publisher of the site and explain my side of the story and request to publish my story independently.
3.2 Verify if the negative comments are genuine and if possible contact the people individually, explain them my side of the story and apologise if there is a genuine mistake.
3.3 If at all I need to publish a comment on ‘that’ site, I will take a high ground, and update people on the latest and more importantly invite people to my site/blog to learn in greater detail on what I have done to alleviate the situation. I will also publish an email id where people can connect with me.
My strategy is NOT to get into an SEO strategy or to remove bad links (which I cannot anyways) or to get some short term benefits by showing positive comments to an ignorant client! My Strategy for ORM is to be genuinely concerned, Not to participate in any online debate or brawl, connect with people individually and try to bring people to my turf for extended conversation
There is no short cut here for sure
Hope this helps.
Jan 2nd, 2009 at 2:40 pm
Thanks Saurabh… I hope these strategies will work in my case too..:)
Jan 4th, 2009 at 1:30 pm
Hi saurabh,
I found your strategy to be quite apt. But there are innumerable sites, for example if we have to do a ORM for a PC Vendor, what should be the startpoint. Do we start with using search engines on the vendor and look out for all the comments going out? What if we want to restrict it to India? I need to understand the start point?
Also wanted to know if you provide ORM training if there is a group which is willing to learn?
Jan 5th, 2009 at 10:15 am
Dear Satya,
I am glad you liked the post.
The starting point for ORM is monitoring. You can monitor key people, and key brands/sub-brands on a daily/hourly basis, through paid and unpaid mechanisms.
The simplest could be using Google alerts (both for blogs and search engine) and creating custom RSS feeds on various keyowrds through various content and social bookmarking sites.
For starters this is more than enough
Country targeting depends on various attributes like the place of content hosting , domain etc and hence may be subjective. You can create an API or buy a customised solution from the likes of Radion to go deeper. At this point in time you can opt for tracking sites with India content to get a filtered result.
But frankly in a dotcom world, a bad reputation of a brand in USA will also have it’s effect in India.
I am working on creating an elaborate booklet on ORM which will aim to guide right from beginning to handling complex situation, and I shall alert you when it’s out. (It should be out by end of Jan 2009)
To answer you last question, while I would be glad to share knowledge on digital marketing and ORM, it would be difficult to do it face to face because of paucity of time, but we can keep a day in a week when we can embark upon an online training. We may create a group and through the use of ebook, forum and chat can do something!
Jan 5th, 2009 at 11:45 am
Hi Saurabh
I would also be interested if you are planning to form a group to share your knowledge on digital marketing and ORM.
Please let me know once you finalize it.
Jan 5th, 2009 at 9:10 pm
Hi saurabh,
Thanks for the quick revert. I look forward to the ORM book you plan to launch will it sell on stands or be in a soft copy format? I also look forward to the online training part, do let me know the modalities and I shall accordingly plan my schedule and it would be truly exciting to have your views on the same.
Jan 10th, 2009 at 8:54 am
Thanks Satya and Manish.
I shall come back soon on when can we hold an online session. (Hopefully next week) and shall also apprise you whenever I could launch the booklet on ORM. I guess it would be an online version to start with
Mar 7th, 2009 at 5:35 pm
Social Bookmarks Demon is enormously powerful, 100% automatic social bookmarking software which will build UNLIMITED number of top quality backlinks, send first-class traffic in minutes, increase your affiliate sales, AdSense income and site revenue as much as never. Social Bookmarks Demon combines features of ALL social bookmarking tools available in the market for price of single tool.