Online Reputation Management – Defending your online persona 
by Team Position2

Picture this: A dissatisfied customer circulates negative comments about your company on the World Wide Web. Why? The reasons could be anything – your after-sales service is lousy or your customer care executive was impolite. When an irate customer (who might also be wearing the cloak of anonymity) has the ability to express himself through blogs, forums and social media networks, you are in for a tough time. This is where Online Reputation Management (ORM) comes in.

You need to constantly monitor the Internet on what is being said about your company. It could be good, bad or outright ugly. And what you need to be concerned about is the bad and the ugly. Here’s what could be done:

•    Reach out: Make an effort to communicate with the dissatisfied customer. Do some damage control. An offer to make good the bad is usually well-received.
•    Make your presence felt: Circulate positive content about your company on the web. This dissuades any negative comments or posts that might crop up in the future.
•    Build your Brand: It is essential to showcase what your company has to offer. Have a page dedicated to your company on social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, or better yet, start a blog. Do all of this keeping your target audience in mind.
•    Have a plan: Don’t wait until it’s too late. Always prepare for the worst-case scenario. For instance, what do you do when a there is a comment against your brand on the first page of Google search?
Negative comments will always make their rounds on the web. You can’t please everybody. You need to push away these negative comments (and they can’t be deleted!) as existing and potential customers might come across them. Defending your brand online is of paramount importance. News spreads ten times faster on the Internet. Take Twitter for instance, it is one of the most viral platforms on the web. The most sought after place to find information about a company/brand is its corporate website. So, put in your best effort to make the website friendly and informative.
Online Reputation Management is not an easy task. You need to monitor the web 24 hours a day. One needs to go through customer review sites, blogs, groups and pages (on social networking sites), forums, etc. and see what is being talked about your company. Various tools such as Social Mention will give you a peek into what the web says about your brand.
On the Internet, customer dissatisfaction is like a virus, it spreads! Hence, ORM & Brand Defense is indispensable. It is all about making the Internet work.

Contributed by Jade D’costa

Tags: Brand defense, Brand management, Online Reputation Management, persona management