Online Reputation Management

Online Reputation Management Transcript

Hi! My name is Raquel and today I'm going to be talking about online reputation management. So, to start off, I really wanted to talk about the definition behind online reputation management and so I found this definition online and it said that online reputation management involves a combination of marketing, public relations, legal, and search engine optimization strategies to promote protect and defend your online image or business reputation. Now this is really broad but we'll go more in depth into later slides.

But key things to keep in mind are some of the activities that online reputation managers do are that they monitor social media feeds, they promote and engage with positive reviews, and they are identifying possible public relations issues online. So why is online online reputation management important? Well to start off, I wanted to begin with this quote from Alice Sol who's a public relations specialist at HubSpot and she said that protecting your brand has never been more important and that goes hand in hand with customer trust. We live in a world where information travels rapidly and we can get a response in seconds at a touch of a button. Technology has enabled us as consumers to get in touch with brands quickly and at the same time it has given brands ability to form deeper connections and resolve issues faster. So that being said, I think she really does a great job of explaining the new challenges that businesses are facing with this internet age. And as the internet has become more of a daily standard in life, businesses are now forced to have an online presence because that's one way that consumers can find them. But with having an online presence you also need to make sure that you're consistently auditing it and managing it to make sure that you have a positive experience for your customers.

That being said, I found more information that just further proves this point that businesses should have online reputation managers because ninety percent of customers read online reviews before even visiting a business. And on top of that online reviews have been shown to impact 67.7% of purchasing decisions. Which really means that before a customer is even stepping into your business or before they're even buying your product they're going to be looking up online reviews and they want to see positive reviews. The more positive the reviews, the more likely a customer is going to trust your brand and buy your product. That being said, if you do have negative reviews it's still important to engage with those negative reviews. I found another information from another Forbes article that said that 45% of consumers will still visit a business if negative reviews are responded to. So that being said if you have negative reviews you still want to be responding to them. That's why you see a lot of brands who if a customer is on Twitter and they're like man I hate this brand because they messed up my order or something like that you'll see a lot of brands responding to them.

And that's one way that online reputation managers are helping to provide a positive experience and positive online presence. So to go more in depth I wanted to talk a little bit about where ORM takes place and that is really broad when you say online but in particular it takes place on social media websites where those are like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and it doesn't stop there it's any social media website on top of that it's going to be on review sites as well such as google reviews, trust pilot, and amazon review. Then on top of that you're going to be looking for like ORM managers are also going to be looking at wikipedia pages, company profiles, and company or personal blogs. So go more in depth let's talk about how it actually works. So when I was researching different companies that use ORM I found that most of the time these companies were using one of these three software systems.

So many of these ORM teams that these big companies were using. Trustpilot which is a way to write have customers write reviews about your products. On top of that they were using Chatmeter to identify different key words and topics that the brand was popping up in. And last, but not least, they were using Sprinklr as an engagement tool. Sprinklr is a good engagement tool because it's a one-stop shop platform where a brand can just log into their Sprinkler account and see all of the different they can see all of the different social media websites that they're a part of and also listen for keywords. So i was researching different companies that had ORM and kind of what they do and I found two major companies that promote their social teams and the first one was the Rock family of companies which is the parent company of Quicken Loans and they have an internal team called the social defense team. This team, the individuals on this team are in charge of replying to customer complaints and creating positive engagement online. They're also in charge of looking out for PR issues and also reporting any feedback to that customers have to the appropriate internal teams. On top of that I found that Nike is also does this except instead of calling their team the social defense team, they call them community managers and those job descriptions were very similar to GLs where their customer con or where their teams were in charge of engaging with consumers to create a positive brand experience.

So going off of that, I wanted to wrap up this presentation to talk a little bit about how you can implement ORM into your business and some strategies and key points to keep in mind. So when it comes to ORM while you may have a online presence you want to make sure that you're consistently auditing it. You can designate a team to this or a specific person depending on how big your company is but you want to make sure that you're responding to not only negative comments but you're also responding to positive ones you want to foster a positive engagement while also making sure that you are catering to the negative comments and making sure their concerns are addressed. Outside of that you want to make sure that you're communicating effectively with public relations and legal teams to create solutions to problems that may arise. In a Forbes article, the founder of the largest online reputation management company Mark Fertek stated that it's important to be proactive and not reactive. This being said you want to make sure that you have a crisis management plan in place just in case a PR issue arises that you need to take care of and what this means is that essentially if say some news breaks on Twitter you want to make sure that you have the ability to take that, that your community managers are able to take that Twitter post or that tweet send it to the public relations team and get that process moving and communicate it to them effectively so that the PR team can create a press release to either address the situation or to essentially accommodate what is happening.

So that being said the last thing that you want to make sure and keep in mind is that you have an SEO blog team that is creating articles to meet customer needs and questions. You want to make sure that your SEO team is creating blogs that customers can find useful because in that turn they'll gain customer trust. So that is my presentation on ORM. I hope you that you understood how important ORM is to the business especially in this internet age we want to make sure that you have an online presence that is not only positive but is consumer friendly. So more consumers will be likely to pick you when they're searching up your business online. If you have any questions please let me know. I left my email here on the slide and that is yen So, I hope you guys have a great day!

Thank you!