Online reputation
From IT
Contents |
Introduction
Reputation is considered to be the opinion and thoughts that a person or community has about a particular person, group, organization or company, brand… In other words, reputation refers to how the world perceives a particular subject. It can be said that the word reputation is very close with the image that the subject has in a community, the subject’s image can be perceive as good or not trusty.
An individual knowing the opinion of other people about the particular subject will decide how much he can trust in the subject. The role of reputation deciding if it deserves to be trusted or not is very important due to two decisions. Firstly, because usually actions that happens in the past might imply that these actions will be repeated in the future. So, if a problem with a subject has happened before, and more if it has happened more that once, the same problem might happen in the future. Secondly, because an individual or a group’s bad opinion or complaint, although it is a lie or a gossip constructed to deceive, can be taken seriously for the community and this can lead to problems for a company or subject. For example, consider that a person has expanded a gossip that involves a member of a company, although the gossip is false the community might trust it and the company will be affected as it has the responsibility of this worker. In this case, the individual might not trust the company for its member. In addition, the weight of some opinions has more weight of others and could be trusted for the individual easily.
Online reputation takes the description of reputation as it has been described before, but with a difference. Online reputation refers to how much online community trust a subject and how they perceive their image looking to the opinions and other content that they find in the web.
Consequences of online reputation
The role of online reputation is very important and having a bad reputation can imply big amount of money, especially for companies.
Suppose a company wants to launch a new product, it implies a huge advertising and marketing costs, but also a lot of advertising and marketing work to do the product known and be sold. Although the company has spent big amount of money in the advertising and creation of the new brand or product, it can be lost as consequence of bad comments or experiences with the product, especially in the Web, as nowadays the Web is the first tool for looking for information.
However, the effects of online reputation for a company are not only damaging when a new product is released, a bad reputation usually implies that the user will look to the competitor. The bad opinions will put the company's credibility questioned, carrying with it big financial complications, sometimes so big that the financial sustainability will be affected heavily involving the company’s disappearance. In this case, the company has to decide who is the responsible of the bad reputation, and take appropriate decisions like if a worker needs to be dismissed or it is worth to maintain this worker in spite of the financial losses. So, online reputation implies financial, moral and more kind of consequences.
The consequences of online reputation are not only referred to a company or its products, it can affect to individuals. As an example a particular person may become affected for bad reputation from contents like comments, images, blogs, etc. This bad reputation might affect the individual in some moments, like when he applies for a job. Nowadays, in most of the cases before employing a person the company looks for interesting information about him in the Web, and in this moment bad comments can be very decisive about the candidates. For example, some compromising images might show if this particular person will be good for the image of the company.
In this context, the Internet and new social sharing platforms have become very important. They have given new and modern tools that can be very useful to organizations and particular persons in order to build a good reputation, but also they can be tricky and the reputation can be affected badly. These tools allow people to comment, inform and communicate, like Web 2.0 and its versions, forums, social platforms, blogs… There are basic tools in the world of online reputation and it is essential to pay attention to them to achieve a good online reputation.
The growth and importance of this type of space has transformed the Internet into a platform for freedom of expression. People can use it as they want, using them to deceive others or in other words, they can make an inappropriate use of it. As a consequence, the online community’s use of these tools is not in accordance with the interest of the organization, or is not good to aim the online reputation that you are interested in. One of the most powerful and used tools in this area are the comments. Comments may become very beneficial for your reputation if they are good and they can put you in a good position, however they can be very damaging if the comments are not what you expect. For this reason, the harmful comments must be deleted preferably, or at least they must be difficult to found for users.
Online reputation management
Online reputation management (ORM) collects all the actions for knowledge, monitoring and control of all information that affects the online reputation of a brand, company or particular person. It is not only referred to the collection of information that affects the reputation, it also works on looking to new content that is not good for the reputation and the image, and tries to manage and control this kind of information and avoid to be accessible or found easily.
For understanding better the importance of the online reputation management we should be aware of how powerful it can be the ability and power influence that the consumer has on the network.
Managing the online reputation is not specifically for promote yourself, it has also much to do with own defense and best practice. Its job is more the prevention and repair of online reputation threats. People can intentionally or for the simple reason that they are upset post bad comments or in general bad content about you, so if you don't manage this content and prevent to being seen for online users, people will probably go to your competitors, and this is the last thing that is wanted. Although, you work on the promotion, this is not still useful if there exist content online that deceives the promotion that you are doing. Be aware that there is a lot of possibility that the people will believe this bad content.
As the amount of user-generated content on the Internet is growing, it has begun to affect Internet search results more and more. ORM looks and analyzes the searches based on some related terms and tries to change the order of the results to avoid bad results to be shown. Following this, it can be said that the most important role of the online reputation management is to track what is written about the related subject, and then depending on the result promote positive and neutral content, while at the same time pushing down harmful links. Usually, most users don't look further than the first or the second page in a search engine, so it is useful to try to have bad results in the last pages. The farther back, the less likely it is to be found.
Most of the times, the need to modify the order of the links in the search engines comes as a result of the frequent inability to delete the content.
Remove content from the Web
Negative information about a particular or a company can be difficult to remove, particularly if it is associated with a very high-ranked website. Unfortunately, it is impossible to have any outside group or also for you to remove data from someone else's web server without their permission. For this reason, it is better solution to contact the web owner and ask for it to be removed. Usually, if the content were not posted maliciously, the web owner would not have any problem to delete it. However, if there exist a case of malicious defamation, usually asking for removing bad information will not have any result, and more it might leads to more negative publicity.
In the cases where asking for content to be remove don't have any effect, or when someone is trying to harm your reputation, it is better to follow the basic phases or techniques described in online reputation management. Try using the tools available for monitoring and building the reputation.
Although the content that it has been posted for yourself it is easier to delete (although sometimes it can be questioned that in some pages it will remain in the server), it is better think twice before putting personal information online. Some sites, such as social networking sites or photo sharing sites, can be shared with all people, or in case privacy settings are used, with family and friends. But also, there exist another pages that don't have privacy settings and are viewable by anybody and they appear in search results. If it is uncomfortable for you that a photo or piece of content will be visible by strangers, think carefully about publishing it on public sites. Moreover, you should speak with friends and tell them to be careful with the photos that they share of you. Because once the content is online removing some content can be very complicated.
Phases in online reputation management
Online Reputation Management is a punctual or permanent job depending on the importance of the company, organization or individual. In addition, it is divided in three different phases.
Monitoring phase
The first step always is to find all content related to your company, product, person, brand, employee, etc. which is distributed in the network. It is the phase for knowing which are the sites where related information appears. To achieve this, the most helpful thing is using the major search engines, like Google and Yahoo and do searches on them. In case you are using personalized searches, results can vary a lot based on your location and search history. To get the most accurate search results, first log out of your account on the search engines.
There are several tools available that help to do this, and not to search related content only in search engines, but also in the major social networks as twitter and blogs. In addition, some of these tools keep track permanently of related content in order to take actions about bad comments as soon as possible. To keep track, it is a good idea to set up alerts and feeds to catch every mention of your name, company, brand, employees, domain… as like that you will be aware if there is new content related to you. If this content is not beneficial to you, you will be able to push it down in search engines or take useful actions before the problem will grow.
Once, the information related to the keywords that are interesting for you has been searched, it is really useful to classify this information so as to analyze it in the next phase of the OMR and decide if you need to build or fix the online reputation. Sometimes, it may be useful to use a simple spreadsheet or a simple list to determine it.
Analyze the nature of the information
The second phase is to analyze the nature of the information in the network, and check the result that you have obtain before. Record how many of these results were positive, neutral, negative, indifferent and how many of them weren't related to you. Once all has been observed, give priority to the negative results that need to be deleted or delegated to last pages in search engines. However, the rest of the results mustn't be forgotten because they show if you need to build your online reputation, as the number of its type of result will tell whether there is a need to build or manage your online reputation. This is the phase for the identification and comparison of the messages veracity in the network.
Looking to the numbers you can know in what is your problem and which actions take to face the problem:
- The potential problem
If the high-ranked results in a search engine are not about the subject you are searching, especially if it is not in the top 10, you need to start building your reputation. Despite there is not an obvious problem, because there is not any content that harms your reputation, there is still a problem as you are not promoting yourself. In this case you should take some specific actions. Moreover, if the subject you are searching is not in the first page of a search engine, when bad information is posted online it is easier that it will appear in the first pages. For this reason, you must take care to build your own online reputation, be proactive and don't be vulnerable to attacks.
However, in some cases it can be difficult to have the first positions of the search engines related to you. The main problem is in some cases where you share the name with a famous person or bigger company, for example. When this happens, it is necessary to take the place of online community members and consider how they will search in order to find another things using combinations with other words or how they will refine their searches to locate you. Filter the searches and find in which of them there is a lack of results or you don't appear. Work in the result of these filtered searches.
- The not-so-obvious problem
If there exist results referred to you and they are high-ranked, but most of them have been marked as indifferent, it is also necessary to improve your online reputation. The reason for doing it is very simple, the goal for any company or individual is that a potential customers or any member of the online community will be able to find the most relevant and positive information for them that exist, and also they must find it immediately. If they don’t find the information they are looking for as soon as possible, you are giving the chance to users to find your competence before you, and maybe they are going to give up finding information of you in this point and go the competence. Moreover, the users that search for the referenced terms want to find easily something that make them go to you in the first sight, something that cause them a good impression of you.
Take into account that is better for you that the first web results that appear in the search are the ones managed for you. Doing this you are taking care that the first positions are going to be positive results always, but if another person’s web page is in the high-ranked positions, although nowadays this web may contain good content for your online reputation, when time passes the point of view could change and it might have not wanted content. Being the first results your own web pages, you will have more control about your online reputation. However, it is true that some of other contents can be beneficial for you, as they give you credibility. Newspaper and magazine reports or interviews are an example of this. So it is essential to decide which ones are interested to leave in the first results and which positions are better to exchange with pages that you control.
- The obvious problem
If most of the high-ranked results are negative for your online reputation, it is indubitable that you have a serious problem with your online reputation and you have to improve it immediately. These negative contents can be of several different kinds such as compromising images, negative reviews, or angry customers that have left undesirable comments, consumers that are not really satisfied. Having these results easy to find for any user is the worst practice that you can do, you will be ruining your online reputation. It can affect you in a severe way, making you losing money or a job. So it is time to fix it.
The most common reputation management problems come from (ordered by least to most severe):
- Squatted usernames
- Squatted domains
- Doppelgangers
- Job changes
- Name changes
- Negative comments
- False information
- Fake profiles
- Trademark infringement
- Bad news coverage
- Legal documents
- Complaint sites
- Competitor attacks
- Hate sites
- Personal scandals
- Corporate scandals
- Industry perceptions
Work in your online reputation
The last phase is to work on your online reputation and improve it, mainly if you have a big amount of negative contents. You need to try to delete these negative messages from the network or at least, if it is impossible to delete it, to put them in the last pages of search engines and achieve to be seen for fewer people, damaging less your image. But also, if the problem is that there is not any content related to you, or the available results are not too much or relevant, you have to start taking actions to build your online reputation and in the same way protect it, before someone will try to deceive you.
Once you have found which is your problem, there are several actions that will be very useful when you are trying to improve and build your online reputation:
Build your reputation
If you haven’t obtain any result referring to you (potential problem) or in other case you have obtain results but those results are not relevant in your online reputation (the not-so obvious problem), it may be because you haven’t spend time building your reputation, start performing the next suggestions.
- Protect your name
The first step to build your online reputation is to register your username. Purchase all relevant domains, the ones related to you. Like this, the searches will soon carry people to your pages, or at least they will be easier to be found, instead of letting users go to other pages of people who share your name. Moreover, it is not enough to buy these domains, the social networks are nowadays an essential part in the online community and a strong source to build your reputation as to have bad one, so register your username also in the most important social networks: Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn and Naymz. But it is important to be aware that every time new social networks are appearing and you have to be fast and register your username in them too, before someone else claims your name. It is very probable that your name is already used for other person, and this is the opposite that beneficial for you. On one hand because it will be more difficult to users finding you, and on the other hand as it may happens that an angry customer or organization that tries to deceive you will be using this username and it will be a good tool for them to deteriorate your reputation. Building your brand is easier when you share the same identifier in all the social networks that you are subscribed. So, although it is a process that requires time, it will be useful to build your reputation to take time to achieve this goal.
- Set privacy settings
Be conscious about the necessity to set privacy settings in the social network accounts that you own. Each social network has different settings of privacy to take your time to learn about them and protect your account. Doing this, you will be avoid problems with photos that you don’t want to share with all the people, or even more with photos that will destroy your reputation as drunk photos or another kind of inappropriate content.
- Get involved
Start finding friends, clients, business partners, classmates, etc. and become their friend or follow them in social networks. Try to participate in their conversations, answer their questions and keep them informed. If you start participating, they will involve you in their conversations, and keep in mind you, linking, sending opportunities, and interesting content. For all people is good to see that you are interested in them, you are willing to work and that it is easy to contact with you.
Prevent reputation problems
It is not enough to build your online reputation, also you have to maintain it. The web changes and new content is uploaded and posted every second. This new information could be good and help you, but also may deteriorate you. For this reason, you should think of the potential problems that you might face and take some actions to prevent them.
- Social media Management
With the appearance of Social Media (texting, blogging, networking) everything has changed. With it, it has become easier for people to communicate, interact, collaborate, listen to other people and give their opinion. An online community using social networks such as Twitter and Facebook can build your reputation or break it without you even noticing about it.
Social Networking sites are growing exponentially and changing all the time with new services and technology. As the consequence of this growth, the volume of conversations and all the kind of content in social media is raising, making harder to track, monitor and manage them.
But not all is bad, the growth of Social Media gives the chance to advertising in much less expensive way than other methods, and also this advertising might be very efficient. As consequence, the Social Media Management has the attention of every company and individual that wants to advertise himself, becoming an essential part of their strategy nowadays.
A Social Media Manager can help you to build a positive presence and improve your online reputation. It coordinates and manages how you participate in the different conversations that are taking place in blogs, social networks and other communities. In addition, it helps you to track what is being said about you and also automatically posting your messages in multiple social media sites simultaneously, helping to expand your presence in social network sites.
Moreover, it is important to join conversations that are not only about you, but also those that are about your competitors and all the areas related to you. Doing this, it will be easier to you understand customer needs and increase visibility. But all of this takes a lot of time; it is not easy job to stay on the top of Social Media world.
Social Media Management tools can be useful to integrate social networking activities with your marketing strategy. Your marketing strategy can include other online activities, such as Web sites, campaigns, and email marketing.
- Be accessible
The lack of accessibility of a company or individual is the source of most of the anger of the customers or users. If they are not able to contact you, or also the response that they expected of you is not the one that they receive, they might become frustrated. The experience said that frustrated users tend to complaint about it in the web, blogs and social networks like Twitter and Facebook.
To avoid it, it is essential to give the user the best information that you have and try to understand them and they questions. Also, give the most exact contact information that you can, and try to respond their messages as soon as possible. If you are unable to give the response in a period of time, inform them about this fact in order not to get the users angry. The most types of contact that you offer the better, as some users will prefer one to other.
It is also known that the methods of contact that are offered will be in accordance of your budget. Maybe you are not able to maintain a 24 hours operable call center, but instead of it you can offer other different services like a customer online service.
- Own your negatives
Be in advance of people that want to deceive you, express bad comments of you… One way that people try to express they anger is purchasing domains that contain the name of you, your company or brand combined with a bad word, for example, [name]sucks.com or fuck[name].com. Through this web page they are going to express their bad opinion about you and try to affect the online users opinion for not trusting you. So, anticipate to them and purchase these domains and not give the chance to angry users.
Moreover, it is always good to make more difficult for users the task to search for one alternative of you. Understand that if they find an alternative that satisfies their necessities they probably are not going back to you. For achieving this, it is important to complete the task of deleting negative contents for the first pages of search engines, as like this you have more opportunities to convince the user about trusting you and giving you a chance. Another good idea could be create a FAQ or customer area on your site and write questions and answer simulating that a external user have made it. The questions that you can use might be of the type: “Is there any alternative to [brand/company]?”, and here you can give products or another companies that you own. So they are not going very far of you.
- Build credibility
The best way to give a good impression and make users trust you is using customer’s good reviews or experiences. Collect testimonials that are useful for you where they have had a good experience and post them in your site. It is also useful to add to the testimonials positive mentions that you find in social networks like Twitter. Giving the chance to users to add reviews about you or the products that you offer is always good. Using these techniques you are building your credibility to possible future customers.
If you are trying to improve the online reputation of your company and you have a logo or you have quality certificate is a foolish idea not to show prospective customers it, so add them to your site. These small things make users feel more secure about you and their decision of trusting you.
- Respond to criticism
If you find that you have negative comments or reviews, work on solving this, even though sometimes it may not be possible. Focus on customers or users who are angry, upset or frustrated and try to resolve the issue and change their feelings about you. Contact them and apologize for your actions. It is also beneficial to reward them offering free products or services. Promise them that it is the last time that this will happen.
Take into account that if a customer change their bad feelings and thought about you, you are losing not only one customer, but also all customers that may be influenced for him.
Tools for ORM
It is possible to find some free tools to manage your online reputation. Probably, when you are trying to monitor and manage your online reputation you will need to do some research to determine which services fulfill your needs. Usually a mix of a few of these free services will cover your bases, but you will need time to do the manual work necessary for the tools that are not automated. If you prefer to have more of the work done, there are also a number of paid tools available to monitor your online reputation.
Classification of several free tools that are used to monitoring online reputation, track the information and get involved in the net and social media.
Blog Monitoring
- BackType Blog Comments Monitoring– This tool indexes conversations from blogs, social networks and other social media. It also has an alert function that e-mails updates whenever a search term is mentioned in a comment.
- BlogPulse – BlogPulse is a blog search engine with several complementary tools such as Trend Search and Conversion Tracker that analyzes the data it collects.
- Google Blog Search– This is a Google beta search engine for blogs.
- Technorati– Technorati is the leading blog search engine indexing millions of blog posts in real time. It also tracks the authority, influence and popularity of blogs.
Twitter Monitoring
- Monitter– A real-time Twitter monitor for up to three keywords at a time.
- TweetBeep – This tool provides hourly Twitter alerts sent via e-mail. You can specify keywords, people and links to track.
- Tweet Later– TweetLater has a number of features for Twitter users, and it also monitors Twitter and e-mails you a digest of the tweets that contain your specified keywords. You can also use this to track your @replies.
- Twitter Search– Twitter Search was formally Summize. It searches all Twitter activity for keywords, links or user activity in real time.
Link Monitoring
- BackTweets – This is a service by BackType that provides an engine to search for specific links mentioned on Twitter.
- WhoLinksToMe – A link search tool that tracks backlinks and makes them easily sortable by anchor text, origination, and by the target URL with enhanced reporting capability. You can also import links from Google Webmaster Tools for enhanced analysis.
Social Media Management
- Atom Keep – update multiple profiles at once.
- Disqus – track your comment threads.
- Ping.fm – distribute tweets to multiple social profiles at once.
Other Tools
- Google Alerts– Your keyword search results are sent via e-mail for keyword mentions in news, web, blogs, video and groups categories.
- BoardTracker – This tool searches discussion boards and forum threads for your specified keywords. You can also sign up for e-mail alerts.
- MonitorThis – MonitorThis is a search aggregator for up to 26 search engine feeds.
- Naymz– A social network focused on reputation, personal branding, and identity verification. Basic version is free.
- Purewire Trust – An online portal that helps people verify reputation information about themselves and those with whom they interact online. You can search by e-mail address, URL or web application.
- Yasni – This is a search engine dedicated to finding people on the web through publicly available information, including images, videos, social networking profiles and posts.
- Feed Reader – Set up a feed reader to help you view the custom feeds you’ll be tracking for your keyword phrases.
- Q&A Tracking – If anyone is asking questions about you, your company or a particular keyword, you can track those on certain Q&A sites.
- KnowEm – useful to quickly check and register your name, handle, company, products, high profile employees, domain, etc. across more than two hundred social networks.
Paid tools
- BrandsEye – Track and manage all of your consumers' conversations online. Provide real-time reporting for yours and competitors' brands, perform in-depth and immediate market research and identify risks and leverage business opportunities.
- Naymz premiun service – A social network focused on reputation, personal branding, and identity verification.
- Reputation.com’s MyReputation – you can track articles, stories or other mentions of you, your most visited pages, how many people are searching for you and the location of those people, the top results for your name and your overall popularity ranking over time.
- Trackur – It is a tool for monitoring alerts, similar to google alerts, but it search in a wider area. It doesn't monitor only google search, but also more chanels.
Conclusions
Nowadays, the importance of the online reputation is extremely high. All the people tend to search for information in the web, especially using search engines. If they find negative reviews or comments about you, they are going to look to other side and end up finding a competitor service. In order to avoid this, it is essential to work building a good reputation and trying to delete or at least, given the difficulty of removing content in some cases, relegating the results to the last pages in search engines.
Moreover, Social media is becoming very important and it is easy to have your reputation improved or broken in this world without even knowing. For this reason, take part in Social Media world and manage your conversations there properly. It can be a great tool of advertising.
Make use of the available tools, and look to what is being said about you in the web in order to solve negative comments as soon as possible and simplify the work to upload several social networks in the same time. But the most important, be careful about the contents that you post online and be aware of the facility to ruin your online reputation, so don’t upload media that can be damaging for you.
