Online Reputation Management

When you undertake a search for your company name or brand is negative information relating to your company showing up in the search results? Is your company and brand reputation being adversely affected by these negative high ranking results? If so, you may want to consider online reputation management.

Online reputation management combines public relations with search engine optimization and search engine marketing, two vastly diverse fields. That is why most organizations, currently, are not in a position to monitor and solve online problems as they develop.

Effective Online Reputation Management

The key to effective online reputation management is to be pro-active and on top of situations before they become a problem. Online attacks against organizations and brands account for damages in the billions of dollars each year. The most cost-effective solution is to prevent these problems before they develop.

Angry customers, ex-employees, consumer activists, and competitors may have a vested interest in spreading negative information, rumors or hoaxes about your brand.

The effect of this negative information can lead to problems with sales, investors, financials, image, and reputation. In other words - damage to your brand.

Online Reputation Monitoring

That is why you should monitor what is being said about your brand. The size of the internet and the speed at which news travels means that it is difficult to continuously monitor all that is being said. Compounding this problem is the fact that it is easy for anyone to get news published.

Therefore, you need an early warning system to alert you for all news relating to you. Such a system not only informs you of negative news but will also help you to gather market intelligence about your brand and monitor developing trends. This type of information further allows you to gauge the effectiveness and performance of your PR initiatives.

Sources of potential problems:

• Attack or Flame Sites
• Consumer Opinion Sites
• Blogs and Forum News
• Competitor Attacks
• Intellectual Property and Infringement Issues
• Counterfeit Products and Wrongful Corporate Affiliations
• Crisis Management Developments

Elixir Systems is experienced in proactive online reputation management. If you have an existing problem we can help you solve the issues.

A strong corporate reputation and brand image are the result of years of time, sweat and financial investment. To protect and enhance your organization’s investment, you need to control how your name and brand appears online and in search results.

Contact us today to learn how Elixir Systems can help you manage your online reputation on the Internet.

What is Online Reputation Management?

There are 1.2 million monthly searches for Delta Airlines. The number 5 listing in the Google results is a site called Boycott Delta. This negative result is therefore seen by many potential customers. Corporations are often defined by third party sites and what these sites write about is not always the truth. Many corporate and brand names show positive and also negative results within the search engines.

39% of the top 100 results are consumer generated media such as blogs. Blogs and forum results are becoming a major issue for reputation management.

What are your options when there are negative results relating to your brand? You can send them a ‘cease and desist’ letter or actually enter into litigation with the flame sites. Often this creates more negative publicity for your site especially if it involves the blogging community.

The other alternative is to take control of the search results pages for your brands. The good news is that 75% of searchers don’t go past the first page of results when searching. Therefore you are only looking at monitoring the top ten results. When you look at these listings determine what is being said about your brand. Look at this information from the eyes of a searcher. If you do not like what appears or if there is adverse information on the page you need to get rid of it. This is the field known as online reputation management.

Online reputation management will monitor the top search results for your brand name. Most corporate sites have a network of associated sites including product sites, blogs, press releases, suppliers, partners, articles, affiliates, recruitment sites, etc as well as their main corporate brand site. These sites should all be optimized around your brand name. By optimizing this network you should be able to control the content within the top ten. By keeping watch on these results pages you should be able to pro-actively deal with any potential problems as they occur. If you effectively optimize your network you should be able to prevent anyone from entering your space.

How Elixir Systems Manages Online Reputations

We will assess the current situation, rationalize and prioritize the situation and then translate it into action.

Assessment

• What is your business and what are your product, partners and customers?
• The history of your web presence?
• What are your online goals?
• Whatsites are affecting your online reputation?

Rationalization/Prioritization

• What are your online strengths and weaknesses?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of the flame site?
• What can we do to regain control of your space?
• What can we do to maintain the control of your space?

Action

• Define major milestones
• Be flexible and opportunistic
• Assess rapid, coordinated and decisive responses
• Track progress
• Ensure constant communications
• Measure and report on status
• Monitor clients listings