How to Manage Your Business's Online Reputation

4 Ways to Manage Your Online Reputation

Online reputation management is a growing field, one that is tightly related to search engine optimization. In both cases the tactics tend to be the same, requiring you to monitor and act on search results to improve your online standing. With SEO, the goal is to make your website rise to the top. With ORM, you're not necessarily concerned about helping your own website rank highly in search results; rather, you want to ensure that positive information and commentary about your business ranks higher than anything negative--no matter who said it.



It's a subtle difference that requires greater and more complicated interaction with a larger range of online constituents. ORM is so important that Google offers a dedicated page with its own advice. In the sections that follow, I'll cover Google's basic tips--and a lot more. I'll also provide brief reviews of a variety of tools and services that can help you tackle the job.

Get Alerts

With a baseline in place, step two is to make sure that you're aware when new content about your business hits the Web. The easiest way to do this is to use Google's free Alerts service. The system is fairly self-explanatory: It emails you when new blog posts or other Web pages are created using terms you want to follow. Type in a query (you'll know from the first exercise which ones are most important), and select how often you want results to come to you (from weekly to "as it happens"). You can filter results--just blog posts, just videos, and so on--and you can allow Google to choose whether to send everything or just "the best" results



Alerts are invaluable for clueing you in to happenings you might otherwise miss completely. My Google Alert for "chris null" told me about an up-and-coming band whose bassist shares my name. For a business, a timely Google Alert can help you head off another company attempting to launch using your name, or it can warn you about someone who is maliciously using your brand to hijack search results.


Another benefit of Google Alerts is that it lets you see whether Google is properly indexing your own blog posts or other Web content you're producing. If you put up a new post and don't receive a link to it in your Google Alerts email, you'll want to make sure that the search site is considering your blog--and if it isn't doing so, you should find out why.

Social Scanning

Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ are all key avenues for branding, and users know it. When consumers want to complain about a company, many of them are more likely to tweet about it or kvetch on Facebook than they are to pick up the phone and call customer service. Although you can't control what customers say about your company, you can easily respond to the comments on each of these same services. That response, more than the complaint itself, is often what will determine how you are perceived by other customers who might come across that post or comment in their search results for years to come.

Tools to Make the Task Easier

Keeping track of all this stuff isn't easy. As with managing SEO and your social media presence, dealing with your online reputation can easily consume hours every week, leaving you with no reputation, good or bad, left to manage. Assorted startups and services aim to take some of the pain out of the process. While many ORM services are tied to the related world of social media monitoring, here's a look at some of the bigger names in the business.

Social Mention: This free service offers a mountain of data about mentions in the blogosphere, ranked as positive, neutral, or negative. The top keywords in those posts are also included, along with all sorts of additional minutiae. The value of this information can vary. Unless you have a major (national) brand or a unique word in your business name, expect an awful lot of unrelated and irrelevant results.

Kurrently: This real-time search engine examines Facebook and Twitter results that include the keyword of your choice. Leave the page loaded, and results update in real time. There's not much to it, but Kurrently is fun to check out if something big involving your business is happening. Unfortunately, the service offers no way to send these results to you regularly; you must use the Web interface to see them.

Addict-o-matic: At Addict-o-matic, you can create a "custom page with the latest buzz on any topic." Like Kurrently, it's not of much use unless you have a big brand that you need to follow, and the results are a bit of a hodgepodge. Some of the "news" I found in sample searching was more than three years old. Still, unlike most of these freebie services, it covers a wider range of sources, including Flickr, YouTube, and even Ask.com news.

TweetBeep: This site describes itself as "Google Alerts for Twitter," and that's exactly what it delivers. Add keywords just as you would with Google Alerts, and you get a list of mentioning tweets emailed to you daily.