What is Online Reputation Management?

Reputation Management simply involves monitoring and engaging in the discussion surrounding your brand by its consumers online via social media, local search such as Google or Yelp, and other online platforms to facilitate feedback response and promote the best company image.

With more and more consumers shifting from local brick and mortars towards web-based storefronts, consumer input has increased dramatically. Reading reviews and capitalizing on recommendations from family, friends, and online communities has become a necessary step in the consumer process making online reputation management more relevant than ever.

It’s important to remember that a consumer can find pretty much anything online, and their search results will always feature high-ranking web sources that reflect the consumer’s opinions about a brand, product, or service. Thus, neglecting to monitor and manage your online presence could hurt your business now and in the future.

For those who have spent years building their brand, it only takes some unanswered negative feedback online to dismantle years of progress. On the flip side, those new businesses trying to build their brand won't get very far with a negative online image right off the bat, so it is important to tread lightly.

Like it or not, you are no longer in control of your brand: your consumers are. People trust what others—even strangers!—have to say about a business over Your Best Sales Pitch! An upset consumer will jump through hoops to get the word out, but won't necessarily do that for a positive experience because we all expect good services, products, etc. 

So What’s the Next Step? 

For those of you who have yet to analyze your online presence, google yourself or your business and claim all the profiles you can. Once you are the owner of that page or profile, make sure the information listed about your business is accurate—the NAP (name, address, and phone), website, email, etc. is very important for search engines and will clear up any confusion about your current operations.

Once you’ve checked for logistical accuracies, you can start to respond to your reviews. Don't focus on just the bad or good; respond to all, even simple ratings.  For the positive reviews or ratings, simply thanking them for their review/rating can go a long way.

If you receive negative feedback, refrain from responding emotionally and do your best to stay neutral. Remain polite even if you know the incident(s) in question are a result of their own choices or attitude and do your best to get them offline to discuss in more detail. The last thing you want is to agitate them further, causing them to go to additional platforms to leave more negative feedback. Also, if you are not mindful in your response and share something personal in the heat of the moment, this could get you into hot water later.

Negative feedback happens sometimes. It’s impossible to please everyone, and if it's your fault, this gives you a chance to learn and improve your services—it also gives you an opportunity to show future customers that you do, in fact, care. Additionally, having perfect “5-star” reviews/ ratings/ recommendations on your sites can lead to consumers questioning the authenticity of your reviews. 

Now, all that said, if you don't have time to manage your brand's online presence or have an employee to assist you, be wary of hiring an external company to handle it for you, as ethics will come into play. Many will offer services to help improve your search rankings by adding reviews to your local directories, social media, etc. or even remove negative reviews altogether. However, no one can remove reviews from Google, Yelp, Facebook, etc. just because they don't like the feedback. The only way to get a review removed is to show how it violates the review site’s Terms of Service, allowing you to flag it or challenge it, which provides no guarantee of removal. On the flip side, if this company you’ve hired adds fake reviews, they will most likely be removed by Yelp, Google, or Facebook anyway for suspicions of fraud, and you will have wasted your investment altogether.

In closing, it’s important to get a sense of the bigger picture of consumer trends in these complex times, and how critical it is for you to manage and monitor your online reputation management.