Online reputation management-Changing the consumer mindset

Online reputation management entails a transitional shift from the bad to the good. Let us understand from the perspective of the consumer how online reputation management (ORM) can affect his decision making process. A consumer who is searching for buying something online or wants to read a review before making a purchase at a nearby store will log on to the net and check for some information.

Quite reflexively, I must say, many latch onto Google or Yahoo to type in a few key terms or key phrases that give information about a product. A website gives only limited amount of reviews. So in order to make the most of information intake, the consumer goes to a search engine and puts the name of a particular brand, product or service to find relevant information in the form of reviews, blogs or forum sites. The consumer is most likely (84 percent to be on the safe side of percentages) to look at the first two pages of a search engine. Can you imagine, if the search engine results on the very first page gives not so flattering views and reviews about a product or service. The very first page of Google or such other search engine will have done the damage and the consumer will change his mind and go to some other product or service, mostly the one belonging to the competitor.

Online reputation management is an exercise to make sure such negative things about your product or service does not crop up in the first two search results pages of Google or any other search engine. While doing so, the online reputation management team uses the best optimization skills at their disposal to make sure that only good and positive information about your product or service appears in the first two pages of a search engine. Imagine if the same customer who uses the same key terms for a product or service finds relevant, useful, positive information about your product or service, what will his line of thought be? Will he go ahead and buy the product/service? Of course he will. Will he recommend about your product or service to others? Of course, he will. This proves that online reputation management is quite crucial for your business to grow exponentially and also to make sure that your business enjoys a substantial amount of goodwill in the market.

Using online reputation management to market your business online

The post mentioned below talks about the power of online reputation management and writing effective content to make good amount of information and positive news about your company feature on the first two pages of Google or any other search engine.

Apart from writing good content and providing back links, there are many other steps that can help in online reputation management. Discussed below are some of the ideal methods to increase the presence of your business online:

• Social networking sites: You can make the most use of social networking sites for spreading awareness and a virtual 'fan club' for your product or service. Setting up online communities and making them interactive is a good idea. You can also make the most of social bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us and Technorati and tagging them to certain associating tags. In fact, these social book marking sites have a huge number of visitors who will tag your content to their website or online business if they find something interesting. Social bookmarking sites and video uploading sites like YouTube etc give a chance to make your online businss come 'alive' Make sure you use effective tags while bookmarking for your social bookmarking site. For instance if your company's name is Horseshoe, then make sure you tag terms like: shoes, footwear, horse, etc.

• If it a new concept you are promoting or if you want to build content for a company that is famous, you can write in wikipedia or even use the ‘edit’ option of Wikipedia.
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• A lot of positive reviews or feeback can be written on specialized siters like www.consumerrview.com. If you are marketing a product, you can use shopping search sites like shopping.com.

• · You can set up a tracking system like Google alerts for free which monitor any of the search results that comes up with the terms that are related to your product or service.

These are some of the common ways that can be used to boost your search engine rankings apart from writing effective search engine friendly content.

Online reputation management and the power of effective content

Online reputation management is antidote to negative publicity online. A negative post or piece of information that comes on the first page of a search engine page like Google can be bad news to your online business. It is now easy for an customer or a lay man with even limited use of computers to post their views online in forum sites, blogs and other web 2.0 platforms.

You may not be able to obliterate negative results disappear completely from a search engine. However, you can definitely impact the search engine results in such a way that only positive and relevant information about your product or service features in the ‘first two’ pages of a search engine. As we know online reputation management is a healthy amalgamation of PR skills and search engine optimization. You can definitely use ORM to your best advantage by marketing your product or service in the right manner.

Writing effective content is one of the best ways to exercise wise online reputation management. Good amount of interesting, original content is the right way to thrust online reputation management effectively. In fact, not only will effective content will win you a lot of support and patronage, it will also make many sites or blogs ‘link back’ to you. With the help of valuable backlinks and your expert knowledge about the product, you can increase the positioning of your business to such a measure that it can feature in the first two pages of a search engine.

You can also submit various articles to famous article directories online. These article directories have a resource box at the end, where you can include your company name that will link back the readers back to your website or blog. There are certain specialist sites or article directories that specially deal with the product or service you are dealing with. In this case, you can put in a keyword or two about your industry along with the phrase ‘article directory’ or ‘submit articles.’ For instance, if your company deals in home loans, you can write home loans article directory.