Online Reputation Management(ORM)-Setting things right proactively

Anyone who runs a business or a professional agency will swear on his or her last buck that a negative publicity can be quite eroding. If the first page of a search engine like Google has some not so good things about your company or the brand, it means that there is something you have to do before you clientele and customers head for the exit door. God has blessed consumers with the power of the Internet. Decision making has become easy for them because they can share their opinions, views and interests with a lot of like-minded people through reviews sites, forum sites and blogs.

What do you do, if your company is the object of scathing attack and relentless criticism? A place in the front page of a search engine is important, but it is equally important that something good or positively interesting is written about at the same time. If there is some negative information written about your company found in the first page of results in a search engine, you have to really do something constructive to undo the damage. It is important to realize that you can’t really remove negative information. However, you can push the negative information down and out from the public view.

Here are some of the steps; you can take into account while latching on to online reputation management:

1. Contact the blog owners or webmasters: You can always contact the webmasters or blog owners of the site where trashy or negative stuff is written about you or your company. Request them politely to remove the negative set of comments. Chances are that they might decline your request. Chances are also there that they might agree and remove the comments. If such is the case, your headache is relieved quite easily. However, you should note that if they do remove the posts, there are fair chances that these comments still remain in the ‘cached’ pages of the search engine. However users who click at that particular link will not see the bad comments.
2. Network with the people who write positive about you: Your company must be doing something good, which is why it is still in the business. Seek such sites that write positive about you and send them an appreciation or a ‘thank you’ mail and tell them that you are giving a link back to their website from your site.

3. Social networking: Social networking is spreading like wild-fire online. Create a community account in sites like Orkut, De.licio.us etc and collate all positive information, videos, interesting content, new product notifications etc. Make your content keyword-driven in social networking sites too with the name of your company appearing in the title and in the body. You can choose to invite only those people who are really interested to know about your company.

4. Audio-visual treat: Upload videos of some of your products or companies online in sites like YouTube and Google videos. You can even make a catchy, promotional video that looks attractive to users online.

5. Google alerts: Set up a Google alerts where you post a certain number of negative or positive keywords or phrases which are most likely to be used in reference to your product or service. In turn, Google alerts automatically send you an email that has new Google results carrying the keywords or phrases that you had listed. This simplifies your online reputation management efforts and keeps you in control of matters beyond the usual human control.

Online Reputation Management is a long-term thing and you cannot expect results the next day. If you channelize your efforts in the right direction, you will earn positive rewards. A close monitoring and optimization of content can surely help you achieve success in your endeavor.