Online Reputation Management, why the fuss?
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Any business owner will confess to the fact that regardless of all the other marketing tools around word-of-mouth is one of the most powerful (good or bad) a business can get. |
The experience of one customer can have a strong influence on your reputation with any number of potentially new (or even existing) customers.
Word-of-mouth has taken on a slightly new form in this new digital age and especially with the explosion of social networking. With access to the Internet becoming easier every day, and a number of social networking sites bringing people together, news of your business can travel quickly. So it’s becoming increasingly important to not only monitor and track what people are saying about your brand out there but also to take part and influence the conversations that are taking place.
The reality is that the internet is a fairly large space, with plenty of activities happening every second and a constant change in content makes it nearly impossible to keep track of it. That is why Online Reputation Management (ORM) is becoming such an important part of your overall strategy.
But what does Online Reputation Management really mean? According to Wikipedia “ORM is a relatively new industry but has been brought to the forefront of professionals’ consciousness due to the overwhelming and many times unpredictable nature of both professional journalistic content and amateur user-generated content (or UGC).”
Specifically, the online media that is monitored in ORM is:
- Traditional/mainstream websites
- Social networks (e.g. Facebook, MySpace, Bebo)
- Consumer Review sites such as Tripadvisor, HelloPeter
- Social news/bookmarking sites
- Collaborative Research sites such as Yahoo Answers, Rediff Q&A
- Independent discussion forums
- User-generated content (UGC)/Consumer Generated Media (CGM)
- Blogs
- Microblogs (e.g. Twitter, Jaiku, Plurk)
With all these various platforms for people to have conversations on it’s clear that you need to start paying attention to what people are saying online. The online world can directly affect not only how your business is perceived by customers but also your bottom line.
