Ideate

Online Reputation Management: What is it, and why should you care?

by Fred on 07/12/09 at 1:27 pm
4 comments

Last night The Killers played at Val de Vie farm near Paarl. The concert, according to some guys at work with me, rocked the house, but the big point of discussion was the parking debacle that cast a dark cloud over the event.

Check this out from the Twitter stream a few minutes ago:

(Click here to see the latest tweets)

The important point here is that a company called Big Concerts, a local events organiser, is being taken to the cleaners online. People are talking more about the parking mix-up than the event. This is a big deal for Big Concerts. They are now better known for making a hash of things than for what could easily have been a breakthrough for their brand.

This brings us to Online Reputation Management, or ORM, which is the analysis of your personal or professional, business or industry reputation as represented by content across all types of online media channels. Basically, when people online write stuff about you, you should know about it fast enough to be able to respond – especially if it’s negative stuff.

So why should you care?

Here’s a quick test, a three step starter to your ORM education.

• Step 1: Search for your personal or business name on Google. Look for any content written about you.
• Step 2: Search for your name on Twitter.
• Step 3: If your brand name pops up on Step 1 and 2, then respond accordingly. Either tweet back, post a comment or c0ntact the person responsible for putting the content about you live.

If the results to the above steps were anything less than favourable (if you’re a Big Concerts team member for example) then you should be taking ORM very seriously. My agency, World Wide Creative, provides this service at a more sophisticated level, using ORM tools and a dedicated team of marketers to manage ORM campaigns for a host of different clients. However, if your brand didn’t feature in the results above, or if you’re a small brand or company, you can run a pretty rudimentary ORM campaign yourself by adding your name to Google Alerts and Twitter advanced search (tip: if you know how to use RSS, then add the Twitter search feed to your RSS reader).

So, that’s pretty much ORM, in a nutshell. The digital environment, because it is so searchable, allows us to track, monitor and respond to any content related to your brand very easily. Take another current example: about an hour ago, an Airlink plane crash landed in George in the Western Cape.

No one was hurt, thank goodness, but the online environment is now awash with tweets and pics from the incident. Now would be a great time for someone from the Airlink team to respond with some calming words to the community.

Let’s see what happens. (Follow the Twitter stream here.)

If you’re interested in ORM, here are some more relevant articles:

• Why ORM is so important
• Business lingo explained: ORM

If you’d like to contact me about organising an ORM campaign for your brand, email me at fred@worldwidecreative.co.za

Fred Roed is the marketing guy in the Ideate crew. He runs a web marketing company called World Wide Creative and loves writing about people out there doing marketing right. View more articles by Fred.

Tags: Online Reputation Management, ORM

Related Articles

• Setting up Twitter for Business
• Business Lingo Explained – ORM
• SA online retailer holds Woolworths to ransom
• Google’s Nexus One – should you care?
• Should a small business advertise?