Thursday, July 16, 2015

5 Ways to Manage Business Reputation Online

The success of every business depends on its good reputation. If your business belongs to a website (nowadays no business can be run without a website), it needs plenty of hits from visitors every day. Online reputation status influence visitors   to visit your site, can make or break a company’s chances for further success and bring changes in your profit dramatically. So, online reputation management is extremely important and vital for survival and flourishing of your business.

Online reputation management is involved with building, protecting, repairing of your reputation. Implementing an effective online reputation management campaign requires a solid foundation of research and planning. The work should be done executed by good monitoring and evaluating all the steps. All these works comprise of analyzing key words, selecting strategy, planning   tactics and putting the plan into action.

Here are a few ways of better online reputation management that can boost your online goodwill  in a higher rank.

1) Follow audience’s expectations and connect with them: It is your first and foremost duty  to make sure that people can find  easily what they are looking for. Tell your story, let your personality shine, and give your site visitors easy access to resources and the information they’re seeking. When your audience can see your company personality and feel like you are more than just a cold website among millions, they’ll build confidence in you and help you build a positive online reputation.

2) Design for authoritative site: Make your design clean , well organized and clear navigation. Make your contact information prominently, highlight your awards, and given them a reason to trust you through the sentiments expressed in your headlines and website contents.

3) Continue testing: Creating a website is completing the first version. Now start the work of testing. Test your site by changing elements and creating a site that fully engages your audience .Test different elements, buttons, pictures, navigation, and more. Continually try   to detect which elements encourage your site visitors and   which are impeding them. This effort will help them to  build trust in your site and they’ll come away with a positive view of your site and your brand.

4) Participation in social media :  Millions of people are spending more and more time on social media sites, like LinkedIn , Facebook , Twitter, etc. You have to make  presence on all of these sites and keep these pages and profiles current and engaging. You should be proactive in recruiting people to follow you on Twitter, like you, on Facebook and keep track of your other social media profiles. Be sure and post photos, text entries and even video footage if possible on a regular basis. Use contests, surveys and open-ended questions to boost engagement and seek feedback.

5) More actions: To improve your online reputation there are more important activities. These are blogging, new article creation, press releases, and link building. The new content, along with already existing positive commentary on the web, which are search engine optimized and marketed, moves up the rankings of the search engines and push negative content down in the rankings.



How to Choose a Good Online Reputation Management Firm

How to  protect the good name of your business from any damaging activities as like   a rip off reports, social media attacks, bad forum posting or any kinds of negative search results? To protect this embarrassing situation you have to have the full control over your online search results. It is a very important issue for you and your business. Though it is not an easy job at all; it is a  daunting and difficult task. You can resolve it by employing a good reputation management company who has time-tested expertise in preserving and protecting your online reputation.

Online reputation management companies are of different types with different services. You have to decide what types of service do you want and select the desired company accordingly. What do want? Do you need only to monitor what is going on about your business? What is the timing of monitoring? Is it non-stop monitoring – for 24 hours throughout the year or only for regular business hours? To alleviate the present business position some companies offer customized service plan or some standard package. Are you interested in that offers?

 How to determine the actual company that best suits your needs from multiple companies? The primary task is to go through the background and portfolio of the companies. How strong is their background? What did the previous customers say in their remarks? Who are their present customers? You can study and realize the actual position of the company from trustworthy review sites (like Better Business Bureau or Angie’s List) social media sites (like Facebook and Twitter) or relevant forum sites.
A trustworthy online reputation management company helps to protect your site from attacks and bad press, builds diverse resources to stand over in the search results of major search engines with positive information, uses innovative and tested methods to provide assurance for the best results in the reputation business. A good reputation management company never exaggerates about its performance, always preaches what it practices and able to make online presence successful.
What are the main tasks of online reputation management? According to experts following steps should be taken from a good reputation management company:
  1. “Identify stakeholders (customers, ex-employee, press, industry opinion leaders, competitors, grudgers).
  2. Conduct a reputation audit - cover search, social networking, portals, video, press, opinion and complain sites.
  3. Improve your online assets - you must own a minimum of 100 web pages linked to your or your company or product or product category name.
  4. Define goals and create a strategy - address customer issues, contact websites for removal, develop new content.
  5. Implement plan of action - dedicate a team with predefined yet flexible steps.
  6. Monitor online reputation - set up auto alerts and scan internet regularly. Categorize all postings into good and bad.
  7. Repair and strengthen - Focus on the addresses of complaints/negative posts and strengthening of web assets. Use web assets as a lead generation source to pay for online reputation management.”

Above all a good online reputation company should be assembled with  online reputation thought leaders with competent team of engineers, PR experts, and journalists, and have the technology that allows to monitor, manage, and protect your brand-name in Google, Yahoo, and Bing ; enable you to gain control over  online reputation.”