The Importance of a Solid Reputation Management System

A reputation management system provides comprehensive protection as you build your brand image in the digital environment.

In today’s highly connected digital world, what people say about you online can have dramatic impacts on your personal and professional lives.

Whether you are an individual or a business owner, the public perception of your brand influences decision-making processes. Your online reputation—that public perception—can open new doors of opportunity or stand in the way of you achieving your goals.

What if there was a reputation management solution that could build brand awareness, improve your visibility in search results, and positively influence purchasing decisions made by your customers? Could a system achieve all of these factors, and what would it take?

In this guide, we will explore the value of a comprehensive system for managing and monitoring your digital reputation, positioning you for continued success.

What is an Online Reputation?

Online reputation is defined as:

“The consensus public perception of an individual or business based on their online presence.”

People often turn to search engines like Google to learn about the world around them. Most consumers use Google to research companies before making purchasing decisions, and the information they find in search results can profoundly impact their decisions.

The quality and quantity of information in these Google search results help define your internet reputation or how others perceive you or your company. Information in results may include:

• Social media mentions
• News articles
• Marketing campaigns
• Images and videos
• Blog posts
• Online reviews on Google or third-party review sites
• Customer ratings
• Customer stories and feedback across online platforms

If the information is positive, an individual or business will likely have a positive digital reputation. Negative information, by contrast, can harm your digital reputation.

Can you afford to miss out on business or professional opportunities because negative information and reviews are easy to find online? If the answer is “no,” online reputation management offers a robust solution.

What is Online Reputation Management?

Now that we’ve learned what an internet reputation is and how important it can be for individuals and businesses, how can we help ensure a positive reputation?

The answer is online reputation management. Referred to as ORM, this is a set of processes and tactics to establish, grow, and protect a positive digital footprint. ORM professionals use a range of strategies, including:

• Content removal
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Public relations
• Social media management
• Crisis management
• Review management
• Branding
• Google My Business/business listing services

ORM teams carefully analyze a person’s or business’s existing reputation and develop a game plan to boost search visibility and brand awareness. This may include creating web property and content, public relations campaigns, content promotion, and content removal to remove negative, defamatory, or false information from the web.

This is why you should also take control of your Google My Business to monitor your business pages and ensure that no false information is added to them.

Why is reputation management important? Simple: people tend to believe what they read on the web. If customers read positive news about you or your business, that helps to build trust.

By comparison, negative information can erode trust, potentially causing customers to turn to your competitors. A negative reputation may also keep you from getting a job, securing a home or vehicle loan, or being accepted into the school of your choice.

Because social media platforms have become so valuable from a digital footprint perspective, robust social media monitoring and management are essential to ORM. Sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn can be leveraged to produce customer engagement.

Social media posts published regularly are critical features of social media strategies. As new social media platforms launch, creating accounts can further build and solidify your reputation.

How Do Online Reviews Affect Digital Reputations?

Service-based businesses are at the mercy of Internet reviews. After all, people typically read reviews before making decisions on whether or not to use your company.

With 94% of people reading online reviews before making purchasing decisions and as many as 91% of people trusting digital reviews as much or more than personal recommendations, your review profile is more important than ever.

Whether you have a single business or operate multiple locations, the reviews posted on the web can make or break your business. Great reviews help spur more business, while bad reviews can spoil everything you’ve worked hard to achieve.

Monitoring reviews is one tactic ORM professionals use. They may also help business owners craft response strategies, conduct review generation campaigns, and remove false or defamatory reviews. When you manage online reviews, you are taking charge of the digital conversation, helping to build and protect your reputation in the digital environment.

Reputation Management Software: Key Features and Considerations

ORM professionals use various systems and software to help clients stand out online. Here is a deeper look at what some of those software suites can do to build and protect your reputation:

Brand Management

In the digital environment, your brand tells others who you are, what you stand for, and what values you contribute. Your brand is arguably the most valuable intangible asset you have—making it stand out is the goal of brand management.

Brand managers use many of the same tools as marketing teams to improve brand awareness and visibility, grow brands across multiple websites, and create business listings that allow others to find you. Whether you are a small local business or a large corporation, controlling your brand can help you stand out.

Review Management

From review widgets to response tools and review monitoring platforms, review management has become an essential part of reputation management software. Management consists of identifying the reviews that are helping or harming business prospects, crafting a response strategy, and creating engagement between a company and its customers.

Review management can also help generate reviews. When a business showcases reviews on popular sites like Google and Trustpilot, this can encourage other customers to leave their reviews. A positive customer experience is a decisive review generation factor; with review and response management, business owners can stand out even in competitive marketplaces.

Review Monitoring

As our review management overview mentioned, review monitoring is part of the strategy. This helps business owners conduct sentiment analysis, or what customers think and say about the business in the online environment.

Identifying negative reviews using monitoring tools gives business owners a competitive advantage while allowing them to address customer complaints before they can harm the company’s internet reputation. Customers want their concerns to be heard, and when businesses monitor reviews, they have a chance to respond quickly.

This monitoring can also improve review collection; customers see that your business cares, helping to encourage the posting of overwhelmingly positive reviews well into the future.

Search Engine Optimization

The best digital presence in the world is useless if customers can’t find you online. With search engine optimization (SEO), you stack the deck in your favor, allowing customers in your area to discover you more easily.

SEO uses many on-page and off-page factors to help search algorithms accurately categorize and index your website and web properties. The goal of SEO is to help you secure top slots in search results, allowing you to stand out from your competition. SEO is so essential that reputation management software commonly comes with SEO modules designed to assist you in creating excellent search visibility.

Reputation Monitoring

As review management looks for customer comments and sentiments, reputation monitoring allows individuals and business owners to conduct sentiment analysis. In simple terms, it gives you the power to identify problems before they can cause harm to your reputation.

For example, if unfavorable information is posted, ORM professionals can use strategies to take these pieces of information down. Monitoring your reputation is an ongoing process; all it takes is one piece of harmful content to damage your hard-earned reputation.

Social Media Monitoring

Social media monitoring provides value in the digital environment. Having profiles on platforms like Twitter and YouTube is critical; monitoring these platforms for negative comments and unflattering images can protect you from embarrassing information damaging your business prospects.

Social media discussions between a business and its customers can also help solidify its reputation as it builds engagement and trust. Monitoring these platforms is essential in the modern business environment.

The tools and strategies above form a robust system, allowing you to control the digital conversation, build brand recognition, and stand out in online searches.

Top Reputation Management Software

Reputation management software allows business owners and reputation management professionals to create efficient processes as they work to establish, build, and preserve digital reputations. It helps you get the most from your investment.

How does reputation management software work? Most solutions, whether subscription-based or free, use automated web crawlers to identify brand mentions. Each tool has different purposes and often works together with others to provide a robust reputation management plan, eliminating guesswork and inefficiency.

The best reputation management software allows you to monitor and manage multiple social media accounts, review platforms, and business listings. Most leading tools can be downloaded from the web, but a few may require on-site installation.

Here is a brief look at our top five favorite reputation management software solutions:

BrightLocal

BrightLocal is designed as a local SEO tool, allowing businesses to stand out in local search. People use search engines every day to learn about local businesses. Whether you have a single-location or multi-location business, Bright Local offers a range of tools to help you achieve top rankings, generate more traffic, and improve your internet reputation.

Employed by some of the largest global corporations and small businesses around the world, Bright Local improves local SEO performance and manages and generates online reviews. It is a subscription service, but the company offers a free trial before signing a contract.

Sprout Social

It is no secret that social media has revolutionized how businesses and customers connect. Today, most companies use social media accounts to engage new customers, identify qualified leads, and collect reviews.

What if you could supercharge your digital presence by managing social media? Sprout Social makes it easy to monitor social media. The platform allows users to uncover trends, gain actionable insights to build brand engagement, and reinforce critical digital reputations in the modern business environment.

Birdeye

Billed as an all-in-one software solution for growing local businesses, Birdeye is powerful review management software designed to collect reviews, convert leads, and generate new ones.

Birdeye lets you analyze reviews on all platforms, including Google reviews, industry-specific review sites, and third-party review sites like Better Business Bureau, TrustPilot, and TripAdvisor. Users can scrutinize customer interactions and customer feedback to reveal insights into how a company’s reputation can be protected. Over 80,000 local businesses use Birdeye as a tool to manage reviews.

ReviewTrackers

ReviewTrackers promises to elevate customer experiences, provide insights into consumer preferences, and integrate with customer relationship management (CRM) and other reputation management tools you already use. It is a powerful solution for taking control of your digital reputation.

More than a review monitoring tool, ReviewTrackers also provides tools to optimize your digital presence for local SEO. This popular online reputation management software can help you improve customer engagement, get more star ratings, and encourage customers to leave more positive reviews.

Brand24

Whether you are an individual or a business owner, your brand helps define who you are and what you stand for in the digital environment. Brand management is essential to digital marketing strategies, and Brand24 offers solutions.

Brand24 is a listening tool that scours the web for brand mentions on social media platforms, blogs, websites, podcasts, reviews, and video-sharing outlets. It provides actionable insights into follower preferences and customer sentiment analysis. Ultimately, the software is designed to improve customer satisfaction. Brand24 has several service tiers, making the reputation management software cost-attainable for large and small corporations.

Choosing a Reputation Management Company

The best reputation management software allows for a robust reputation management solution. However, these tools are only part of the overall picture.

Getting the most out of a reputation management strategy requires experience, skill, and industry knowledge, which can be achieved by hiring a digital reputation management service provider. A dedicated team of ORM professionals conducts detailed analyses of a client’s current reputation and develops solutions to improve visibility and brand awareness online.

Some tips for choosing the best ORM company include:

• Read the reviews — what are other clients saying about the company? If positive reviews come from satisfied clients, that’s a good sign of quality. Negative reviews, on the other hand, suggest problems with service delivery.
• What are the company’s media monitoring capabilities? Do they use social listening tools or other media monitoring practices to analyze consumer sentiment?
• Is the company transparent about costs, timeframes, and services needed to build or repair your digital reputation? The best companies explain the process, which may take months or years.
• What other marketing tools does the company use? Leading ORM providers use SEO, public relations, web and content development, and social marketing strategies to enhance the client experience while delivering superior results.

Contact OnlineReputation to Learn More

Want to learn more about reputation management and the need for a comprehensive digital reputation management system? Call OnlineReputation today at 844-230-3803 to speak with brand reputation experts who can help protect your hard-earned online reputation.