Online reputation services has become an important part of business nowadays. A good product or a service is what will get your business in the mainstream, but only a good reputation will keep it there for long.Reputation in general terms mean the state or situation of being held in high esteem. It is the estimation of what people think about a particular person or a company. Every action we do is being subjected to scrutinization. These days’ companies promote their products on a free medium known as the Internet. The Internet provides various marketing tools such as article writing, website development, blogs, social network profiles and videos. These tools eventually help companies to build their reputation. Consumers often take help of these computer-generated mediums to gather information about their desired product. A study reveals that consumers buy offline but gather views and form judgments through the Internet. That is why companies do have to care about their online presence and reputation.
Realizing the importance of reputation leads to success. An old saying about reputation is that “it took decades to create a good repo, but it takes seconds to tarnish it.” A good response to the company’s product brings confidence and trust among buyers that will eventually reflect in sales and growth of the company. On the contrary, bad response amounts to the loss in revenues of the company. In this age of stiff competition, rivals often tend to spread erroneous rumors, malicious gossips, unfair responses and other bad news about products of a particular company. So online reputation management helps in combating all these types of threats, thus preventing from incurring huge losses.
Online reputation management means how to manage your company’s reputation. Mainly it is the use of SEO and SEM to push back the negative responses of customers or competitor and amend it to your advantage. The ultimate goal of ORM is to increase the visibility and accessibility of the site for the good publicity. Three steps that are involved in ORM are: Monitor, Analyze and Influence. The first method is to monitor what is said on computer-generated medium sites such as blogs, podcasts and opinion forms about your product. Then analyze how the information will affect your brand and its reputation. The last step is to influence the results through participating in the conversation and also limiting the negative sites. By following these footsteps, you will surely increase the reputation of your company, which is the key ingredient in company’s success.