Online Reputation Management

Think BP, Toyota, Tylenol, Red Cross -- all brands that suffered serious damage to their brands and reputation yet have survived. While your business or organization may not be on that scale, you could suffer reputation damage from which it could take years to recover. What's your online reputation management plan? The articles below offer some tips on how to manage your reputation online and how to assess reputation risks.

This article describes a process that will help managers do a better job of assessing existing and potential threats to their companies' reputations and deciding whether to accept a given risk or to take actions to avoid or mitigate it. (Item #1)     Online reputation can have much broader impact than your reviews in Yelp and Google. (Item #2)     When UCDavis hired two ORM firms, the results were unexpected. (Item #3)    

Here's what a small business needs to know about how to assess, build, track and monitor its online reputation. (Item #4)     Which reputation management tool(s) do you need? (Item #5)     Patrick Ambron of BrandYourself.com shares his thoughts on how the reputation management industry is changing and what you need to know about the changes. (Item #6)    

As always, I look forward to hearing about your concerns with regard to business continuity. If there are any topics that you'd like to see covered, email me at [email protected].

Bob Mellinger, President
Attainium Corp

1. Reputation and Its Risks

Most companies do an inadequate job of managing their reputations in general and the risks to their reputations in particular. They tend to focus their energies on handling the threats to their reputations that have already surfaced. This is not risk management; it is crisis management-a reactive approach whose purpose is to limit the damage. This article provides a framework for proactively managing reputational risks. It explains the factors that affect the level of such risks and then explores how a company can sufficiently quantify and control them.
https://hbr.org/2007/02/reputation-and-its-risks

2. Ten Pro Online Reputation Management Tips For Local Businesses

There's hardly a business out there that doesn't have an occasional issue arise with a customer. Ideally, you can resolve things before it reaches a point where a customer believes they can only get satisfaction through a public forum or feels they ought to warn people about your business. But, if you've prepared and planned for how to handle online criticism of your company, the impact of one or two complaints can be much reduced, and you may be better able to respond effectively and rapidly to minimize monetary impact.
http://searchengineland.com/10-pro-online-reputation-management-tips-for-local-businesses-182230

3. Blowback: when online reputation management goes wrong

It's natural for businesses and individuals to want to tamp down negative opinion on the web, beginning with search results. Although it's next to impossible to depress negative results on Google's SERPs, the standard approach is to add enough positive content to the web to cause the negative results to shift to the bottom of the page or to secondary pages getting less traffic. ORM efforts always entail some risk. Before you contract with an ORM firm, ask yourself these questions.
http://www.didit.com/blowback-when-online-reputation-management-goes-wrong/

4. The Online Reputation Management Guide

The following Online Reputation Management Guide will show small businesses how to assess, build, track and monitor their online reputation. In most cases, you can follow these simple steps to easily grow your personal brand and/or small business.
http://outspokenmedia.com/orm-guide/

5. Top 10 SEO Reputation Management Tools Online

If you learned nothing in high school, you learned that you do have control over your reputation and your reputation is elastic and can be changed. This same lesson works for businesses looking to shape and reform an online reputation; the difference, however, is that you have web tools to help you make it happen. Before jumping into the different tools available, it's important to understand some of the things that help give your business an online reputation---or the way that online readers perceive your business---in the first place
https://www.highervisibility.com/blog/top-10-seo-reputation-management-tools-online/

6. Why the Online Reputation Management Industry is Changing -- And Where it Needs To Go

2015 was an eventful year for the online reputation management industry. In June, Brand.com vanished overnight. Later in the year, the oldest player in the field, Reputation.com, announced it was replacing its founder and CEO. With major shakeups like this, it's impossible not to wonder what's going on. Is the market shrinking? Is the industry dying? Do less people need to improve how they look online?
http://patrickambron.com/2016/08/04/why-the-online-reputation-management-industry-is-changing-and-where-it-needs-to-go-2/