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To help you manage a reputational crisis, download my free, special edition PR Crisis Management eBook. It's full of expert advice, crisis tools, and templates to help you protect the reputation of your brand.
Scoot straight on down to the online reputation management tools, or work your way towards them through my ORM guide...
Here’s what I’m asking you to do…
Listen to what consumers are saying about your brand, your products, your industry. Listen to your competitors. What they’re doing. What’s being said about them. Monitor what your competitors are doing. Visualize where your industry is heading. What's the sentiment surrounding your brand?
Talkwalker sentiment analysis results. Pepsi best watch that negativity.
Sounds like a big ask. Up for it?
You need an ORM plan and the best online reputation management tools. A plan and ORM tools that’ll help you find every single online mention of your brand. Whether they’re in text, images, or video.
Yes. Video. Ready?
Measuring your current online presence is the first step. Social media analysis pulls out all the data you need - competitor benchmarking, industry trends, consumer behavior and sentiment, influencer topics, etc. I’ve included a cracking infographic that walks you through the 10 steps to social media analysis success. It’s the best place to start.
Let’s go...
It takes time and effort to build positive awareness about your brand. It takes blood, sweat, and tears to maintain that good reputation. Damage it, and your business will suffer. Destroy it, and it’ll be fatal.
Your website may be pretty. Your SEO could be awesome. But if a potential customer searches and finds your brand with comments like - regret the day I purchased - terrible customer service - fell apart after a week…
90% of consumers say that user-generated content influences their purchasing decisions.
You can see where I’m going with this, right?
Social proof from users of Amazon, influences consumer buying behavior.
It’s not fire-fighting. You don’t have to cosy up to the press, or bury negative stories. What you have to do is improve online consumer reviews. Generate awesome new ones. Respond. Engage. Share happy consumers’ comments. Strengthen your brand’s good reputation and make it unimpeachable.
It’s called… online reputation management… ORM.
Warren Buffet - US business magnate, investor, speaker and philanthropist - said, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.”
Wise man.
“This guide illustrates the importance of online reputation management for businesses. Today’s customers are scouring the Internet to find out where they should spend their money and which companies deserve their business. In order to cultivate industry authority as well as earn and sustain consumer trust, you must make developing and maintaining an excellent online reputation your top marketing priority.”
Hersh Davis-Nitzberg | ORM Consultant & Social Media Influencer | RepairBadReputation.com
If you want your brand to win. To be the choice of your target audience. You have to be open. Don’t make them hunt for information. Tell them everything they want to know. I don’t mean marketing-speak. Tell them about the origin of your company, your team, your products. Share your philosophy, and your roadmap for the future.
Be transparent.
The increasing need to be transparent about your brand, means that online reputation management has become essential.
With more options available to consumers than ever before, they'll shop around and weigh up their options before handing over their cash. They’ve lost their naivety. They’re less susceptible to the quick promises and gotcha advertising of the past. Wanting more authenticity and understanding.
This isn’t about a quick sale, but a long-term relationship between the consumer, the product, and the brand.
Provide customers with as many details as you can about your policies, investors, structure, strategy, values, and anything else you think is important in defining your brand.
The more open you are, the more likely you are to increase and maintain the trust of your customers.
94% of consumers will be loyal to you if you offer complete transparency. 73% are prepared to spend more on your product if you’re open about all aspects of the business.
Fail to be transparent, your consumers will go elsewhere. 74% of consumers in the 2017 Shopper Confidence Survey, said they would research online if they couldn't find the information they wanted from packaging and labels.
74%!!! That’s a lot of consumers to lose.
Be open. Be careful.
The more open you are about your business, the more you leave yourself open to criticism. Yes, you'll gain significantly from brand transparency, but ensure your online reputation management strategy is in place.
Be ready to take the flak.
Online reputation management is a project that has no end. It’s a strategy that builds and maintains your brand’s reputation.
Hence… no end.
After finding your brand online - accident/intention - your online reputation determines how consumers see your brand. Find good reviews, chances are they’ll do business with you. Find bad reviews, and you can wave goodbye. Therefore, online reputation management is about ensuring consumers find the positive. So much positive, anything negative will be drowned out.
A little bit of negativity never did anyone any harm…
Should be fine...
Seriously, you have to look after your reputation. Protect it. Nurture it. Build on it.
Damage your brand's reputation, and your brand equity will be reduced, which can lead to loss of customers and profits.
If you don’t control your brand reputation, who does? We’re talking positive impact and negative.
This one’s down to what your company’s doing. Or rather, not doing.
Would I buy your product? Can’t be bothered.
Start using users.
Or… watch your bounce rate increase.
Check out our PR Crisis Management Guide - it could save your brand’s reputation.
The trick? Keep them happy.
See what I did there?
STOP!
Before you implement your online reputation management plan, you have to understand how consumers currently see you.
You'll need detailed social media analysis and monitoring. To make things easier for you, I'm sharing this cracking infographic with the 10 simple steps to social media analytics.
10 steps to a social media analytics win.
Ten small steps to measure your social reputation. Owned and earned media, including social networks, online news outlets, blogs, and forums.
Let's take a closer look...
This is all the content you create and share on your channels. Your website, blog, and social media channels. Driven by your content marketing and social media strategy.
How much do you engage with your audience? What's the tone of your communication? These will affect what consumers think of your brand. How they react.
This includes any mentions that weren’t created by you but were organically generated by Internet users in the form of status updates, comments, tweets, articles, blog posts, etc. Shared on channels you don't own.
To get a wider understanding of what people are saying about your business, look at...
This company chose to measure industry themes that
could impact their brand reputation.
Great if they're raving about your brand. But, what if they're trashing you? You need to know who these people are. They will influence your audience. they'll impact on your reputation way faster than regular consumers.
Monitor these things and you’ll have a benchmark for your share of voice in the industry. So what? If you see a significant drop, you can react immediately. That’s why.
If you'd like to learn more about earned and owned media, check out my guide - Paid vs Earned vs Owned.
What are your competitors talking about? What are consumers saying about them? Understanding will give you benchmarks.
You’ll identify gaps in your marketing that you may have missed - countries to target, new content ideas, product inspiration.
Sample soft drinks company measures brand keywords to understand brand perception.
CEO, COO, CMO, CLO, CTO... what kind of traffic are they generating?
There are big names on social media, as more and more top-level execs drive social engagement. Hugely successful in business, they're also found their voices on social media. It's hard to ignore Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos... they're loud and they're heard.
Unfortunately, there's a downside.
“A CEO’s personal opinion can quickly turn loyal customers against them and the fallout can live forever in search results.”
Cheryl Conner, Forbes
Think back… a CEO displaying increasingly erratic behavior. Peaking with a pot and whisky fueled interview ONLINE! It went viral. Stocks plummeted. Key executives quit their jobs.
What you don’t want to go viral… WILL ALWAYS GO VIRAL!
Monitor their accounts in case they go rogue. Look for red-flag content that could cause controversy or bring your company into disrepute. Ensure your C-suite execs understand how much power they wield on social media. For good, and for bad.
If I search for a company, I’m not looking in the phone directory. I’m not checking out business cards. Filofax went out of fashion. Electronic organizers died a death.
I’m searching online. I’m reading online reviews. I’m looking at social media profiles.
What results will I see when I find your brand? It’s going to impact how I feel about your company. How consumers think about your brand.
Interested in the difference between SEO and PPC, and how they can be used in combo to improve your marketing strategy? Take a look at SEO vs PPC - Which is best for your brand?
Google a brand. What do you see in search results? Reviews, social media accounts...
Consumers will find...
Ensure your content is value-driven, credible, resonates with consumers. Include keywords relating to your brand, your industry, and used by your target audience. Search engines will rank you higher in search results.
Dictate what they find.
Download free your marketing strategy eBook
Don't forget to download your free digital marketing strategy eBook. Everything you need for a marketing win!
Top tip - Google isn't the only search engine!
Over a third of online searches are made elsewhere. Determine how your results vary on other search engines - Bing, Yahoo, Ask, AOL, Baidu, Yandex, DuckDuckGo, etc.
Onto your reviews.
66% of consumers trust reviews, 12x more than brand content.
C'mon. Who can ignore those kind of stats?!! Proving that consumers search online for reviews of products that they’re considering purchasing. You must manage your reviews. Control them, and encourage new ones.
You’ll need to set up Talkwalker Alerts so you can find the reviews as they’re posted. If they’re negative, you have to respond and solve issues as quickly as possible. If they’re positive, you gotta say thanks.
Consumers expect a response, when they leave a review. Don’t keep them waiting.
Top tip - find your industry-specific reviews
To find the review sites that relate to your industry, enter your “business industry” and “reviews” into the search engine. For example, a toy store would search for “toy store reviews”.
Yelp is the dominant review site for toy stores,
with Google Reviews and Reseller Ratings.
You should now have a detailed picture of how your brand - and anything related - is perceived online.
Before you can concentrate on reputation monitoring (and brand protection), resolve any obvious reputation issues that could be affecting your brand. Done? Now check out my 10 ORM best practices...
How big is your social presence? Are your competitors using channels that you're ignoring?
Oops!
Is your audience using channels where you have no presence?
BIGGER OOPS!!!
Update everything that needs improving. Trash anything that’s under performing. Analyze your social media strategy and exploit each channel to the full.
Brand consistency boosts trust. If your Twitter bio states that you’re the “Number 1 shoe store”, while your Facebook Page reads, “one of the biggest shoe stores”, you’re weakening your brand identity. Consumers will doubt your brand.
If you find anything in your analysis that is detrimental to your brand, clean it. If you've shared posts on your own social media accounts that contradict your message, delete them.
For negative posts that you don't have control of, take a look at how to get things deleted from the Internet.
I wouldn't recommend deleting negative comments. You could escalate a poor review into a bigger issue. Stick with serious items that are unjustified or libelous to your business.
To improve your social media strategy, check out your brand voice. What your brand says. How it speaks. The language it uses. The tone.
The key to success on social media is to create engaging and relevant posts that resonate with your audience.
A cute cat post is fun on your own Facebook page. Your mates will love it. On the page of a finance company? Not going to work.
Social analytics will reveal which posts your audience engages with. Find the most popular, and replicate in future content.
If you haven't created your buyer persona, now's the time to do so. Representing your ideal customer, based on real data, a buyer persona will help you learn your audience's motivations, behavior, goals, and pain points. You can download a free buyer persona template now, and learn to speak their language.
Your tone of voice will depend on your industry, your audience. your brand style. Just make sure you're consistent.
Find new friends.
— Wendy's (@Wendys) January 3, 2017
Depending on your industry, tongue-in-cheek humor can work well.
Online reputation management demands authenticity. Vital if you want to maintain brand transparency. Which you do... of course.
Establish social media guidelines for your brand...
Take a look at my Social Media Messaging Checklist. It'll help you determine your tone of voice, what works for each channel, along with best practices to rock social.
Engage with your audience on social media as much as possible. You have to show your audience that you're listening.
Respond to everything. Not just compliments and complaints. Even if you can't see a benefit to your business. It's all about making people feel part of your community.
See... there's the benefit.
Speed is of the essence.
The sooner you find a post and engage, the sooner you can deal with any negativity. Tweets can spread faster than a virus, and be devastating to your brand.
Set up Talkwalker Alerts to ensure you find issues in real-time. Hunt down negative comments and catch them before they go viral.
Engaging content will improve your social reputation. Encourage user engagement. Promote your messages.
Bonus... search engines love unique, value-driven content, and rank it highly in SERPs.
If your website has a blog, you can get 434% more indexed pages. More indexed pages, means more leads.
Don't forget to include keywords on your web pages. The words that consumers are using when they're talking about your industry. Makes it a whole lot easier for them to find your website.
Consumers are immune to brand-speak. We’re not listening anymore. Marketing messages leave us cold. So many brands… they can’t all have the best product on the market. We stopped believing. We stopped trusting.
It’s time to get other people to say what they think of your products.
Engage external sources and encourage them to share your content, or write their own. 86% of millennials say that user-generated content is an indicator of brand quality.
Powerful stuff!
Don't delete or ignore your critics. Respond to them.
Look at who the main detractors are, and resolve their issues. We're back to brand transparency. If there’s a question about your brand visible online, you should be the one to answer it. Consumers are looking for brands to respond.
Here's McDonald’s responding to ongoing criticism of its chicken nuggets recipe, with a cross-media campaign promoting their 100% chicken breast contents.
Neat.
McDonald's fights fire with fire. Or should that be flame-grilled?!!
If you can’t delete negative content, or turn it into a positive... bury it. 8.5% of people will go to page two of a search. With only 3.7% going beyond.
If you fill your search results with positive news stories and content, you'll push detrimental content into the search engine graveyard.
To create more positive conversation about your brand, look at those who make a career out of being online. Influencers.
Use them for brand endorsement, to boost brand awareness. Ask them to write original content that their followers will love and share.
Take a look at our Ultimate Influencer Guide for more details on how to create a winning influencer marketing strategy.
When monitoring your reviews, you should consider...
Reviews are significant to your reputation. 94% of consumers said they would use a business with a four-star rating. While only 57% would use one with three stars.
Move your business up one star level, and you could improve your sales by 65%!
Acknowledge complaints. Always. Respond quickly to minimize damage. Not only will you stop the negativity spreading - bad news travels at supersonic speed - you'll demonstrate to potential consumers that you’re a proactive and attentive brand.
Please keep it professional. While your tone of voice on social can be relaxed, for reviews... if you fight fire with fire - you’ll only get burned.
Never ignore complaints.
Consumers expect to see bad reviews. If you delete them all, you’re not being transparent. 30% of consumers assume online reviews are fake if they don’t see any bad scores.
Encourage happy customers to leave positive reviews.
2 bad reviews + 8 good reviews = 80% positive
Add 10 good reviews into the mix, your score will increase to 90%. More positive reviews, will reduce the significance of bad ones.
It never stops. You’ve built up your reputation online, but it only takes one crisis to damage it. Possibly, destroy it.
You ORM strategy should include...
Don't stop using social media listening. Your audience may have been raving about something yesterday, and today they're trashing it.
Set up Talkwalker Alerts to notify you of stories related to your brand that are getting traffic. Include keywords for your industry and competitors. A looming crisis can come from anywhere, and if it's affected your competitors, chances are your brand will feel the force.
Ensure all relevant teams in your company have the information they need. If you want to respond fast, you have to have all your teams up to speed.
— Olman Hernandez (@OlmanHernandez) March 3, 2016
Set up a Command Center to monitor all brand mentions in real-time.
Before you can manage a crisis, you need to understand what constitutes a crisis. Before panic sets in, ask...
Would you consider all of the above a disaster? Occurring separately, your brand would ride them out. Even a couple would be manageable. All three?
CRISIS!
Every company should have a crisis management plan. It doesn’t matter how careful you are, a crisis will happen.
The trick?
Be prepared.
You’ll need holding statements, trained spokespeople, social media monitoring, crisis alerts, role play… you’ll need to read our Crisis Management Guide.
There are three stages of a crisis… before, during, after. Our guide walks you through the 11 steps to tackling a crisis, and coming out a winner.
Read the guide!
Your brand deserves the best ORM tools. Here are my favorites...
Use Free Social Search to monitor your social media platforms in real-time. Track what's being said about your brand over a 7 day period, across all major social media channels, blogs, forums, reviews.
Talkwalker's free online management reputation tool - Free Social Search.
Talkwalker's Free Social Search monitors the web and let you dig deeper into your online reputation management.
Talkwalker Alerts is a monitoring and management free tool that makes it easy to stay on top of your online reputation. Alerts will notify you whenever one of your keywords is used on the Internet. It's a simple - yeah, better - alternative to Google Alerts.
Creating an alert is simple. Enter the keywords you want to monitor - your brand name, product, CEO - refine by media type, language and frequency. Add your email address - done!
Told you it was easy.
Oh, and you can also monitor Twitter!!!
Create an alert in 10 seconds - enter your keyword, language, frequency, and result type.
“Talkwalker Alerts have been very useful for me to track mentions and publications of our brand in the media. Every day I get an email with new findings that I wouldn't have seen otherwise. This makes the tracking activity of my PR job easier.”
Giovanna Sánchez, Associate Communications Manager at BlaBlaCar Mexico
"Today's brand captures. Tomorrow's business insights."
Talkwalker recently added video analytics to its image recognition feature. This means that we can give you 100% control of brand mentions in text, images, and... video. This technology, unique to social listening, will allow you to find up to 3x the number of brand mentions.
That's epic, I have to say.
How's it going to help you with online reputation management?
Remember what I said about posting positive content, so the negative loses its impact? The solution is user-generated content. UGC can boost campaign engagement by 50%, increase email click-through by 73%, and conversions by 10%.
Sweet.
The best ice cream on earth. pic.twitter.com/05Dz5DnU3u
— Jonathan (@jpboogie2381) March 9, 2019
Hey Ben... Jerry... you won't find this awesome UGC wihout video analytics.
Brand protection is right up there in your ORM plan. Your logo is unique to your brand, and you hav to keep it that way. If others abuse it, your reputation will be damaged.
Tracking and measuring the ROI of sponsorships is notoriously hard. 40% of sponsorship professionals think that evaluating sponsorship campaigns is one of the top challenges.
Seriously, it can't be ignored. Sponsorship spending amounts to over $50 billion per year.
If you can't prove that money spent is bringing in results, why are you bothering. You could be losing big bucks.
Every capture of your logo on video will be found by video analytics, without or without a mention in the comments.
You shoot. You score!
"With Talkwalker's new video recognition capabilities, brands are able to open a new door of mention possibilities. Not only can they see what is said about them, they can also see where there brand is present and acknowledged within context. Perfect for PR and customer service opportunities, this new service will see brands fully embracing their logo and its importance in online conversations."
Christina Garnett | Marketing Media Maven
Okay, moving onto my other favorite online reputation management tools...
Connect the app and devices you love.
IFTTT is an awesome app that can do everything. From texting you when it's raining, to turning on your porch lights at home when your pizza delivery arrives.
Extra cheese?
It can be used with hundreds of apps and devices - Twitter, Facebook, Evernote, Dropbox, Fitbit, Amazon, Alexa, Gmail...
The basic principle is simple. Choose a channel that triggers an action in another channel. For example, if you like a picture on Facebook - trigger, the picture will be sent to your Dropbox - action.
Go Fish Digital helps with SEO, online reputation management, content marketing, website design and development, and paid ads.
Online reputation management tools - build trust in your organization.
The Go Fish Digital complaint search box lets you perform a Google search of more than 40 websites for negative reviews. All at the same time! Protect your brand's reputation by making the positive information easier to find. While diminishing the visibility of negative user comments.
"The complaint site search tool is one of the handiest tools we have. We created it to help develop a holistic picture of a brand's online reputation.Many brands come to us to fix one specific issue, and that is fine, but having a deeper picture of how people are complaining online can be very helpful in developing a comprehensive strategy."
Brian Patterson, Partner at Go Fish Digital
Ensure your site is fully optimized for Google.
Online reputation management tool - automate reviews and respond quickly to minimize customer churn.
ReviewTrackers is an ORM tool to keep track of your customers' reviews across 100+ sites and sources.
"Our clients are able to unlock actionable customer intelligence that helps them manage their online reviews, improve their brand reputation and make data-driven decisions that can result in increased profitability."
Chris Campbell, CEO of ReviewTrackers
Secure your brand reputation on the internet.
KnowEm will help you secure your brand name across social media. A pioneer of social media brand protection, KnowEm tracks hundreds of social media networks. These networks are filled with user-generated content.
Online reputation management tool - trademark and brand protection.
"KnowEm’s services seem to fulfill a genuine need for enterprises, brands and even celebs looking to play in the social media world. As we’ve seen from Twitter username-squatting, this can be a problem for brands and celebs."
Leena Rao, TechCrunch
"Accelerate growth with a full suite of solutions for customer reviews, visual marketing, loyalty programs, and referrals."
User-generated content marketing, referrals, loyalty programs.
While most of the online reputation management tools here focus on brand monitoring, YOTPO is a service that helps you improve your brand's reputation. Encouraging customers to write positive reviews.
Features include...
Visual user-generated content to enhance your brand reputation.
There is a free plan, but the features are limited...
Free version
Paid version
Automatic reporting of your review activity.
ReviewPush offers all-in-one online review management.
Features include...
ReviewPush even provides some basic analytics to understand whether your reviews are positive or negative.
Done.
In this brand-transparent world, your business is wide open to criticism. With an ORM strategy and the best online reputation management tools, your brand will be protected. Your business, and your bottom line.
Use ORM tools to…
To help you deal with a potential reputational crisis, download my free PR crisis management eBook. Minimize the danger of being hit by a PR crisis. Create a rapid-response crisis team of trained personnel. Build a crisis communication plan. Plus free crisis management templates. Your crisis comms roadmap, and crisis plan checklist.
Enjoy!