Sales and Business Development = ORM
If you don’t try to build a strong reputation, all your investments can collapse under the pressure of the first informational attack.
I have witnessed powerful brands lose their value and worth simply because their leaders believed the product would create a reputation by its mere existence. This is a gross mistake.
Reputation is an integral part of any product. It requires separate investments, just like the production of the product itself.
Thus, it may seem that ORM is just PR that doesn’t convert into direct profit. And you would be partially correct.
What does Online Reputation Management (ORM) consist of?
Here is an essential list of activities I use that should be included in developing a personal brand and any business reputation.
ORM can be summarized in a formula that must be applied on an ongoing basis:
Monitoring → Analysis → Working with Reputation Content → Monitoring Changes
1. Reputation Monitoring
This involves searching for any mentions of a brand or person on the Internet:
- Social media.
- Websites.
- Video hosting platforms.
It is necessary to gather as much information as possible about the brand or person to understand how to influence their reputation.
Monitoring can be conducted in three ways:
- Independently – Googling, searching through social media, and compiling links to websites with mentions.
This is not a very effective method – it requires a lot of time and human resources, lacks efficiency, and is costly since you would need to maintain an entire team of specialists solely for Internet monitoring. - Monitoring Services – a more effective way of monitoring. Each service has its features. They provide all the necessary tools and monitoring capabilities and can deliver timely information about new mentions.
However, it is not a fully autonomous replacement for manual searches. It also requires additional expenses for personnel to process the information and conduct daily monitoring. Therefore, keep in mind that in addition to the cost of the service, you will need to account for the price of managers, depending on the volume of work. - Turnkey Monitoring – A professional monitoring service provided by other companies in a B2B format.
This is not a service but a feature offered by companies specializing in ORM at a professional level. Specialized companies have their software products that search for information on the Internet.
I prefer this format because it significantly optimizes time and cost efforts.
You simply provide the key parameters and receive a ready-made monitoring result by country, geography, and language, clearly labeling where you are spoken about positively and where negatively – positive/negative/irrelevant. Everything is consolidated and delivered very quickly, taking into account individual preferences.
However, you can choose the most convenient method based on your budget and needs.
Turnkey Monitoring may cost slightly more than the subscription fee for a service, but it saves money through full autonomy. You won’t need an additional team of employees to process data and conduct in-depth analysis.
2. Analysis of Mentions (Monitoring Results Analysis)**
When analyzing mentions, it is necessary to:
- Determine the tone of the information – negative/positive.
- Assess the impact on reputation.
Sort by:
- Risks
- Processing priority
- Geography
- Language
- And other parameters
You can analyze monitoring results and label them by tone either manually or automatically. It all depends on the monitoring method you have chosen.
Returning to my personal preferences, I favor Turnkey Monitoring, where the results are already labeled and systematized according to my needs.
This looks like a table with links, where each row corresponds to a position in the search results and is marked as negative, positive, or irrelevant. I find this format convenient. However, everything is individual.
I recommend conducting monitoring and analysis on an ongoing basis. This way, you can assess the current situation, track how it changes over time, and identify areas that need strengthening.
3. Working on Reputation
After the analysis, you understand the current state of the brand's or person's online reputation. Negative mentions are crisis points where you need to focus on restoring a positive image or resolving a conflict.
This can be divided into two directions:
Reviews and Comments:**
- Social media
- Review websites
It is always necessary to maintain active engagement. Communicating with users, answering questions, extinguishing fires, and resolving conflicts at their inception is essential.
Additionally, you need to monitor whether bots are attacking your brand. Abnormal, harmful activity from many accounts is often part of an informational attack, and you must be prepared to counter it.
Websites:
- Blogs
- News sites
- Niche expert information sites
It is necessary to talk about the brand, the person, and the industry you operate in.
ORM is PR focused on the Internet. However, it has a more significant impact on the brand because offline borders do not limit the Internet.
4. Monitoring Changes
After each iteration of activities, it is crucial to evaluate the results and determine what changes the implementation of ORM has led to.
After each iteration, you can adjust your activities based on the current situation.
In Conclusion - it should be noted that there are situations where an ORM strategy for building a positive image does not work. Informational attacks usually cause such cases.
You create 10 positive mentions about yourself, and 100 negative ones appear in response.
You cannot predict them, but you can be prepared for them.
Such abnormal, harmful activity is very rarely organic. It is usually targeted informational strikes on reputation. In such cases, ORM with an altruistic approach loses its effectiveness.
For such situations, you must have a crisis management and SERM strategy. If ORM is a routine activity, then SERM is a crisis activity when the reputation is already on fire.