Imagine you’re a high flying marketing executive at United Airlines. You’ve been at the company for 20 years. You’ve come through most of your career unscathed, with huge advertising budgets annually with which to push out one-way communication to a vast audience all across the North American continent. Life is rosy, until June 2008, when a seemingly innocent and innocuous little home-made video was released to the world…
Seen over 8 million times on YouTube, this video has been the bane of your life over the past 12 months…
This is a perfect example of how something online can cause your reputation a great deal of damage. That is why Online Reputation Management (or ORM) is vital when promoting, or rather, managing your brand. Let’s see what is ORM?
In simple terms, ORM is an ongoing process of monitoring your brand online. In other words, dealing with negative comments or posts and pro-actively protecting your brand by engaging in the conversation about your brand.
The Internet offers people a platform where they can say what they want, when they want, about who they want. With tens of thousands of websites, blog posts and chat rooms available, businesses can no longer afford to ignore the comments their customers make.
Even though ORM involves pro-actively taking part in the conversations online, do not make the mistake of taking part in arguments online. If a consumer has an issue, deal with it in private. Ask for their email address or give yours for them to contact you. The safest bet is to not try and solve a problem publicly. A problem could escalate and explode into an online brand-bashing session.
ORM has become unavoidable since more and more people voice their opinions online. Apart from blog posts and Facebook groups, Twitter is a huge platform where people are engaging with each other and with other brands. Just look at these brands’ Twitter pages and how they use it to monitor their brands.
These examples use their Twitter accounts to engage with their consumers and try to solve their problems. They deal with all the negative comments being tweeted to boost their reputation. These brands are monitoring influential blogs and other sites as well. Check out this example to fully understand how negative chatter about your brand can effect your reputation.
Read more posts by Yolandi Janse van Rensburg
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Thank you for a nice post! I wouldn’t have known about MTN had you not directed me there and I had many problems in the past with their difficult-to-use website and not-so-good service. Maybe that is why they only have 154 followers? For a company that size it is hardly an online presence. Maybe we should direct them to your post?
A person who posted last night re the cost of steel ,it realy depends where you go to buy it, galvinized is around £740 per metric ton and standard is around £650 per ton- hope this helps