Pt 1: Online Reputation Management (ORM)

By Sherzod on Jul 01, 2009 with Comments 0

Bismillah

Hat tip Najm Clayton @najmc who has written an article for us about online reputation management. We will be over three posts inshallah

Part 1

What is ORM?

There was once a time when a company, organisation or individual could place a website on line and it would represent what they wanted people to know about them.

Sometimes a disgruntled hacker could gain access to a site and deface it but this was rare and generally aimed at large corporations.

With the development of the web 2.0 environment this is no longer the case. Web 2.0 has seen a revolution in web chatter. Interactivity is the key with blogging, micro-blogging, social networking, online bookmarking and sharing taking the place of the old ‘my homepage’ that came free with ISP accounts and rarely received more than a dozen hits. What’s more search engines love these types of sites. They are regularly updated, are keyword rich and quite often packed with authoritative content. They also have lots of inbound and outbound links without being link exchanges or link farms. Inevitably they perform well in the SERP’s (search engine results page).

Your company may be number two in the search results but what if number one is a blog saying how rubbish your customer service was or that your products are overpriced?

A reputation that has been built over years can be destroyed, or at least significantly damaged, within days (if not hours) of an initial comment attacking your company, brand, product or even key executives.

To minimise any risk it is important that online chatter is monitored and that any negative publicity managed. This, along with SEO, is Online Reputation Management.