Online Reputation Management

Online Reputation Management, or ORM in short, is about managing your reputation on the Internet. Protecting your online reputation or brand is getting more important everyday as more and more people base their buying decision on what they read on the Internet.

As your business grows bigger, you will have to contend with poor product reviews, false claims, competitor attacks, squatters and even hate sites - hate sites are the worse because they are more believable since they are created by genuine customers who have bought and dislike your products. Don’t believe me? Just check out www.ihatedell.net for an example.

In the early days of ORM, a company would just engage an SEO consultant to bury these “negative” websites in search engine results by means of optimizing existing company websites or by creating spam, e.g. Facebook page, Wordpress blog, etc.

This method worked well and especially for smaller companies. But as the search engines became smarter, it became more difficult and less effective to do this. On Yahoo, while you could dominate the top 10 results, the negative ones may appear in the form of “suggestions” below these search results.

Hence, a more effective (and sustainable) method going forward is to create a “PR” website where you highlight the positives, explain the problems (if any) and give an assurance that you’re working to resolve them.

One such example is a website called QuestNet Scam, which at first glance looks like a hate site. But upon visiting the website, you will learn that it’s a very clever PR effort. The company comes clean about it’s shortcomings right from the beginning, explaining that the problems they face is not unique to them but to all MLM companies as well.

They do this subtly using a Q&A with QuestNet’s MD and emphasizes the company’s strong points at the end - established since 1998, 3 million members, presence in 160 countries, blah, blah, blah.

There are 3rd party reviews/testimonials in the QuestNet Reviews area to show that the company has it’s fair share of satisfied customers, and thus cannot be a scam. They also explain about their problems in India and how they are working to address them.

Infact, the site doesn’t even convince readers that it is NOT a scam but instead give them QuestNet’s side of the story and them let them decide for themselves.

Isn’t this a smarter way to manage your online reputation?