What is online reputation management?

What is Online Reputation Management ?

The world of business seems to have a lot of misconceptions about online reputation management. The term has a broad range of activities associated to it. ORM ranges from social media monitoring to review removal, reverse seo and online investigations. This post will break it all down.

Why Online Reputation Management?

ORM did not exist a decade ago, it is really a product of the Web 2.0 revolution. Most specifically, the rise of user generated content sites. The proliferation of sites that help the custome spread a negative message about a brand is what made companies vulnerable. Suddenly, consumer interactions were not just open to see for everyone, but also recorded for there to see FOREVER!

No matter what business you are in, people can tweet about you and share negative things about your brand on Facebook, Linkedin and Instagram. When these things become prominent, thats when you call a reputation management expert.

Online reputation management is not just about engaging with what people say about your brand, or your products and services, it’s also the process behind the intervention. Sometimes, you don’t want to engage.

The key to online reputation management is how you build it up. The best way is from the ground up. ORM starts with monitoring your public reputation on a regularly, it is the foundation of digital public relations. This means you have to know exactly what people will be talking about and what they wlll search for.  This is where tools like radian 6 come into play. There are a host of solutions we use for social media motoring and crawling the web. One of our favorite tools is called ahrefs.

In most online reputation management scenarios, the negative content is represented by complaints on social networks or web 2.0 sites.There are many review sites like ripoff report, pissed consumer, Glassdoor, reseller ratings, yelp and the list goes on.

 

Negative content on these sites need to be addressed legally and effectively. In order to do that, we need to classify them in order to figure out the likely best approach.

  • Social media sites: Best way to deal with negative content on social media site is to inform management or their legal department. If the posting is overt and against site policy, you can usually contact the site administrator. Otherwise don’t even bother, they will not do anything about it, they have very narrow predefined roles. You may want to start there and escalate the issue.
  • Hate sites: “hate sites” allow users to cross some lines that other review sites would not allow for reasons of ethics and fear of defamation suits. The titles (which appear on Google search results) often have extreme language like “scam” and portray a “truth” and are designed to hurt your business. Best approach is to go with a defamation lawyer who specializes in Internet reputation issues. The problem is that that there are only a couple of good lawyers in the United States with proven track records.
  • Negative reviews: Review sites are a platform for consumers to express their opinion about you or your brand. Did they like your service/product? Would they recommend it? Negative content can affect your sales. Websites like Ripoff Report and Pissed Consumer provide the perfect platform for this kind of negative content. These sites will likely be iron clad with their site policies and have strong legal representation. Best way to deal with these websites is with suppression.
  • Negative media coverage: Unfavorable print, and online media coverage has a very negative impact on companies and brands. These are also very difficult to suppress, this is when you need very specific ORM expertise and should contact the online reputation management expert: Herman Tumurcuoglu for one on one consultation.

Recently, a court ruling that orders the business review site Yelp to take down a contested review has caused a lot of debate.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency is meant to protect Internet companies from laws that could hold them responsible for posts made by others. Yelp argued that if they are forced to remove the reviews, consumers will be the real losers, because they’ll no longer get a full range of consumer opinions about businesses. Any business that doesn’t like negative reviews could sue the person who posted it, and then get a court order forcing the Internet company involved to take it down. But fake reviews have long been a problem on Yelp and similar consumer review websites. Even when they aren’t defamatory, negative reviews can damage your business. We work with cyber investigation firms and lawyers to make sure you have the best options to protect your reputation!

Our Perspective On Online Reputation Management

So you’re all in on Digital? You’re determined to get ahead of the competition; you decided you wouldn’t perish because your more adaptable, and you’re ready to dominate in the 21st century.

 

But Digital Darwinism has many faces; it isn’t just about being left behind; or losing a franchise to a disrupter like Uber or Airbnb. Today’s businesses and entrepreneurs can also fall prey to digital brand attacks, deteriorating their most valuable asset, reputation.

Reputation is an old concept; recognized throughout many eras. There are traces of it going far back as ancient Greece. The Greek philosopher Socrates wrote, “The way to gain a good reputation is to endeavor to be what you desire to appear”, British play writer underscored the horror of loosing one’s reputation in his famous play Othello “Reputation, reputation, reputation! O, I ha lost my reputation, I ha lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial!” and in more recent times, famous investor Warren Buffet “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.”

 

Nowadays, the management of brand reputation is facing onslaught by multiplying constituencies with unprecedented zealousness and anonymity. Statements on the web can easily be made without consequences. Reputation damage can come from something a company or its members did not even do. Hurtful statements can spread on the web without necessarily being truthful. It happens every day.

In an economy where 70% to 80% of market value comes from hard-to-assess intangible assets such as brand equity and goodwill, organizations are especially attentive and vulnerable to online brand attacks.

Increasingly, we are meeting some digital marketers that understand the importance to plan against such attacks. They understand the law will not protect them fully when such attacks happen. They have a contingency plans, everything from crisis communication plan to social media monitoring software, CSR conversation recording and archiving, escalation procedures and they curate positive content in case they face the court of public opinion. They are getting ahead of the curve.

 

Still, most entrepreneurs and businesses do not have online reputation managers, individuals who will analyze and carefully manage the “findabilty” of positive information about them and their company. Managing the presence of online information about you or your organization allows you to “take ownership” of your reputation. When you don’t take an active role in determining what information about you appear glaringly, others may make that decision for you. “Others” include unconscious programs (“bots”) that continuously collect and index publicly available information online. They organize and rank prominence based on an algorithm. This is the case with Google.

So why prepare in such a way? Why is the law not sufficient when it comes to digital attacks?

The answer is simple: We’re in the midst of a digital revolution. In the backdrop, civil laws and liberties applied to digital media are being debated and even revisited the world over. We’re figuring out that the web allows anyone to uncover and misuse information in ways laws could not have envisioned just a couple of decades ago. One example is the rise of digital extortion. Increasingly, crime syndicates are calling people with the threat of promoting information already in existence about their businesses. Since a third party published the information, this becomes a grey zone. Currently, website operators have legal immunity over what is posted on their sites (regardless of veracity). Remove the phone threat part and you end up with legitimate sites like Rip-off Report and Pissedconsumer. These posts then end up on the most visited website of all: Google. There is nothing illegal about these sites; thousands of lawyer letters have been written to them, hundreds of judges have thrown out cases against them.

There is also a rise in “for hire” anonymous reviewers who, for some sum of untraceable cryptocurency are willing to do others “dirty work” without any repercussions. Heck, forget about repercussions, nobody can even trace them. This repeated damage to people’s lives and businesses has gotten a lot of press lately, and has us thinking about some obvious need for oversight.

Laws like the right to be forgotten are seen as controversial and are emerging too slowly for many North American businesses and individuals. This is because first they run into our precious first amendment rights. It did not take long for lawyers, once again, to have emerged as the true beneficiaries of all this incongruousness. I am not saying lawyers have no role in reputation management, they do. But they are just a part of an overall reputation system. We discuss the role of lawyers in reputation management here.

 

ORM An Unregulated Industry

Presently, for individuals and companies faced with irreparable damage, the journey to reclaim what is lost can be challenging at best. Both legal and technical approaches are often inadequate in so many cases. More importantly, the search for a provider can be very tricky. ORM is an unregulated industry. Ensuring your provider is technically capable is very difficult if you do not have prior experience with search campaigns and SEO. You also need a company that is above-board, one that will protect your brand, your information and will not cause larger issues along the way or participate in fraudulent practices on your behalf.

A casual look at rate my lawyer and reviews about law firms will equally find dissatisfied clients seeking help to the same problem. Ask yourself, if lawyers can’t make it go away for them, how can they do it for you? There is supercilious ideal of the Internet as a distinct dominion; defamation is not an easy case to prove, there are jurisdictional risks, timeline issues, there is also backlash risks (which lawyers tend to underplay) and most often you will find that the identity and motives of the real perpetrator hard to gather. In fact, much could have been done to prevent the problem or at least lessen the blow if positive information was curated in the first place.

 

ORM As A Distinct Profession

Online reputation management (ORM) is both a complex and subtle thing. Fighting it demands a set of strong capable resources. Companies must approach ORM as a multi-disciplinary, cross-functional task closely managed at a senior level. The proper execution is to huddle legal, PR and technical professionals to formulate a multipronged approach to the problem. As ORM professionals, we have seen leadership in this area. So we know that a determined and sophisticated CEO will launch against the attack understanding that time is money, and in the case of negative online reputation issues, this often equates to a loss of substantial revenues.

So how exactly do you manage this? What’s the road map? The technical resources in this area are scarce, few if any firms offer combined approaches. Moreover, marketing and legal professionals are often overwhelmed with online reputation management issues. This is where an ORM expert comes in. We believe this is now a specific job category. Involving the skills of an editor, technical SEO, outreach and public relations sensitivity. With a good enough understanding of what can be achieved via legal, social and seo forces to reshape and reorganize the first impression left behind with sites like Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, Yelp and the host of others that seem to rule our universe.

The ideal approach to all reputation problems is prevention. Hopefully, reading this book will convince you of the ROI in prevention. But to most CFO’s this is a hard sell; and as a result, the hesitation to invest in a costly cleanup is often a harsher reality being faced by many businesses. The indecisiveness of many companies facing online reputation problems is proof that the business community needs some reflection and perhaps some answers related to cost, return on investment, consequences and strategy. This is especially true for search reputation problems.

 

 

There seems to be several gut reactions. At one extreme is the “counterpunch”, AKA: launch a lawsuit, after all, that’s the American way! But, a strongly legalistic approach to controlling one’s reputation can easily backfire, as Nestlé discovered when it tried to have Greenpeace‟s Have a Break palm oil video removed from YouTube, or Barbara Streisand found out when she ordered pictures of her house suppressed. In online reputation, the nature of the attack can move and morph, a blanket decision by a judge targeted to an individual, company or a group means nothing in a universe where tracking multiple attacks, often anonymous, can amplify the problem. Soon, the counterpuncher may find themselves overwhelmed by legal costs and published legal documents that turn the public against them.

Another gut reaction is the one we covered in the opening chapter, the predominant reaction to trivialize issues of online reputation, when in fact; it is a crucial problem with broad consequences that emerge over a long timeline. In times of trouble, many organizations turn inwards. Even the biggest and the best. To illustrate the problem in well known offline cases, one can think of Toyota‟s failure to disclose problems with foot pedals across several of its cars, despite a several reported crashes on the mainstream media and how about BP‟s apparent initial reluctance to reveal how much oil was spilling into the Gulf of Mexico is another. In both instances being perceived to have withheld the truth only made the situations worse.

 

 

But this also happens in search reputation. It happens to smaller businesses the author has interacted with over the past two decades. Family businesses, professionals and even individuals.

 

A reputation that took years to build can now be destroyed in seconds thanks to web savvy agitators and social media platforms that give their anonymous voices access to the masses. Throughout this book, you will be immersed into the reality of how their voices have become increasingly forceful, blowing in all directions and traveling further and faster than ever before.

These attacks can come from anywhere; unscrupulous competitors, unhappy customers, and disgruntled employees. They can go viral. They can pick up steam if influencers get behind the momentum, they can destroy a brand, a company or even a person’s living in a matter of days. This about the case of Walter J. Palmer, an American dentist and recreational game hunter from Minnesota, reportedly paid US$50,000 to a professional hunter-guide, Theo Bronkhorst, to enable him to kill “Cecil” the Lion.

Big businesses have also suffered. In November 2011, rumors began to surface online, involving the crash of a Qantas A380. Soon the rumors spread like wildfire on the web. It tuned out that there was a problem on a Qantas plane, but it was not a crash. The plane’s engine caught fire, forcing it to make an emergency landing in Singapore. Yet, these rumors became news as people shared “eyewitness” accounts on social media. This was picked up and reported as fact by leading wire agencies and the mainstream media.

In normal instances, the firm’s PR department would craft and issue a statement, maybe even do a press gathering in order to contain the story. But the story had already gone viral, so they were too late! This time space dimension was not well understood by public relations people just a few years ago. This is a classic case in ORM. You need to be ready at all times and get your message out in real time in the digital spaces where people are having the specific conversations about your brand. A press release and a tweet might not cover the time space dimension you need to address. But in search engines, the dynamics are very different.

Search engines; hold a special place in the online reputation management (ORM) industry. This is perhaps due to the stealth damage it can cause, eating away at your business and trustworthiness, slowly, sometimes over years, and most importantly without your knowledge. Nowhere is the unsuspecting business or professional so vulnerable.

 

It is also because search is not a graveyard, like microfiche was to newspapers and even social media. In search engines, all stories big and small live forever, where they are found, uncovered, re-found, disseminated and potentially amplified. It can silently form an opinion that cements an image of your brand.

 

Finally search covers every business and everyone. In mainstream offline media, big companies might get mainstream repeated negative exposure but smaller companies suffer limited exposure which subsides. But search engines are the great equalizer for reputation damage. Nobody escapes the search reputation problem. Not even ORM firms. One only need to search for “reputation.com reviews” on Google to see what customers think about that firms attempt at solving reputation problems.

 

But search engine reputation management also has an advantage over other types of ORM. Social media is vast, and the time/space dimension does not allow for perfect preparation to an attack. In search engine reputation management, there is a strong possibility for prevention, to ostensibly prepare for attacks.

Your Search Reputation

Your search reputation is a decision system. Think of it as a hidden tripwire in a search engine algorithm. Surely your thinking in search results! But not necessarily…Like during a typed query when the autocomplete feature kicks in while someone is trying to find you, your business or your brand and he first page results for keywords related to your brand.

 

It is also what they find in reference to specific keywords like: “reviews”, “complaints”, “rate” in conjunction with your brand and some specific local reviews that appear instantly. It can also be words with very negative connotations like “scam” When looking at first page of Google results for example, what do you see? If you click on these results, what do you see? If what you find can hurt your brand then you need to pay attention. Because as this book will detail, these results will form an opinion about you that’s starting to surpass our collective understanding “reputation”. If your feeling victimized and targeted, if your reputation is jeopardized then It is important to fight back!

 

 

 

Reputation Marketing evolved from the marriage of the fields of online reputation management and brand marketing. To understand the importance of search engine reputation management we need to look at the why and how reputation marketing emerging as an important part of today’s corporate

Reputation Marketing

Many executives fail to understand the relationship between poor online reputation and their company’s long-term revenues. This is often less of a problem with E-commerce companies, because they can measure the impact or click ratio from search engines and their E-commerce conversion rate across the problematic keywords they are already monitoring.

But remove this data driven culture and you get an entirely different managerial mindset. Businesses that utilize the web just for branding and some lead generation, particularly smaller ones, have a harder time making the connection between search reputation issues and the impact on cash flow and commercial viability In some cases, they know there is a negative impact on sales or employee moral, for example, but don’t understand exactly what the impact is on the bottom line. Some managers are even unwilling to explore the idea, much less measure the ROI of addressing the problem.

We will discuss later in this chapter the ROI problem facing the search engine reputation management industry. For now, let’s just say that the social media marketing industry had a similar problem. I point this out because companies who often have a search engine reputation problem did not invest or even believe in social media marketing. Look at the widespread use of social media today.

The reason Social Media Marketing (SMM) grew quickly was not because of ROI. In fact, 10 years into it, marketers are still having a difficulty exhibiting the ROI of social media marketing expenditures. It took an entire class of marketing professionals to pragmatically accept the rapidly changing world we live in. One look at Our brand conscious youth provided them with a glimpse into the, not so distant, future.

Fueled by social media savvy, millennials have seized the reins of consumer influence and content creation. Their opinions are on the web, and from the web. Their every interaction with digital media is a seamless transcendence of information consumption, collective construction and instant transformation. This collective consciousness is concentrated on a few sources. What I would call the “most visible sources” of information such as Google, Linkedin, Youtube, Facebook (and instagram) and Wikipedia. Today’s youth are forming a deep relationship with these media sources.

 

What we are learning is that Millennials and digital nativesright behind them trust some of these sources unquestionably. These “sociodigital” experiences will bond them to their friends and connections and formulate their reality much more than any other media, parenting and education, even maybe critical thinking. Increasingly, the clout of digital information is leaving little possibility for the contemplative life. We are being hard wired to trust a digital experience put in a few words if any. Images and videos on the web form our collective understanding of the facts and the “truth”.

 

We also live in the most brands driven environment ever, and if brands want to succeed they need to acknowledge the importance developing specific strategies centered on these “most visible sources”. For example, they need YouTube channels that can videos that feed into that reputation system, the need social profiles where they control the content consumed by potential customers and they need Google to show content that it’s user will likely to click on to feed into that reputation system as well. That will like be the top search results.

 

Interestingly, entrepreneurs with foresight have been targeting opportunities in these “most visible sources” with reputation services. For examples, social media monitoring tools Radian 6 scan social platforms like twitter, facebook, youtube, linkedin etc… A consulting firm wikiexperts concentrates it services offering on editing sites like these.

These entrepreneurs have anticipated the importance in reputation as a new form of marketing. In a world where no moment of doubt or hesitation escapes a visit to Google or Wikipedia, no moment of boredom can be experienced without visit to Facebook or Linkedin, no lapse of communication can last long enough before checking a Twitter feed, these entrepreneurs understood that critical thinking is becoming a blank space, like real estate, a piece of digital experience waiting for brands to insert their message or detractors to destroy them. It might seem foul, but it’s happening. Savvy digital marketers have learned from these millennials. They know that if you preempt the message, monitor and influence the conversation you create a digital precedence for future generations; the future it seems, is today!

If you cannot accept people’s diminishing ability to think without digital sustenance, if you believe in some kind of idealistic state where the self is separate from a digital portrayal, your probably living in a sentimental world that is becoming marginalized. There is a sense of pride among some baby boomers, about the ability to think freely without the influence of this so called new collective consciousness. This may be profound, but is also a self-centered view. The next generation has traded in the contemplative world for the sharing is into sharing every experience, perhaps very superficially, but they are quicker to make connections, they are more global, with the ability to absorb more variety in faster skips. They may be jacked in like cyborgs, but by connecting more dots in their lifetime, they may also reconcile what past generations couldn’t. Together they might even find the cure for cancer. We should only hope!

For better or worse, our cortex has already learned to miss the input output interchange with the Internet. Indeed, studies show that Nomophobia (fear of being with a mobile device), among high school and college students, is on the rise. The connecting of our brain to information has always been Google’s ambition. This will be a natural evolution for Google. In a way, these neural connections also started with Google. For those of us who are fortunate enough to remember using other search engines like Alta Vista, Yahoo or Excite. Remember the first time you used Google? Something instantly ignited in your brain. We did not know it then, but this was ushering in of the 21st century person. We will talk more about our relationship with Google throughout this book.

A reputation, which is a part of any brand, can now be curated and transplanted into these trusted sources. All it takes is careful planning. That’s the new world of reputation marketing.

A study done by Neilsen in 2012 suggests that 70% of all consumers trust online reviews (a 15% increase in the last four years), second only to personal recommendations.[1] This gives credibility to the social proof theory, in the famous study done by Muzafer Sherif and is also highlighted as one of the Six Principals of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini.

Think about it: You don’t buy a car online – but you search for information about it before you do. You found the dealship address online, and yes that Google review came up. If you did not like what you saw, you probably drive a mile the other direction to buy that exat same car from another dealship. Think about this: You don’t close large business deals online but you do Google the people you’re about to do business with before you close the deal. Rest assured the other people Google you too! If what you find in search engines is negative the deal could be off.

People looking to buy stuff online almost always go to Google first. If too many negative things turn up in search results about your product or service, what are the chance they will not find a similar product or service in just a few clicks?

Some people still dismiss the search reputation problem. They mistakenly believe their prospects will contact them directly if they have concerns.

When dealing with individual search reputation we often hear, “doesn’t bother me”. These answer once left me baffled.  But interestingly, many of these people revisit the proposition. Sometimes over different circumstances. Often what can be a business problem becomes a personal problem, and sometimes vice versa. Revisiting the same search reputation problem they sometimes come to the realization; we live in a world where information is power and access to information is easy and non linear. Information about you or your brand can be benign for many years until it surfaces in the most embarrassing or damaging way.

 

We recently had a client who was fined by the US government for $4 Million dollars. The CEO of the company did not care much for the government website that published their case against the company. His name was all over it. He had no profile of social media and decided that there were no repercussions to his company because he was a manufacturer who sold components under various brands to resellers. The brands in question were not part of the attack, just him and the company. Fast forward a couple years later and the same CEO was seeking a $20 Million dollar loan from banks and was being turned down. After some probing he found out why banks were unsure to facilitate this loan. Suddenly he needed our services and needed it fast! But the search result was number one under his name and under his company name as well. It was not always that high, but when he started shopping his financial deal around, he triggered some curiosity and that led to search for him and his company, some clicks and some engagement on the negative search results told Google that these negative pieces of content were important and the algorithm did what algorithms do. They reordered the search results to reflect that efficiency, the “collective truth” people are seeking. We were hired to teach the algorithm a new truth, the client had to wait patiently for 10 months while we did our work. Thankfully, he could see the progress as both search results started coming down, until we pushed it to the second page.

 

Understand that People who experience something online will almost never confirm the information offline. There is no way they will pick up the phone to cross-reference or ask about negative reviews they just read about you. Only the delusional can believe that.

 

Search Reputation and Your Brand

The rapid change in technology over the past decade has significantly disrupted the landscape of traditional marketing communication. People have to pay attention to online reputation. This involves isolating the key areas (Social Media, Search Engines, Video, Wikipedia) of trust and implementing reputation systems.

We never think about what our Google searches divulge about our fears, emotions and curiosity. We have an intimate relationship with Google. Many people cannot put to words what this relationship is, for example few people have a clear understand of what is being exchanged in this relationship.

What is clear is that Google will strongly influence consumer opinions. If what the consumer finds about your brand in Google is mostly positive, this will be conducive to help you accomplish your marketing communication goals. Because you have a good search reputation. If, for example, the content on the first Google result page establishes trust in your brand, then in the digital age your golden. Conversely, if the SERP for your brand is mostly negative, then this will affect your business adversely.

In most cases, the first symptoms of negative search results will be declining NEW business. I emphasize new, because in my practice I have often come across situations where the client points to a steady stream of business after the negative result has been uncovered. This is because happy customers are returning customers. But no business can survive by resting on their laurels.

Few business today can maintain profit margins without a growing base of customers. But because this is a lagging indicator the would be client will reasch out to these online reputation firms too late. Because Google’s algorithm is based on, among other things a stability factor. Once a negative result rests a certain time at the top of Google, there is a bias that favors it’s entrenchment. We will discuss the Google algorythms in chapter

If the growth rate declines, this can lead to many other business problems. As expenses increase, sometimes the company get’s into a cash crunch, which makes the decision to invest in search engine reputation Management more difficult. Also these search results are not just searched by customers, they are searched by employees and prospective employees, investors, suppliers.

For example, a preospective employee can search for a companies ratings on sites like glassdoor. Usually one of the top results for companies with a high head count.

In several instances, the question of employee moral comes up within discussions with some of my clients. There is even a case of a prospective student wanting to work for a client who had a reputation problem in Google, after discovering the negative customer reviews and videos on YouTube, the student decided not to apply for a job at that company. The same client was getting very aggressive phone calls from suppliers… wonder why?

This example illustrates that people will “Google” many things for many reasons. In much the same way the baby boomer generation starting thinking of saying like “you are what you eat”, this generation is proving “you are who Google says you are!”

 

 

 

 

Predictably, most of our clients are primarily concerned with what potential customers read about their brand on Google. Even if you don’t believe or buy into the cultural and physiological changes outlined in this book. They are not investors in reputation marketing per say. They just need to repair a problem and are reaching out to online reputation management expert to solve the problems. Sometimes, the bad results have overtaken the entire first page of the search results. So this already puts ORM service providers in a difficult spot.

You most certainly accept the fact that people usually Google before they make a major purchase decision.

 

It is naïve to believe Google results can be influenced so quickly. The naïve patrons of lawyers and reputation firms have created a marketplace where quick fix reputation repair solutions are sold like snake oil. Particularly in the mass market, involving people’s personal reputation. Mainly professionals and entrepreneurs as opposed to brands and large businesses.

These victims and unscrupulous companies have given our industry a bad name and have shut out the people in need of a real solution. Often the problem is even much more profound and complex than the superficial merchants can discuss. A bad personal search reputation will affect you not just in this life, but your loved ones longer after you pass. Few people often contemplate the namesake issue related to a tarnished online reputation.

If you’re serious about online reputation, and understand the loss that can result in the absence of a good search reputation, then you know you need a reliable solution. A preemptive resolution will be cheaper; a clean up of a problem will be arduous and more costly. It cannot be outsourced to India, unless you are willing to take the chance that you will be extorted for money because people in another legal jurisdiction just don’t feel the heavy hand of the law which otherwise protects the privacy of the information given by the patron. In a way, those people who have been victimized by the ORM industry likely have part of the blame.

Online Reputation Management (often called ORM) has been around for over a decade. There were traces of it on several e-commerce community based sites like E-bay. In 2007, a study by the Berkeley found that some sellers were undertaking reputation management on eBay by selling products at a discount in exchange for positive feedback. This was an attempt to game the system.[1]

 

Since then, the practice has gone mainstream. A myriad of service providers have started offering everything from social media monitoring to social profile management for individuals and companies.

The rise of ORM underscores both the growing importance of so called user generated content and the anxiety of businesses about their vulnerability to unregulated free speech on the Internet. The body of expertise and literature is growing precipitously in the general field of ORM and is now a common topic covered in most digital marketing classes. A course on Social Media would not be complete today without at least cursive review of the principles involved in ORM; everything from monitoring the online conversations and influencing the conversations.

[1] http://www.cnet.com/news/study-ebay-sellers-gaming-the-reputation-system/

 

Reverse SEO and Negative SEO, are some of the central technique used in Search Reputation. These techniques can be used in Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and other major search engines to protect your brand and guard your search reputation.

 

These strategies as well as many others have become important for all types of organizations in today’s business environment. If you’re currently not implementing any proactive strategy to guard your company, the time to do something is now! Otherwise, you’re leaving your company vulnerable. This book will cover the bases for your business or agency practice.

 

 

Reputation in other Media

 

Before we go any further with SERM, let us state the obvious. Display media is still far more visible than digital media when it comes to reputation. While we spend more time in the digital space, display media tend to be more what marketers call a “PUSH”, a term used in marketing communication. Which means the media is being forced (or pushed) upon us, it’s an interruption that grabs your attention. So when there is negative press about someone like Toronto mayor Rob Ford you’ll be aware of it without any effort. The case of Rob Ford is such that he is what we would call infamous. While social media will reinforce the Rob Ford Story, it is a reverb in contrast to display media.

 

Search reputation on the other hand is a different beast. People who search for your medical clinic address are attached to you. They are part of your community, part of your constituency. They are your customers, prospect, friends, suppliers etc… For this reason, there is no obvious way like PR to tackle the issue of search reputation. In search engines you only see what you actively search for.

 

The implication of this is enormous. This means, you need to proactively search for you own reputation. It will not be obvious to you. It will not be forced on you or grab your attention, and it might be found by someone before you find it. If that someone is a prospect, then you have a search reputation problem without know it.

 

To adapt to this digital reality, we all must search for our names, our brands, our products and services. We must scan for how our prospects see us. But what we may find in search engines may defer from what our prospects see. This is because we do not know the exact circumstances of their search.

 

For example, If you search from a different location, with different preferences or using different keywords, you won’t get the same search results as your prospects. So to monitor and evaluate your search engine reputation you will need to recreate the searches your prospects and potential business partners.

 

Perhaps this imperceptible nature of search reputation make it so that most companies don’t have a monitoring strategy to evaluate their search engine reputations.

 

Once you know the health of your search engine reputation and where there may be problems, you can start to take actions to fix or secure your reputation. This book will teach you a wide range of great strategies and techniques you can use to achieve great results.

 

For just about any type of search, Google will find millions of matching links. The results are then ranked by relevancy, which is based on more than 200 parameters. By default, the top 10 results are displayed on the first SERP. These are suppose to be the most relevant ones according to the search engine algorithm .

 

Users scan the search result page – both the organic results and the search ads. Mostly, users will only scan results above the fold (what they see without scrolling down on their device).

 

Few, will scroll down and see the rest, even fewer will go to page two of the SERP. A fact, compnded by ever smaller devices we use to interact with search gnines like Google.

 

So in essence, most of the information is not accessed, it’s invisible to searchers willing to go through 100 pages of results, but hardly anyone will. Moreover, the chances of somebody clicking on a result near the very top of search result page goes down exponently… we will talk about search behavior. But what you need to understand at this junction is that even if, on average, users only click just one or two of the top search results, the remaining listings still can have a negative impact. That’s because a search user scans all the top links, their titles and descriptions. If many of the links are negative, then the searcher notices them. That often marks the start of the search engine reputation problem! In some cases, the user will not continue down the intended path of interacting with the digital realm the business was hoping for. This can stop a purchase, an inquiry, a lead or a call. The loss of a customer.

 

If the user then clicks on the negative search results, decides what they read should be shared on social media, then that can result in many more customer losses.

 

Domain and Page Authority

Basically, Google and other search engines rank websites based on its criteria of relevance. Their algorithms are planned to for this purpose and in essence, these algorithms are the differentiators of the services.

While most companies succeed getting top placement in Google search results for their brands, some companies struggle. Those companies can benefit from this book because they are likely missing some key aspect of SEO theory to remain competitive.

But even if you have succeeded with your SEO and gained a top position for your most important keywords, search users will still see other websites with opinions about the topic searched for, both intentionally and unintentionally. So the question is what would happen if your being attacked by bad publicity from or on “authority” websites.

 

The ROI of Online Reputation Management

 

Nearly all businesses and individuals can benefit from actively managing their search reputation. However, not everyone can have enough money to invest the endeavor. This investment will be in terms of time and money. The consideration will be financial; therefore it requires some ROI consideration. Since not everyone has the same revenues at stake, the amount of money potentially lost must be a part of this equation. So here it is important to breakdown the loss in terms of primary order effect and secondary order effect.

 

Primary order effect is the loss that happens immediately after the search reputation problem. If you’re a dentist who shot a lion called Cecile, you might be out of your practice for a few months. But when you announce to the world that your going back, despite the backlash, your world will not be the same. Your loyal customers will come back, of course, but you will certainly experience a drop in your “new business”. This drop in business is most acute in the weeks and months following the blow up. This drop in business has been as high as 50% for some clients serviced by us and others in the ORM industry. Hopefully, and in most cases, the ratio will drop as things boil over. This is because people need new things to get angry about. It’s also because people focus will change and they will forget. This declining drop however, is also part of the cost; the secondary order effect, if you will.

 

Some of the methodologies used with ORM clients who are trying to figure out what the damage of search reputation might be involve a worse case scenario of 50% new business decline along with a straight line reduction over a period of time, but this is assuming that the search reputation problem organically disappears.

 

In most cases however, the calculations need to be more specific, involving the actual decline in organic search result click thru ratios (CTR) and accumulations of all potential conversions that happen on a monthly basis, while the problem persists. The client will then figure out what kind of customer lifetime value is being lost over a number of months or even perpetuity.

 

The ORM provider then, can provide a timeline by which the problem would be remediated and a budget. The party with the reputation problem can then calculate what is the ROI of having the problem fixed and perhaps even maintained against future attacks!

 

That’s right, in some cases, reputation problems do come up again. Whether the search reputation problem is handled legally or technically the problem can resurface. Increasingly, companies are finding that they need to hire reputation experts both on the legal side and technical side in a more permanent matter. Much like a PR agency.

 

Finally there is personal stigma that stays with the company or the individual for years and perpetually. This has a cost that cannot be measured so easily.

 

In general, the ROI works positively for most companies that have a high reliance on search engines for leads and who fall in either one of these categories.

 

If your livlehood is being affected, don’t just In this case, you can make the same cost-benefit analysis as a company, as explained above. This will help you determine how much you should invest in maintaining your personal brand in search engines.

 

 

 

 

 

Three Reasons to Engage in Search Engine Reputation Management

 

  1. You’ve found one or more negative results about yourself or your company. Maybe you just stumbled upon a really bad result one day while searching for your name, company or brands. Or maybe some clients told you directly they would not deal with you because of this.

 

  1. You suddenly find that your SEO efforts are backfiring. Your loosing rank for the most basic branded keywords you were ranking with a lot of authority. Perhaps you were attacked by a negative SEO specialist. Your site might have even gotten banned by search engines like Google. This problem is not an overt search engine reputation problem. But the lack of presence by itself can indicate bad faith to the market. Rumors and assumptions can spread when a site looses it’s place a the top of Google rankings, It needs to be addressed.

 

  1. You want to protect the reputation, you either want to be prepared for the worse case-scenario or this possibility has been discussed in the plans to an upcoming marketing campaign: Maybe you’re about to launch a major branding or product campaign. If your campaign is big enough, people will search for these keywords right after your campaign launches. But what will your prospects find? Will it be your sites? Will it be totally unrelated websites? Or will competitors dominate search results?

 

 

But are you ready for this eventuality? What type of material do you have ready to publish about the event? How fast can you have it published, indexed and ranked highly for the most important keywords? Do you have a paid search strategy ready? Time is critical. You may have to act within minutes because, if you leave it to others to feed hungry searchers, your side of the story may be drowned out by far more damaging versions. Each of these scenarios requires different strategies. You should begin to monitor and benchmark search results over time and keep a constant focus on improving your reputation in search results. We recommend you use the tools, strategies and techniques that we discuss in more detail in the next sections of this book.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 2 Identifying Search Reputation Problems

 

Monitoring

 

Search engine reputation Management starts with monitoring. As discussed in the opening chapter, monitoring is essential in search because the problem is byproduct of searches made by numerous people under so many circumstances unknown to us.

 

We can only understand what to monitor by looking at people’s search behavior. We need to understand what they see when searching on search engines. To understand search behavior, we must first reconcile our relationship with search. Here we can turn the discussion over to the most important search engine: Google. We can then apply what we learn to other search engines.

 

Our Relationship with Google

 

Most business relationships involve some level of influence. One party derives benefit from the resources of another. Ideally, there is benefit to both parties, a symbiosis if you will. Most digital marketers recognize the potential for mutually beneficial relationship with Google. Publishers and marketers for example, will acknowledge several different relationships at play. The vast majority of users however, don’t even think about the relationship they have with Google.

 

Our business relationship with Google comes with a reciprocity, in the form of data. Google offers marketers visibility, the opportunity to be displayed in SERPs. Google is vested in capturing and indexing virtually all types of data. This includes knowing who users are, where they’re located, what they’re interested in and even who they’re connected to. Google also scans our private content in Gmail. If you think about it, all this data gathering gives Google incredible knowledge about us. Google can even infer things about us. Which it implicitly does when it ranks results concerning our business and our private matters (if there is such a concept anymore). Google knows for example; where you have been, every day of your life for years, what you said, even some of your secrets, the secrets of others. Using big data analytics, Google can probably even deduce your deepest fears, motivations and emotions over a give period with some accuracy even if Google does not “know you” personally.

This has not stopped the billions using Google services. Nobody believes that this information will be used against them at some point. This mere fact is an attestation of how deeply users trust and share with Google.

Google also offers us a great deal of data about how they see our pages and how users interact with our sites, ostensibly to help us improve the quality of our sites and increase visibility. This data has given the search engine marketing community a great insight into search behavior, this data can also help the search engine reputation management Industry. Let’s start with the obvious, reputation managers would love to know about search behavior.

 

For a company, a negative search results is anything that sheds a bad light on your company and even it’s employees. It can be negative press or a bad review from a customer for example. Individuals can also have negative search results. Often, time search engine reputation firms get called byindividuals who are trying to get rid of a search result related to an incident in their past. Information they don’t want others to know, these can be classified as negative for the purposes of this book.

 

Whether these results are “negative” per se is not in question and is really up to each individual to decide. For example, we had a lady who was a lawyer and recently divorced another attorney. Their court information was published on the web and they were sensitive about how others in their professional circle would perceive them and judge their adjudication abilities. Both were active members of their parish and heavily involved in their community and decided it would best if the details of their divorce was not public.

 

Whether you are a professional or a supplier of consumer goods, these “negative” results can hurt you or your business. In general, negative search results will greatly undermine your brands. You probably know this by now. But how exactly can negative search results really hurt your business? Below you’ll find a few examples of exactly how negative search results can hurt you in very tangible ways:

 

  • In the most severe case, consumers may not purchase from you anymore. This is a rare occurrence, but consider cases where fewer consumers will buy from you if they see negative search results about you in search engines. You may lose important business deals.

 

  • You may loose a large deal, too many or strongly negative search results can easily scare off potential business partners. If your business depend on partnerships, especially with new contacts who have few ways of referencing your past dealings, negative results can deter the closing of a large deal, a partnership, even something as mundane as a leasing agreement.

 

  • You may see diminished new business, we have seen professionals hold on to established customer relationships but see a lower rate of new customer acquisition. Sometimes as much as 50% decline in new business. In our experience few established medical professionals care because their practice will be have 100% capacity utilization. But if your business is not depended on continuous patronage, your pain is greater.

 

In most cases, consumers have several brands or vendors to choose from.

The effectiveness of your marketing campaigns may decrease People search for brands, slogans and taglines used in large branding or product campaigns. If what they find contradicts or makes fun of your campaigns, they may not trust you or your marketing message.

 

Small busineses with $1MM + in sales but with a net margin in the teens or greater. Few businesses make that much margin. This often limits this first category to businesses involving high-end professionals. There are many groups of professionals like law, medical and accounting practices however fall in that category.

 

The second group are companies that have over $10MM in sales with a narrower margin, up to a point.

 

If your business is lucky enough to fall in both categories, say for example mid size to large medical clinics, law firms, outpatient/inpatient treatment etc… then the ROI of prevention should be on your mind. This is because most ORM companies, including those specializing in search engine reputation problems, charge between $1,000-$5,000 a month. A typical file can be completed in six months. So the mid point of such a file could be $15,000 all in. This represents a fraction of one years profit. In more elaborate cases where a firm has to be retained, clearly a discount will be provided, but worse case scenario, your firm is looking at $60,000 a year for a typical problem. In such cases, the expense still works our to be a less than the incremental revenue loss than can be more of a burden. Successful businesses can also have several files going on at once, often businesses who are suffering search reputation problems will also have an owner who has such a problem for example. Or several product or service lines are being attacked at once. The author has experienced such a case.

 

It would be fair to state that a serious problem will likely be correlated to high profit and so the damage repair may be par for the course, as crooked as this may sound. But all this to say that the involvement of search reputation professionals and lawyers will almost always be a reconcilable part of doing business online for many high profit business or high net worth people, as has been the role of PR in traditional settings.

 

 

In general, the more your target customers use search engines to research you, your brands or products and services prior to dealing with you, the greater the ROI of search engine reputation management.

 

Like business companies, non-commercial organizations will also benefit from maintaining a good reputation in search engines. Often, their goal is political or charitable rather than financial. But down the line, there is still a financial consideration. The negative impact on a brand will result in less influences, less donations and less power to accomplish the goals of such organizations. The ROI of search reputation will be tied to the depreciation prevention of the underlying asset. While less tangible, it can be more important. The scenarios involving the past costs put into the organizations brand and it’s mission might need to be examined.

 

Finally, the hardest item on the ROI menu is the personal search engine reputation problem. We all need to have a good reputation both at work and in our social circles. Once in a while, we may run into someone that decides to Google us before engaging with us in a personal matter. To illustrate this point, think about all the eligible bachelors and bachelorettes, for example. Consider how, a negative search might affect their matting prospects. While at first, it might seem difficult to broach the subject of cost related to matting game, it becomes easier to imagine when you consider that matting sites made…..

 

Let’s face it, having a bad search reputation hurts. If our individual reputation in search results are generally negative, then we risk not getting the job we want, the business deal we expect, the bank loan we apply for, or even the date we were hoping for.

 

For most individuals any financial loss caused by negative search results is likely limited to our pride. For, others however, the effects can be much more serious. If you’re a celebrity, or a spokesperson, if your livelihood depends largely on your image, there may be a huge financial impact. Often, individuals are attacked on cheater sites like Bad Boy Report or Cheaterville which appear high on search results.

 

Unless you have unlimited resources, you will only be able to tip the balance in your favor to a certain degree between positive and negative listings for your brand searches. But any degree to which you can tip the balance will be valuable, since fewer negative and more positive or neutral listings for your most important brand searches will have a positive impact. If you have a lot of negative listings in relevant search results, then you probably won’t be able to remove them all. But you may be able to get rid of half of the bad listings or perhaps even all except one or two. This would still be a huge improvement for your brand in search engines. Far fewer of your prospects will form a negative opinion about you if the great majority of the listings are positive and only a few are negative.

 

There are basically two ways to clean up your brand search results when you have too many negative listings:

 

  • Promote positive messages If you promote positive content that ranks above the current negative listings in the search results, the negative listings consequently drop in rank. If you add enough positive pages that rank high, many of the negative listings will be pushed to page 2 or beyond – where they will be virtually invisible to most search users.

 

  • Suppress negative messages. There are many ways you can suppress negative listings, or have them changed so they appear far less negative (or even outright positive). If you can turn a negative page into a positive or neutral page, or you can make it drop in rank from a terrifying first page rank to something below page two, then that’s a huge improvement. To some degree, that is indeed possible.

 

Online reputation management is in many ways similar to good old-fashioned public relations. Journalists and editors can be “manipulated” and so can search engines, though of course both search engines and newspaper editors will deny it. But the truth is that they can – and we all know it. Humans are not perfect and neither are computers. Both humans (as in the traditional media) and machines (as in search engines) can and do get manipulated to some degree. We realize that some people may have a problem with the term “manipulation”, but that’s essentially what we do in SEO. We try to influence the factors that will make journalists or search engines prefer our version of a story over those promoted by our detractors. We want them to value and promote our content, which speaks positively about us, at the expense of less positive content from sources that don’t agree with us. Like it or not, by definition that’s manipulation.

 

Everyone has the same freedom of speech.

 

That doesn’t mean they have a right to be heard. Manipulation is not the same as control. We cannot edit a newspaper article we do not like; we can only try to manipulate the journalists and editors to present our side and get it “right”. Likewise we don’t have direct access to manage the search engine indexes. But we can influence the way they crawl, index and rank search results– that we can definitely do. You can’t expect to get rid of all the negative things being said about you online. But you can successfully suppress a great deal of the negative items and promote a lot more of the positive things. You can shift the balance between good and bad in your favor. Some people have the misconception that Online reputation management is only about trying to push down bad search results with better, more optimized pages. That’s far from the truth. First of all, search engine reputation management is not just about removing negative information; it’s equally about pushing positive, correct content out to the world, thereby making the negative content less negative. Dilution of pollution is an easy way to think of it. Freedom of speech means that you can’t fight all negative perceptions of your brand by trying to silence the people who disagree with you. Preferably, you need to speak up too – and louder than your opponents. Getting your side of the story out is just as important as trying to decrease the visibility of the other side. Often the most effective strategy is a mix between the two.

 

 

 

The Four Most Important Rules of Online Reputation Management

 

There are a lot of things that can go wrong in your search engine reputation management efforts. Most often the outcome is that you don’t fully achieve the results you expect. In some cases, if you really mess up, your mistakes may backfire and create more damage than you were trying to fix in the first place.  These are the four most important rules of ORM you want to remember.

 

There are many ways you can deal with your brand’s reputation in search engines and many techniques you can choose to use. Which ones work best for you depends on your market, your brand and your resources.

Three Ways ORM Agencies Combat Negative Search Results

 

There are basically three ways you can combat the impact of negative websites in search results:

 

  • Organic

 

Organic methods include Reverse SEO, social media optimization, and public relations. It’s basically all the things you can do to change negative content or rankings in unpaid ways.

 

  • Paid

 

Paid solutions include everything you choose to pay for, including buying offending websites and closing them down, “bribing” site editors, or using search engine advertising such as Google AdWords.

 

  • Legal

 

This includes legal actions against publishers or authors, or filing of DMCA complaints, etc. Basically all the things your lawyer can help you with. There are other methods, very aggressive ones, to combat negative search listings but the ones we know may not be legal and therefore are not included in this book.

 

It directly defeats the whole purpose of reputation management to commit crimes to reach your goals. In order to reach your reputation management goals, you will probably have to apply both organic and paid strategies a bit more aggressively than you are used to during your normal search engine marketing activities. That’s perfectly fine, as long as what you do is not illegal and doesn’t hurt innocent bystanders. Committing crimes or hurting innocent people is not only ethically questionable, but can also easily backfire.

 

How to pick the right ORM Agency

 

There is a lot that goes into getting the right ORM agency. Not to worry, we have you covered. You can get information here. This video is also very informative: