home Sample documents Formation and management of reputation on the Internet. What is online reputation management and who needs this service?

Formation and management of reputation on the Internet. What is online reputation management and who needs this service?

In order to understand what we are talking about, it is worth first defining the concept itself.

Reputation is an external complex of evaluative ideas and judgments. There is no need to confuse reputation with image, since the latter is a “picture”, statements about oneself that are not initially supported by anything.

The term “reputation management” is close to PR, since public relations is aimed specifically at managing information flows to form a certain reputation. So, reputation management on the Internet refers to a set of measures for working with information on the Internet to form the desired image. Initially, this concept was used by American marketers who tried to identify and neutralize negative messages on the Internet (reviews on forums from dissatisfied customers, “revelatory” articles, blog posts criticizing a company or brand). Then the concept grew, and related or even synonymous ones appeared - such as PR on the Internet. IN Western countries such services are practiced very actively, while Russian SMM specialists relatively recently they began to adopt similar experiences.

So we're talking about online reputation. About worldwide network they say she knows everything. And this is true - often it is enough to enter your name in the search bar, and the system will return thousands of results from which you can determine where and when a person or company “checked in” and for what reason.

Managing the reputation of a company or organization

The basic rule of working with communications is to keep everything under control. But there are two extremes that people periodically fall into. Russian companies: remain silent or say anything just to talk. Let's analyze each of the situations.

If you or your company prefers to remain silent, then they will definitely start talking for you. Employees, clients, partners, competitors. Agree, this is not at all in your interests, since these communications will clearly be either subjective or negative. It is known that the ratio of positive to negative users is 1:4. That is, for every 4 negative reviews, only 1 positive one will appear on the Internet. And it’s no coincidence that one can imagine that an employee happy with a salary increase will boast about it in in social networks, but if he was fired, and even did not pay the due bonus, consider that there is already a mention of your company on the Internet as an irresponsible employer. It’s the same with clients: satisfied - good, dissatisfied - expect negativity.

Since the Internet is a special environment, everything that gets there is quite difficult to control. At the same time, according to statistics, . Besides, high speed spreading, especially negative information, sometimes leaves no chance to quickly combat even false information on the Internet.

That is why, if you have not yet thought about how your company looks in the media (almost all of which today have migrated to online spaces), and even worse, simply ignore the negative, you risk losing not only your good name, but also your entire business. The spontaneity of filling the Internet space, various blogs, forums, social networks (, VKontakte) and others are a powerful and difficult to manage mechanism for forming an opinion about a brand.

Negativity on the Internet: work to identify

So, before you start working on your online reputation, you need to assess the scope of the task and take control of the situation. To search for information, you will need to monitor online media and social networks. Then you will need to see which reviews suit you and which need to be adjusted, that is, replaced with positive news.

You can do monitoring in the following ways:

Monitoring search engines Yandex, Google, etc. for the main keywords manually - it will be quite long, difficult and not always effective (you will definitely miss some information);

Monitoring Yandex.Blogs (blogs.yandex.ru) and Google Alerts (google.ru/alerts): available systems for tracking mentions of an object in search engines, the information found is sent to email subscriber – the notification sometimes arrives late, so if something negative appears online, you will be the last to know about it and will not have time to react in time;

Specially developed programs that search the Internet, for example: monitorix.biz, youscan.ru, netmind.ru, buzzware.ru, etc., social monitoring systems. networks - paid services, they work quite quickly, but there are errors and omissions of information. In addition, in order to use such systems, you need to know all the keywords for the search, otherwise the effectiveness of such a search will be reduced to zero.

Negativity on the Internet

You've probably heard that negative information on the Internet can be deleted. At least, advertisements about “removing negativity” can be found on the Internet today. Some companies boast that they have competent specialists capable of hacking the content management system and will not delete necessary information. But in practice, things often don’t look so simple. Most often, you are offered to create many new sites that would allow you to move the site on which there is negativity to lower positions in search engines. You can easily imagine the cost of creating at least several websites yourself. So you probably won't want to use this option.

At the same time, we strongly advise you to predict the likely course of events after “deleting” a negative review or placing an obviously “positive” one behind it - this can cause even more negativity among users, since the main rule of working on social networks is to provide truthful information. Untruth will always be revealed (just as in personal communication), and exposure will bring new wave crisis communications.

How to remove negativity yourself?

What to do if negativity appears on your corporate site or even your personal account? You can try to solve this problem yourself. For example, there are numerous services that will help you “remove” from the Internet.

1. Accountkiller - here you can find direct links and instructions for deleting pages in all popular services.

2. Google presents its set of tools for online reputation management. The Me on the Web service allows you to track the appearance of personal information in search engine results.

3. The DeleteMe website offers to “clean” all information about you from the largest databases; for only $130 per year you get constant control over your personal data on the Internet and a detailed report every three months.

4. Suicidemachine - this resource will delete information about you from the social network before your eyes: messages, photos, etc. By the way, deleting an account on Facebook here will take less than an hour, while manually deleting information will take about ten hours.

In this way, online reputation can be managed. However, it must be remembered that good reputation- it's not just the absence negative information, but also the presence (predominance!) of positive. To replace one with the other correctly, without losing sight of any subtlety, of course, it is better to contact the appropriate PR specialist. It will not only help you prepare and correctly post the necessary information, track the development of the topic, and calculate the effectiveness, but will also help you create a holistic communications plan that will complement your marketing policy and help solve your business problems.

Online reputation management is a set of works that representatives of any brand think about sooner or later. The very concept of reputation management is defined in different ways - RM, ORM, SERM, reputation marketing.

It is not so important what the brand’s marketers will call the set of works at internal planning meetings, it is important that reputation management work brings benefits to the brand.

If this is your first time facing the task of reputation management, then this material is for you. In this article, we will look at the main reputation management tools that can be launched relatively quickly and for free.

1. Monitoring system

Before you start managing the reputation of your brand, you need to understand what people generally write about it. As practice shows, users like to write about a brand on neutral platforms that are not controlled by the brand itself. If there is a spike in mentions, it could happen anywhere, but key discussions will most likely appear somewhere on user pages, on forums. Therefore, the frequent phrase from marketers “oh well, we only work in our group” is erroneous.

A monitoring system is used to identify brand mentions in real time. There are many monitoring systems on the market. Personally, I advise you to try the very affordable Brand Analytics Express (they give you a starting balance right away) or Youscan (they give you a trial period). In addition to them, there are several other systems on the monitoring market that you can try - IQBuzz, SemanticForce, BrandSpotter and others.

If you are interested in looking for leads in parallel with reputation management, you can try the free lead monitoring system Leadscanner. Also, we must not forget about free systems Yandex.Blogs and Google Alerts.

2. Analytics

We started monitoring mentions and found mentions of our favorite brand. However, monitoring alone is not enough to manage online reputation. It is necessary to seriously analyze and correctly adapt for further work the data that is collected through monitoring.

At a minimum you need to understand:

where they write about the brand,
Who writes,
how much they write,
what coverage,
positive or negative,
what is the audience engagement,
similar analysis for competitors (see next section).

Some monitoring systems support automatic downloading of reports. However, sometimes it is necessary to manually double-check the monitoring settings so that tags and sentiments are determined correctly.

3. Play on competitor mentions

Recently, battles between brands like Tinkoff versus Rocketbank have become a normal occurrence.

No one forbids monitoring negative mentions of competitors and introducing your theses into discussions. Moreover, you can collect not only negative mentions of competitors, but all mentions of competitors in a specific context.

For example, two options:

Bank A monitors all Bank B's discussions about mortgage lending and covers it with its posts or comments. Bank B writes about a cool promotion at 12% per annum, and Bank A will publish its posts and comments everywhere that it has 9% per annum. Moreover, as indicated above, you can implement your posts in the same groups and forums, and also start guerrilla marketing directly under the posts of a competitive brand. Benefit – the brand will have a reputation for being more affordable.
users write negative things about mobile operator B. Marketers of mobile operator A in this case can infiltrate all discussions and offer dissatisfied customers operator B its services. For example, if a user complains about frequent lack of communication in a particular area, or about high cost mobile Internet, then a competitive brand can offer such a user to deliver a SIM card to a convenient address with free mobile internet for 1 month. Benefit - the brand has a reputation as an active brand, which also offers gifts at the very beginning of cooperation.

In both cases, users will see which brand has more favorable conditions, or even a free distribution of freebies. In this case, what is happening will be seen not only by the user involved in the discussion, but also by simply observers and subscribers. This type of reputation management tool is especially useful at the stage of a brand’s entry into competitive markets, for example, the same market of cellular operators.

4. Respond to your customers

Unfortunately, negative mentions will appear about absolutely any brand sooner or later. If there is no negativity about a brand at all, the question immediately arises: is this brand even present on the market? Therefore, working with negativity is an integral part of the work package for online reputation management.

Here are just some options for working with negativity:

answer on behalf of the brand, alternatively – support service;
work as brand advocates;
park the negative - let's look at it further.

It should be noted that sometimes the best decisions are either to delete the negative (if the provocateur is completely inadequate) or not to respond at all (for example, if the negative on a neutral platform is trolling).

5. Parking negative

When working on online reputation management, it is imperative to remember the difference in the concepts of reach and involvement. In short, reach is the number of users who saw a post, and engagement is the number of users who were somehow involved in the discussion. Moreover, engagement can be called both comments and likes with reposts.

The purpose of parking negativity is to minimize the development of coverage by diverting the discussion to a non-public communication channel. Offer clients to resolve a negative issue in personal correspondence, by email, or by phone. Avoid the practice of holding long discussions on “debriefing” in your brand group as much as possible.

6.SERM

A set of measures to manage reputation in search results is usually referred to as SERM - search engine reputation management. The goal of the team that deals with reputation management in this case is to squeeze out unwanted sites for brand queries like “brand”, “brand reviews”, “brand employee reviews” and the like. If we're talking about about a person as a brand, then the queries can be “first name last name”, “first name last name mayor city”, “first name last name corruption”, “first name last name diploma”.

The main SERM tool is most often a change in the tonality of sites, which can be done on sites with negativity. Establishing a flow of appearances good reviews information about the brand can be achieved through promotions among customers. Some negative sites can be removed from search results by applying the law of oblivion (there is no guarantee of success) or by correspondence with the owners of sites where negative content is posted - see the next point.

7. Digital jurisprudence

One of the actively developing trends in online reputation management is digital jurisprudence. And there are many reasons for this. It is not always possible to squeeze a negative site out of the search results using traditional tools. Owners of sites with negative content may begin to demand a lot of money to remove content that is unfavorable to you. There's no point in giving up. To solve such problems there is digital= jurisprudence. Essentially, this term refers to the work of lawyers to solve the problem of removing objectionable content through legal procedures.

Examples of work on digital jurisprudence include the following:

competent preparation of filing applications for the application of the law on oblivion;
drawing up justified claims to the owners of sites (sites);
pre-trial and judicial work with website owners;
legally sound communication with hosting companies and domain registrars - sometimes it is possible to delete a page with unwanted content at this level;
domain delegation – if a number of conditions are met, domain delegation can be removed.

It is difficult for ordinary marketers to work at a legally professional level; digital jurisprudence has emerged to solve such goals.

8. Industry statistics and trends

In the matter of further positioning of the brand and in assessing its prospects, it is necessary to use holistic and competent analytics on the situation in the industry as a whole. You need to know what the current trends are, what statistics of industry growth or decline. What are the success (or vice versa) stories over the past years. All this can affect the positioning of the brand, and therefore will have an impact on the work on managing brand reputation.

In fact, at this stage there is no need to assemble a separate team of analysts and order research from scratch. Every year, many studies appear in the public domain. Examples include research carried out by associations such as AKAR and RAEC. Also, studies from analytical and consulting companies like Nielsen and Deloitte. You can freely find the research you need on their websites.

9. Content Islands

Content islands are sometimes called a work tool when implementing multi-channel SEO. Content islands are all those platforms that you create in addition to your official website. Content islands can be used both as an SEO strategy and as a section of SERM efforts.

In addition to the official website, most brands by default create official groups in social networks. However, for online reputation management work, you can also create cards on review sites, where you can then bring a loyal audience. Most reviewers create brand cards for free. And some brands even create their own reviews.

You can create several official websites - one large portal, one business card website about the brand owner, a separate website for collecting reviews and complaints, and so on.

In addition to review sites and additional sites, reputation management agencies often create cards for brands on various encyclopedias and company catalogs. Try this for your brand too. The same Wikipedia allows any user to try to create their own article. The direct benefit of working with islands of content for reputation management is that, as a result, you can occupy search engine results pages with controlled sites.

Conclusion

As a result, I would like to note that reputation management on the Internet is an integral element of the marketing tasks of any brand. While there are many reputation management tools out there, and we've only covered a few of them, even a novice marketer can try managing their brand's reputation using the tools described above without spending significant budgets.

Kirill Krutov

Head of SMM & SERM department at Kokoc Group.

Who needs online reputation management services and why?

Reputation management is a systematic influence on factors affecting the reputation of business structures or individuals. With the development of social networks, this service has become popular on the Internet and extends to the reputation of the brand, influencing search results.

Entrepreneurs and marketers think about online reputation management in two cases:

When they find a lot of negative reviews about a company or its products on the Internet. Negativity can be reported by both company employees and clients. It happens that he himself finds negative comments in the search results for the query “brand + reviews”.
When a company is concerned about increasing the level of customer service and perceives review sites as an additional channel of communication with consumers.

However, ideally, reputation management should be undertaken before a company enters the market.

Regardless of the direction of business, working on reputation at the start will create a positive brand image and a manageable information field.

As a result, the company will be able to attract loyal consumers, quickly identify and solve their problems, and achieve its main goal - to become profitable.

Unfortunately, most clients and agencies do not understand the essence of reputation management. For example, a common story is when a customer is offered SERM - reputation management in search results, but in fact, agency employees only monitor mentions of the brand and post positive reviews about it.

Many market players and clients do not know the basic terminology and do not understand the difference between hidden marketing (Hidden Marketing), online reputation management (ORM) and search reputation management. As a result, the market does not develop, and agencies do not offer customers the services they need.

We’ll tell you in more detail what these abbreviations mean and what tasks each tool should solve.

Which reputation management methods to choose?

Hidden Marketing

Principle of operation

Unlike classic advertising on social networks or on forums, when agents of influence or opinion leaders directly promote a product and provide links to the company’s website, hidden marketing is not so obvious. The user compares the product or service with analogues, talks about personal experience use or gives unobtrusive advice.

Anyone can be an opinion leader a famous person, whose audience coincides with the target one - from Yuri Dudya to Tutta Larsen. But if we talk about cooperation with an odious person, then subscribers will most likely perceive a mention of the brand as advertising. Another thing is agents of influence. This regular users forums and social networks, behind which agency employees are hiding, casually mentioning the brand.

Let's consider an example of promoting a furniture factory. On an interior design forum, an influencer asks where they can buy one with two opposing backrests. He is supported by another site visitor who is also interested in unusual furniture. The third user writes that he knows for sure that well-known factories do not produce such models. The fourth participant in the dialogue names a company that makes sofas with two backs. There are four users on the forum, through whose efforts the agency is promoting the factory.

Another possible development is the creation of a discussion thread on a popular forum about renovation or design advice. The influencer asks where it is better to buy the Atlanta sofa - one of the popular models that most manufacturers have in stock. Another user replies that he tried to buy a sofa from two stores, but one of them was unable to deliver the furniture on time. This way, the dialogue between influencers will push the audience to choose the right company.

Peculiarities

In hidden marketing, the sites on which mentions of the brand are posted are important, not their number. Therefore, competent agencies approach brand promotion strategically, for example, using search engine optimization tools.

Before recommending forums for a furniture factory, agencies analyze search results for the query “which company makes kitchen furniture the fastest.” A person who reads advice on specialized sites will regularly come across the brand name.

pros

Increasing brand awareness.
Increased interest target audience goods or services, since they are recommended by ordinary people (agents of influence) and stars whose opinions the audience trusts.
Low cost of promotion through influencers compared to classic advertising.

Minuses

Difficulty in assessing effectiveness. For example, the effectiveness of a blogger’s direct advertising can be analyzed by the number of clicks to the site or by the number of activated promotional codes that he offered to subscribers. Hidden marketing does not provide links or metrics to track its effectiveness. The success of the promotion can be partly indicated by an increase in traffic or an increase in sales. However, a surge in user activity can be attributed to hidden marketing only if other advertising campaigns are not launched in parallel.
Work exclusively with positive reviews. Using only hidden marketing, the company will not become aware of negative publications that may scare away potential buyers.

Who is it suitable for?

New brands or products entering the B2C market. Works great for businesses of any subject, especially real estate and pharmaceuticals.

Online Reputation Management

Principle of operation

Using semantic search services, such as YouScan, IQBuzz or Brand Analytics, the agency monitors mentions of the brand. Every 10–20 minutes, the services scan their own website databases and report the appearance of new reviews.

The next stage is their analysis and processing: solving customer problems, answering questions about products or services, and thanking you for positive feedback.

The number of positive reviews can be increased by motivating current customers to share their impressions of the company, for example, by giving a discount for posting a review. If for some reason the tool turns out to be ineffective, positive reviews are posted on behalf of influencers.

Consider a situation where an automatic monitoring service notifies you of a negative review about a laundry service. A user complains about poor cleaning of his coat. An agency employee, communicating on behalf of the brand, asks him to clarify the order number, finds out the cause of the problem in the laundry and reports a solution - he suggests re-cleaning. After the conflict is resolved, the client is asked to delete the negative review since the problem has been resolved.

When working with positive reviews, the agency can use. If a person uses the laundry more than once, most likely he was satisfied with the quality of the services. In this case, he receives a letter asking him to leave a review on the laundry website or on a popular review resource.

To a greater extent, ORM is an additional channel of communication with current clients on platforms convenient for them, and to a lesser extent, it is a tool for attracting new audiences.

Peculiarities

Some companies relax and publish the same type of positive posts on different platforms, which as a result has a negative impact on the brand. Reviewers can easily identify scammers by IP addresses or location and flag the accounts of unscrupulous companies.

For example, one of the review resources conducts regular anti-ratings of brands that often post false reviews. You can avoid problems if you approach writing reviews wisely and use automatic services that replace the location and IP addresses of accounts.

pros

An additional channel for customer service and communication with the target audience.
Search and leveling negative reviews.
Increasing the number of positive publications.
Identifying problems in the quality of goods, services or maintenance when using the tool systematically.

Minuses

Automatic monitoring of review sites does not show publications without mentioning the brand. On some sites where reviews are posted on company pages, a user can write: “They scammed me.” And automatic services will not see this publication. The problem can be resolved using additional manual monitoring.
A limited number of sites that are scanned by automatic services. Some agencies offering ORM service claim to analyze the entire Internet. In fact, automatic services index only popular social networks and forums, which make up less than 5% of the Runet.
One-way performance evaluation. On the one hand, most agencies report to the customer based on the number of positive reviews published. On the other hand, few people think about how these publications influence the decision to purchase or order services. It’s a common story when an agency posts reviews on some sites, but the majority of potential buyers read completely different resources.

Who is it suitable for?

Any brands already operating on the market and having a pool of customers. ORM is suitable for any business in the B2C segment and shows good results in the medical and automotive industries. The tool can also be useful for B2B companies, with the exception of extremely narrow markets with a limited number of players and consumers.

Search Engine Reputation Management

Principle of operation

When users want to leave a review about a company, they open a search engine, write the query “brand + reviews” and go to sites from the first page of search results. That's why the main task SERM - bring sites that can be managed to the first pages of search engines, that is, remove spent negativity.

Let's look at an example of how SERM works on the network medical clinics. Agency employees constantly monitor search results for the query “clinics [name] + reviews.” You can do this manually, viewing each site, but it will be faster to solve the problem if you connect automatic services. For example, you can use SERMometer, which collects daily search results and creates a heat map of the brand’s reputational environment.

At the same time, agency staff are working to remove negative publications where the problem has already been resolved. The reputational background of the clinic network is becoming positive. The agency promotes these sites to the top of search results using SEO tools. At the same time, the agency initiates managed threads on forums and creates brand pages on popular sites that are well indexed by search engines.

At the same time, it is worth creating from scratch or actively developing a reviews section on the company’s own website, which ranks highly for the queries “brand + reviews.” As a result, managed sites will appear on the first page of search results.

The effectiveness of the tool is assessed based on a comparison of the reputational background in search results using the “was/was” type.

Considering that users looking for brand reviews are at the last stage of the sales funnel, and the company has already invested a lot in attracting them, it is important to motivate potential clients become real. SERM can play a decisive role in monetization advertising expenses, because it allows you to control what the user sees in the results.

Peculiarities

Some brands, finding negative reviews in search results, hide them with a stream of positive publications. As a result, sites that cannot be managed remain in the top search engine rankings.

It is better to solve problems on all platforms and publish positive reviews on managed resources, promoting them in. The sooner a company connects SERM, the easier it will be to bring controlled review sites to the top.

pros

Formation of a positive brand image in search results.
Interaction with users at the last stage of the sales funnel.
Influencing the decision to purchase goods or order services.
The opportunity to see products, services or a brand through the eyes of potential customers.
Finding and neutralizing negative reviews.
Identifying problems with the quality of goods or services and customer service.

Minuses

Reputation management in search results without an ORM is not effective enough. Promoting managed sites to the top of search results without addressing negative reviews and motivating current customers to share their opinions about the quality of goods and level of service is a half-measure. Therefore, competent agencies combine two tools.

Who is it suitable for?

Any business and public figures. SERM works well in the furniture and finance industries.

Good day, dear readers. Vladislav Nikitin is in touch. In this article I want to talk about the importance of the reputation of your business and tell you how to manage your reputation on the Internet and offline. If you are not running a one-day business, then today’s article is just for you.

Work with reputation includes the following actions: monitoring, working with negativity, seeding, branding, working with your website, etc. Let's talk about everything in more detail.

Reputation management options:

Statistics

First, let me give you facts about the importance of reputation. The picture below shows a cross-section of the level of trust in various traffic channels:

As you can see, the greatest trust among people is in recommendations, that is, word of mouth. It has long been no secret that with a 9 out of 10 probability you will go to the service station where your friend is being repaired, or you will go to the restaurant where your colleague always dines. Of course, there is no guarantee that you will like the level and quality of service there, but you should definitely go there.

This is why you can often hear phrases in advertising like someone recommending something to you, for example, “Dentists recommend.” Yes, it is clear that this is all advertising, but, nevertheless, people believe it, since it is a recommendation. Or very often people write on their pages on social networks that they have been there or there, use this and that. Such posts not only increase interest in a particular company, but also sales, since through such a recommendation people also become interested and want to take advantage of it.

Imagine that an employee of your company provided poor service or even was rude to one of the clients. Remember that just one negative client can steal up to 50 other clients from you. And in this case, it is not the employee who suffers, but your company. Therefore, it is extremely important to constantly work on customer service and the quality of your company’s products or services.

Monitoring

If you have a business that has been operating for several days, then probably someone has already written something about your company. Therefore, monitoring is an extremely important point in working with reputation, since in this way you can track down who wrote what about you, where they wrote about you and to what extent. After you have collected information, proceed to the next step, namely directly distributing information about yourself.

Working with the site

Also, people have great confidence in the company’s website. Of course, if there are only 3 words about your company and a crooked photo of the office, then this will not add trust, but on the contrary, it will push away. The best thing . Ideally, attach a blog to the site and show your expertise through articles. It would be a good idea to post photos of employees, office, and production on the website. Your site should show life, movement, and not be an overgrown clearing.

Crops

There is one very obvious thing that few people use: your business must constantly be in the ears of potential customers. The presence of a website and page on social networks is not an indicator. According to the name of your company, the first page should contain maximum information, and not 2-3 positions. How to achieve this? It will take a lot of time and effort, but it will pay off in the long run. One of important factors are the so-called seedings - this is the placement and dissemination of information about your company in all kinds of media. These include: