Online Reputation Management

Online reputation management is the process of tracking people’s actions and other people’s opinions about those actions on the internet; reporting on those actions and opinions; and reacting to that report.  The tracking and reporting may range from word-of-mouth to statistical analysis of thousands of data points.

Your reputation is generally centered on character, what a person, business or even product (movie, album, etc.) is known for, and it may be good, bad or ugly. This reputation that you are known for are real, perceived, ambivalent or totally untrue, for example there is a perceive notion around the world that products from Taiwan are sub-standard, we know that is totally untrue but that has now form part of reputation of this country albeit a bad one.

Reputation is different from image or branding for the fact that the earlier can be created and the former is an identity that evolves. Online reputation management deals with the root cause of a problem, offers solutions, set processes in motion and monitors progress towards these solutions. <For the effective management a matrix was developed to that effect in-house in our organization, R.I.P.E matrix as its called stand for Repair, Improve, Polish or Eliminate, but what are really the different stages of reputation.>

Reputations can be:

* Excellent - An excellent online reputation means that the company/product has obtained the highest position on the spectrum that makes its reputation to be impeccable.  This represents the perception of a high quality of service/product, strong corporate identification, strong branding and communication.

* Good - A good online reputation means that a company/product maintains a number of the above identifiers but has a few areas within its company or product that have slipped or are not as strong as they could be.

* Bad - An organization that that finds itself in this category has made numerous detrimental actions in the management of its (or its product’s) identity.  Typically this is a result of poor customer service, a failed product, etc, that quickly spreads on the internet.

* Ugly - A company or product falls into the “ugly” category has done so because of subterfuge, betraying public trust, committing illegal acts, causing the death of a fellow human being.

Also it is possible for a company or product to have no reputation i.e. a new company/product or lack of transparency in operations.

Identifying the state of your reputation as either excellent, good, bad or ugly requires research and, in order to identify the position of an organization on the reputation spectrum, there are things that serve as pointers.

It should be now be clear that reputation deals with three things and they are: 1. What you do or do not do 2. What do you stand for 3. What you say, do not say or are perceived to have said.

The cost of managing the reputation of an organization will adequately reduce if your preparatory reputation level is very high, reputation management could therefore take place at any of the stages of the development of an organization, the stages and the type of management required are listed below

* Preparatory Reputation Management for the pre-establishment of the organization
* Introductory Reputation Management for the introductory level of the organization
* Incremental Reputation Management for the growth era in the organization
* Experiential Reputation Management for the mature era of the organization
* Perspective Reputation Management for the decline stage of the organization

Managing a reputation How then do we manage reputation whether excellent, good, bad or ugly or in different stages of the cycle? All that needs to be done should be in the follow the steps stated below;

* The organization must identify all the issue that affects its reputation (reputation audit)
* It must analyses each one of the issues properly to ascertain the past, the present and the future state of that issue e.g. is your market share increasing? And why is your market share at the level?
* There is need to put forward change strategy options and pick one that could be of high efficiency and effective to the issue
* Use the strategy to put an action plan into effect, the SMART principles must be adhere to
* The result must be properly evaluated

To use this step to manage the different levels of reputation requires different approach and it need to be handle carefully in other to generate the desired result for example if you use six stakeholders to measure the reputation of ENRON, this is what you will come up with and the answer to how they rate its reputation;

As you can see reputation management goes deeper than rhetoric-it requires action and engagement with different stakeholders, and being a new field of endeavor it has technicalities that are not present in traditional marketing communication. As is noted by Forbes Magazine, the company with the best reputation always achieves a substantially higher return on investment.

(Special thanks to Wikipedia for much of this data.)