You may have heard about reputation management but may not know about the theory and practices behind it that you should follow. Reputation management, especially online, often termed as ORM is a process that is slowly gaining in popularity. This is a common practice that is followed to make the best use of the SEO search space.
However, when you research, you will hardly find any substantial results for the expression. This is why you will need to know about the concept of reputation management, the theory, as well as the best practices you need to follow to make your business grow in all aspects such as reputation, online presence, and in volume.
Typically, there are a few basic concepts related to reputation management theory. This mainly entails managing the search engine results. In addition to that it includes:
- The brand values
- The engagement levels
- The contested namespaces
- The hostile entities
- The hostile environment
- Result flipping
- The namespaces shared and otherwise.
Therefore, whether you are protecting the name of an individual, organization, a product, a service brand, or any other keyword search, it is essential to define the search listings, both the number as well as the type you want to manage.
The different parts
Irrespective of what the stakeholders may think about a company, there is two specific part that makes up the reputation of it. These are:
- Identity: This is what the company is about and what it says it is and
- Personality: This is what the company is all about.
Experts say that it is vitally important to align both these factors for any company that wants to build, endure, and protect the reputation of it.
The role played by everyone in the company is essential for the development of the reputation of the company because how everyone speaks and acts to the community beyond the operations of the company has a severe impact and influence on the reputation of the company.
Therefore, every company has to follow the ethics in reputation management so that people consider it to be an ethical company. Of these, there are a few significant ones, such as Search Engine Optimization or SEO.
- You will need to push down the bad search results and defend only the positive search results concerning your company.
- You must also remove the content that may negatively impact on your reputation and how your consumers perceive you as an individual as well as your brand.
The best way to go about is to align the perception of the group of interested parties with the identity of your company. This will need you to engage SEO and other methods that will help you to deal with the online resources.
Branding is important
The most crucial part of reputation management theory is branding, and this has lots more to do and focus than Search Engine Reputation Management, SERM. You will need to re-brand SEO to make it better, more productive, and more palatable for those people who are not interested in SEO, thinking that it is a vague idea.
Nonetheless, you will need to have and follow a specific goal to improve the reputation in the search results. A professional Online reputation management company Florida will utilize many domains for this matter as a process to push down all those negative results. The different methods that you should follow include:
- Setting up proper profiles across many various social networks
- Creating the best blog surrounding an individual
- Posting numerous relevant articles to several sites
- Linking all of the sites and profiles together and finally
- Using all those traditional techniques to ensure better SEO and to build more links to gain more traffic.
This is the best possible process that you can follow to create a better online presence and ensure a better reputation for your company.
Reputation and spending
When it comes to corporate communication activities and reputation management, a lot will depend on your spending because there is a distinct relation of it with the reputation of the company.
According to a study by Fortune, the overall relation between spending and reputation was found to be only 0.24. However, the fact that it made things more complicated is that there is a significant correlation between the size of the company and reputation, which typically measured to 0.23.
The report also focused on a budget of different companies in reputation management, and it was found that:
- The median budget was about $11 million for the top 200 companies and
- The median budget for the bottom 200 companies was a mere $1 million.
In addition to that, it was also found that most of the companies that have a comparatively large budget for corporate communication had an excellent reputation of 5 and above on a reputation scale. However, it was found that foundation funding is the best way to manage the reputation of a company with a correlation of 0.69. This means that the higher the charitable foundation giving, the better and stronger is the reputation of the company.
The key elements
There are a few critical elements for managing corporate reputation that you should know about and consider. These elements or variables will define any research explicitly, and at the same time, it will help you to delineate the desired relationships between those variables formally.
Out of all, the most significant element that you should consider and focus on is the image of the company. This is actually how other people ‘see’ the company. When it comes to business marketing literature, the terms reputation and image are often used interchangeably.
The image of the company also affects patronage because it is found through research that people only become customers of a specific business when the image of the company matches with the image of themselves. Therefore, image study is most vital for building and maintaining the reputation of a company .
Summing it up
Therefore, make sure that you have a proper reputation management plan to follow. This will help in the convergence of ideas, images, identity, and reputation.
