Online reputation ( e-reputation) is the reputation of a person, company, product, service on the internet or any digital platform. Online reputation management ( ORM) term is coined as it focuses on the management of products and services on digital media. The reputation on a digital ground is impacted by the ideas it represents and its interaction with the web users. Reputation is generally managed by utilising search engine optimisation to influence results, by censoring negative comments and reviews, etc.

In this digital world reputation, management is very important for business and to maintain the positive image of your company or business, organisations should devote more time and energy towards maintaining and monitoring their online presence. In various businesses, online reputation management is an attempt to bridge the gap between how a company perceives itself and how others view it.

Various online communities and markets have ORM systems built-ins. They use effective control nodes that minimize the threat and protect the system from possible misuses and abuses by malicious nodes in decentralized networks.

Effective online reputation management can be done by following some important rules:

Identifying opportunities, Strategy planning, Creativity and evolution, Content creation, Channel targeting, Research and analysis.

There are two cycles of online reputation

• Vicious Cycle:  You ignore your online reputation and you risk yourself as a victim to a vicious cycle of misinformation and rumours.
• Virtuous Cycle:  You thoroughly take care of your online reputation and you create a virtuous cycle of positive, quality materials that has a good impact on you.

Various companies have started online reputation management services in which they help your business by maintaining an excellent online reputation through various software and online methods. They try to find out the root cause of your negative reviews and customer dissatisfaction through cyber investigation techniques.

They mention your company's products, brands on various review sites, blogs, social media platforms so that you can monitor your online presence. These organisations try to increase your online popularity by inviting past and current logged in customers so that they can easily review your online business platform.

Some of the reputation management tools are -: Reputology, Mention,  The Brand Grader, SimilarWeb.

Here come two key principles of reputation management:

1. Monitor:  This will help you know your customers, influencers, and competitors say about your brand.

2. Respond: This process is to take active measures to develop a positive brand identity and improve what people say about you.

The former step is the most important because without it you can’t do the rest. The whole action plan depends on what you hear people say about you and then you respond. So listening to people response is very important. For this step, there are tools and apps to scan every social media platform, forum, blog, and review the site manually.

The latter step is the way you’re going to improve your reputation with your actions. The comments and reviews are obviously monitored by the marketing and customer service section of your organisation, so they know well how to respond. Sometimes there are tough questions or harsh criticism that you need to respond but for that, you need to discuss with management and handled delicately.

Let's discuss a detailed approach to online reputation management :

• Monitoring the brand

Continuous monitoring of your products both online and offline is crucial. So you need to have a full-fledged professional team for the purpose. A higher percentage of people are influenced by online reviews. Your strategies should be planned by keeping in mind that the target customers, product details and business goals and also the ethics should not be compromised.

• Negative content warning

Negative contents can be immensely harmful for your online reputation. The published material should be optimized by SEO and by improving tagging. The positive business-friendly reviews and testimonials will help you to have less negative contents. Adding product reviews by prominent reviewers and publishing the reviews on popular websites.

• Strong social media presence

The social media platforms are also great to solve customer queries. Also, you can take notice of their complaints and resolve them here. Social media is the best place for getting feedback as well as to improve your products and customer service operations.

• Importance to quality of product and customer service

If your product is of low quality then reputation management can't help you. The customer service should be efficient and timely. So you need to put your efforts to target and improve the deficient areas and make your customers happy.

• Publish informative and engaging articles

As your content will be reaching a wider mass it important that the content is fresh, informative, unique, free of grammatical errors and written by experts or professional web content writer. Articles, blogs, social media content, pictures, videos, product descriptions, forum contents and pdf documents are some of the content types that can be placed at suitable websites. The addition of vital keywords within the content will help you enjoy a better online reputation and in increasing your sales. Your content should be updated regularly and fresh pieces are added to it regularly.

Online Reputation Management is one of the key aspects of digital marketing. Kolkata School of Digital Marketing is the best digital marketing institute in Kolkata where you get to learn about Online Reputation Management through live client projects.