Online Reputation Management

Online Reputation Management

Online Reputation Management (ORM) is the activity of monitoring conversations taking place online with the intention of understanding stakeholders’ views towards an organisation to inform strategies and to manage reputation. ORM will empower the organisation to manage opportunities and risks to allow for tactical responses, in near real-time.

On a strategic implementation level ORM provides insights to direct communication strategies.

ORM fulfills the key market research function to direct operations and strategic decision making, ranging from identifying operational failures, through to new focus areas for research & development and South Africa’s economic development.

The benefits of online reputation management are:

• The organisation could gain a deeper insight into the online ecosystem that the audiences inhabit;
• Measure and quantify any offline communication campaign by the amount and sentiment of the online attention it generates;
• Gain insights into the relationship between user-generated content and traditional forms of online and offline media;
• Develop effective risk management systems by focusing where opinions about the business are being formed and propagated; and
• Understand the organisation’s reputation which allows for informed decision-making and immediate action.

How to you manage your reputation online?

ORM should consist of four main components, which rely on an underlying strategy in terms of how each is focused, the order in which they are implemented and how each provides outputs:

• Monitor: Find all conversations taking place online through the tracking of specific phrases (keywords) across the web and group these into relevant categories.
• Measure: Rate each mention by its level of influence, its sentiment and media origin, as well as capture essential data to provide measurement on the marketing and communication effectiveness from both a qualitative and quantitative perspective.
• Manage: Use notifications and the near real-time conversation stream to spot engagement and tactical opportunities while managing brand risk.
• Maximise: Use these metrics to provide a way of understanding which strategies and tactics are most effective, while identifying opportunities to optimise existing marketing and communication activities.

Monitoring conversations

Monitoring conversations taking place online should search as many websites as possible. The digital environment is free of geographical restraints and conversations spread far beyond the local community. A single conversation can cause widespread, unplanned second-generation discussion.

The business should capture both the cause of conversation and the subsequent generations of it in order to identify influencers, strong themes and ensuring an in-depth understanding of the environment.

Measuring the conversation

A fundamental principle of any marketing related discipline is the process of bench-marking and learning based on responses to a campaign. ORM provides a near real-time means of determining which strategies and tactics have (or haven’t) been effective. Moreover, the ability to segment the data will empower your organisation to not only ask the questions of “What”, “When”, “Who” and “How”, but to critically understand the “Why”. This will ensure that activities continually improve in effectiveness, and ineffective strategies (and tactics) are constantly replaced by more effective, higher yielding, ones.

Managing the conversation

Once the question of “Why” certain activities are taking place has been answered, then you should commence with process of replying with either a tactical or strategic response. At its simplest form this would include the direct engagement with the situation through the same channel.

At its most sophisticated the response will need to be entirely operational where the core problem requires resolution before any direct response can be made. Ideally, your company should continually look to resolve the underlying problem, then respond with a strategic campaign, and finally engage with individuals to build advocates in the stakeholder spaces.

This entails the person responding being empowered and equipped to resolve the problem.

Mitigating a reputation crisis

Proactive mechanisms should also be put in place to guard against potential crisis situations. These closely follow your Crisis Communication Plan, Policies and procedures.

Situational planning

All organisations bear a certain amount of risk. This is largely driven through what game theory would call “Known unknowns” and “Unknown unknowns”. ORM should be used to identify both groups, and once found, equip your organisation to actively plan for each situation. This is determined according to a number of variables such as: assessing the likelihood of it occurring, the consequences and the estimated reputational cost to the organisation should it occur. Once assessed, steps can be taken to either mitigate the risk, or plan and prepare for scenarios of high likelihood and impact.

Through this process the response times for a reputation crisis are drastically reduced. In turn, this improves the manageability and controllability of a situation.

Maximising the conversation

ORM can be used as secondary market research (qualitative and quantitative) to help guide departmental strategy formulation and identify specific stakeholder wants and needs. This process reduces the need for other forms of market research and dramatically reduces the turnaround time of such research.