Online Reputation Management: Why It Matters

The phrase “online reputation management” sounds like it was surely cooked up in a conference room somewhere, along with “synergy” and “leverage” and “reaching out to” someone when you’re really only sending them an email. But despite the cringes the phrase inspires – and the groaning under its own weight as it settles firmly into your company’s budget – online reputation management is as necessary to your business as keeping your office up to fire code.

Why does it matter? Let’s put it this way:

• Why does keeping your office up to fire code matter?
• Why do your employees have health insurance?
• Why does a product assembly line have quality assurance checkpoints?
• Why is your advertising copy edited?

It’s all about mitigating risk and staying in control of your company. And for online reputation management, it’s no different. OK, actually, it is different – it’s actually more important; not in terms of the health and safety of your employees and customers, per se, but in terms of the health and safety of your brand.

It used to be that a complaining customer would moan to their friends or colleagues about their plight, or perhaps work up enough anger to write a strongly worded letter to your company. In fact, American humorist Don Novello made a living off this idea when he published a collection of letters he’d written under the name Lazlo Toth – and the painfully sincere replies he received from some of the world’s best-known brands.

It sounds quaint, doesn’t it? It is – because today, there are simply too many ways to let one dissatisfied customer use a worldwide platform to express their unhappiness about your brand.

Let’s say a couple comes to your steak house for dinner. While sitting in a booth, the wife sees a bug crawling up the wall. Back in ye olden times before the Internet, you could probably comp enough dinners to get through the night. Chances were low that the couple would report you to the city health authorities or the Better Business Bureau.

Today, though, by the time you’ve noticed a kerfuffle at table four, they’ve seen the bug, taken a picture and posted it on each of their Facebook pages with all the gory details. Their friends comment on the post – maybe they haven’t seen a bug in your steak house, but they have had undercooked meat, or gotten sick after the shrimp cocktail, or broke off a relationship there two years ago and have never gotten over it.

The picture is disgusting and the comments are funny, so it gets picked up by websites that exist to post disgusting Facebook pictures or funny Facebook comments. Now thousands of people a day are reading about that bug, and forwarding it to their friends for whatever reason – maybe they live in the area, or are coming to your town on vacation.

Through what can only be called Internet Osmosis, your restaurant name is now brought up every time someone mentions a bad dining experience – by people who have never even been to your establishment.

Now multiply that by millions, and you have online reputation management for 21st century businesses.

Online reputation management matters because, despite your very best efforts, you no longer control the conversation people are having about your brand. People are going to say what they want to say – and if they’ve had a bad experience, or even just a bad day, you’re going to get caught in the crossfire.

If you can’t control the conversation, you can at least inform it. What an organized online reputation management campaign does for you is stay on top of the trillions of bytes of data that are flowing through the Internet, filtering out the noise to get you a clear signal.

Once you have that signal, it’s a matter of being the best dinner party host you can be. Is someone getting loudly drunk in the corner? Kindly give them a glass of water and guide them to the patio to get some air. Are two guests debating a subject that’s a downer? Listen for a bit, be sympathetic, and then lighten the mood by getting them to agree about how delicious the canapés are.

It’s all about shifting the conversation to what you want to talk about, without seeming to be too controlling. Get the hang of it, and soon enough the signal you’ll be receiving is clear as a bell – and in your favor.