A great brand does not evolve overnight. It takes months, if not years, and up to millions of dollars to build. It should be the thing organisations holds most precious.
Online Reputation Management (ORM) has recently emerged as the hot new term in digital marketing.
Brand loyalty can spread like a virus in the matter of hours with the praise of a single influential blogger. It can be destroyed in hours by an upset customer on an open forum. Longer term, it can fail, if you fail to listen to your customers.
By now, you will see the influential impact Consumer Generated Content (CGC) can have on your brand. Before you jump into the challenge of ORM, you need to determine which skilled marketing people can effectively read and understand the data resulting from online monitoring and then use this information to develop strategies to improve and grow the business.
I say skilled because your company intern who spends 80% of their day on Facebook may feel the most comfortable online but will not have the business acumen to develop and implement long-term ORM strategy.
What to track?
- Anything and everything related to your company
- Information related to your competition
- Industry information
When you first begin to measure your online reputation via social media it is important to choose a trusted technology and stay with it long enough to see trending data. The idea is that you are discovering how your strategies are working and where improvement is needed.
Useful online monitoring tools to get you started
- Google Alerts – keyword search
- Google Blog Search
- Board Reader – determine messages on boards & forums
- Yahoo Groups & Google Groups – determine groups to track
The opportunities of using the social web for a business are endless. The challenge, ensuring you are building meaningful relationships with your audience and finding ways of measuring results.
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