An important part of owning a business is effectively managing your online reputation.
What is online reputation management?
Online reputation management involves the following:
- Finding all online profiles associated with your business
- Updating and maintaining a consistent identity across all profiles
- Monitoring and moderating everything people say about your business online
To re-phrase: online reputation management is actively monitoring, managing, and moderating what people say about your business (or brand) on social media, online review websites, consumer forums, and other online media outlets.
Why is online reputation management important?
Actively managing your online reputation is important because it allows you (the business owner) to control the conversations about your business online. Businesses managing their online reputation can maintain and build a positive image/message about their business, and recover from publicized issues before they spiral out of control.
For instance, if people are sharing negative, harmful, or even false information about your business online, actively managing your reputation will allow you to quickly identify and recover from comments and content that may hurt your brand image.
Online Reputation Management: Getting Started
The first step in managing your online reputation is to find all of your online profiles. There are two simple ways to do this using Google.
- Google your business name (Google “comnio”) and catalog the results returned, or
- Use a backlink tracker (such as Moz’s Open Site Explorer) to find all sites that link to your website
Once you’ve identified the majority of sites linking to you (because the Google search and backlink tracking method won’t catch them all) business owners should create and share a document within your organization with all of the profiles listed. This way, you can continually review and refresh your online profiles and manage your online reputation.
To help you out, we attached an example spreadsheet you can use to keep track of your online profiles. Download our online reputation management tracker.
If you need help managing your online reputation, let us know — we’d love to help!