Tag: Online Reputation

8 Ways Brands Can Grow Their Business Through Social Listening
Your Customers Are Speaking: Are You Listening?

Social listening tools monitor social media conversations and allow companies to capture what customers are saying around their preferred keyword(s), be it – a product, brand, industry, or anything that’s relevant to their business. With the right social listening data, brands can assess their reputation, brand sentiment, and gain valuable customers insights.

Let’s discover eight ways brands can leverage social listening data:
Maintain Brand Reputation: Monitoring your brand’s online presence and other relevant information which might affect its reputation ensures that you see the bigger picture while unleashing its full potential. Crawling mentions in real-time in various languages across 100+ million online sources plays a crucial role in improving a brand’s reputation.

Helps Track Your Brand: Social listening allows you to monitor your brand’s activity across various social media platforms. It ensures that you don’t miss out on any brand mentions or other parties associated with it.

Understanding Your Audience: It is important to have a strong sense of whom you are trying to target before creating content. Demographic insights help answer questions like – which gender is most outspoken, which country the current audience belongs to, audiences’ common interests, most prominent professions, etc.

Competitors Analysis: Analysing your competitors’ strategies, marketing campaigns, and keeping track of their products and features allows you to compare your own outcomes. This in turn helps you develop and change strategies that aren’t performing.
Identifying Influencers And Brand Advocates: Social listening can help brands discover new influencers or help them partner with influencers who are already mentioning the concerned brand to their audiences. Identifying brand advocates and rewarding them with giveaways or special offers helps foster a good relationship with them.

Improving SEO: Most social listening tools help monitor the web at large, including news websites and blogs. This kind of web monitoring can be beneficial for companies that are looking for new ways to improve their sites’ online image and user-generated content.

Analyze The Impact of Marketing & PR: Monitoring campaigns, launches, and other initiatives provide insights on reach, sentiment, and other conversations around the topic. Thus, social listening helps evaluate the impact of a campaign and measure its ROI.

Write Better Content: Social listening can help with content marketing in multiple ways. It can keep you updated with the trending topics related to your industry. It can also help you create better content with social data.
Conclusion

Social listening is one of the most effective methods which brands can leverage to stay afloat and thrive in today’s competitive digital economy. It can help improve a brand’s approach to audience analysis and adapt as per the needs of the target audience.
November 11, 2021
Online Reputation Management in The Age of Trolls

Online trolling and smear campaigns have become the tabloid sensation of the digital era. A single tweet or a Facebook post can bring about a viral stream of negativity to a brand’s reputation. In most cases, the subject of the troll may be very irrelevant or even false, but the damage it can cause has no limitations.

One of the finest examples in recent times was the social media backlash faced by Nike when Colin Kaepernick created a storm by kneeling down during the US national anthem as a sign of protest against police cruelty to the black community. Kaepernick had a huge endorsement deal with Nike and was the face of several of their promotional campaigns. Online trolls mercilessly bashed Nike for continuing their association with Kaepernick and it almost led to sales of the US sporting giant declining for a brief period. We’ll talk about how Nike emerged out of the fiasco a little later in the blog.

A viral negative attack on a brand is often the PR team’s biggest challenge. The damage could be done before the brand comes up with a statement. A brand cannot respond to a troll-like how an individual does irrespective of whether the troll is genuine or a false attack. Let’s have a brief look at how brands can manage their reputation in the age of internet trolls.

A humorous response may turn the tides

Most online trolls leverage the comic value of their statements to push the troll to become viral. A clever brand PR exercise to counter such trolls is to mix humor in the response and match them tit for tat. While doing so, the brand has the potential to win over the entire social buzz and traffic that the troll had generated in the first place. The point to note while adding humor is to ensure that the matter raised by the troll is acknowledged if it was genuine and the response could be a solution.

Avoid automated responses

Automated responses are good for generic feedback and sentiments that surround your brand in social media. But when the subject of focus is a troll that promotes negativity, an automated response can do more harm than good by adding more fuel to the fire. The trolls may use the response as a sequel to their campaign and invite further negative attention to your brand.

Get professional help

Not all communication, especially online communication can be managed in-house. When trolls take a brand reputation for a spin, it is wise to entrust response and management of the crisis to a professional agency. They would have better resources to minimize negative impact and can advise on the next steps to be taken to regain lost ground in online presence.

Stand up for what is right

It is a good practice to ignore small-time negative trolling as the internet has quite a short memory. But when your organization is trolled for initiatives or business models that are for the right cause, make sure to stand by it and do not take it down due to the trolling. This is where we visit the Nike saga again. Nike chose to stand by Kaepernick and even launched a campaign featuring him and a slogan that reads “Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything”. The brand found support from most corners and brilliantly came out of the negativity even when the trolls had support from prominent members of the ruling party in the US.

The rules of online reputation management are a continuously evolving chapter. As newer events rise, brands get a good lesson on how to manage them. The wise ones learn from the mistakes made by others and in turn, create an action plan to contain the negativity when it pokes them.

If you want assistance on handling trolls from a professional ORM company, please drop us a line.

June 15, 2021
4 Ways to Manage Negative Feedback in a Positive Way

Everybody loves acknowledgement and appreciation for the work they have done; even brands. When everything goes right, there will be praises. But when things do not go well, then negative feedback is also bound to happen. And this is something that is tough to handle irrespective of the industry, profession, or business that you are engaged in.

For a business, customer sentiments are a key metric to identify the acceptability of their operational model, products, or services. In today’s highly connected world, any feedback has the potential to reach millions of other customers in a matter of minutes thanks to the power of social media and the internet. And brands will want this viral feedback to be positive to ensure they do not suffer any backlash. But unfortunately, negative feedback from customers also makes it into the queue and is often more propagated than positive ones.

Rather than being bogged down, here are 4 tips to manage negative feedback in a positive way:

Be open about clarifications

Accepting negative feedback is an important step in dealing with customer sentiments. After an initial message or communication about accepting the feedback, the next step is to collect more details or evidence from the critics to understand the negative feedback better or to identify the root cause of the issue. It should be noted that such questions or clarifications should never be aimed at intimidating critics or questioning their motives.

Classify the Feedback

Identify whether the feedback is constructive or destructive in nature. If it is constructive feedback, use it to learn from your mistakes. If the person made destructive feedback, with no clarification, then he or she might have ulterior motives and the best thing to do is ignore the feedback.

Do not be biased

While analyzing negative feedback, always put yourself in the shoes of the customer who gave the feedback. Then you will understand the perspective of the situation and how they were challenged by your business’s service or product and ultimately forced them to provide negative feedback. It will help in focusing on the core issue to be solved rather than trying to cope with the negative emotional narrative.

Keep Communication Active

Once a careful and unbiased analysis of collected evidence and facts surrounding the negative feedback is made, you can find out if the feedback was true or just aimed at tarnishing your brand. If the feedback was false, you have every right to defend yourself and put out a communication exposing the false attack on your brand. If the feedback was found to be true, then an immediate corrective course of action needs to be planned and announced to ensure customers that your business is open to feedback and is willing to change based on customer concerns which ultimately improves brand perception in a positive way.

Negative feedback should never be seen as a demotivator for individual or business performance. It is important to analyze it and find out what went wrong and take measures to ensure that the next experience you provide doesn’t invite the same feedback. Consider it as one of the best ways to improve your quality as an individual or a business, and always take negative feedback in a positive way.

If you are looking for an online reputation management company that can proactively manage your review and feedback, just drop us a line.

June 8, 2021
What Do You Do When Your Online Reputation Sucks?
Is your online reputation at its worst? Are people saying bad things about your brand on every platform? Don’t worry. It’s time to clean up the mess.

In this article, we’ll take you through a detailed set of steps to help you improve your online reputation. So, let’s begin.
Start with an Online Audit

Before you start any online clean-up, you need to understand to what extent your online reputation is at stake. The best way to do that is through an online audit.

An online audit helps you understand:

What your customers are saying about you?

Which social media platform has the maximum number of negative reviews?

How many and what ratings do you have on the review platforms?

What are your employees talking about you?

With data on all these, it will be easier for you to chalk out a clean-up plan.

Create an Online Reputation Strategy

It’s time to develop your online reputation strategy. You should set clearly defined reputational goals first to set the direction for your strategy. The first thing you should do is to set a Google alert for any mentions about your brand keywords.

Categorize and Prioritize the Things you Need to Clean-up

The entire clean-up process can get messy unless you create a list of priorities. Aggregate all the comments, ratings, reviews that you see online and prioritize which concerns should you address first. There are comments that could be ignored, some might need a generic reply; that’s it. However, some comments, reviews, etc. might be actually critical and require immediate action.

Reputation Management Needs a Skilled Person

This is an important aspect of your business and has to be assigned to someone who understands this space. The person has to be trustworthy and reliable since you’ll have to share the credentials of at least some of your accounts with this individual. Also, have an oversight as to how things are progressing in the space.

Begin the Clean-up

Now that you have an online reputation strategy in place and assigned a skilled and trustworthy person with the responsibility, it’s time to start the online clean-up. The process may be tedious since you need to delete/edit/reset information wherever required. However, try to remain patient as you’re handling a sensitive aspect (your online reputation).
Wrapping Up..

Always keep in mind, any prospect will first research your brand online before deciding to approach you. So, make sure that you have a good online reputation that can compel your prospects and customers to conduct business with you.

Use these simple steps to accelerate your online clean-up. Trust us, things will get better.
June 7, 2021