Category: Reputation Management

Have you ever Googled your business and were taken a back?Digital trust is critical for any business. A single negative search result can impact customer, investor, or stakeholder decisions.

5 Mistakes That Can Cost Millions to Influencers and Brands

According to GroupM INCA’s India Influencer Marketing Report, the Indian influencer marketing industry is projected to be valued at Rs. 900 crore by the end of 2021. The market is expected to grow at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 25% till 2025 to reach a size of Rs. 2,200 crores.

Influencers are either paid in the form of money, free goods, or experiences for endorsing products or services of brands.

While it is important for brands to create memorable and successful campaigns, these are the 5 mistakes that both brands and influencers should avoid.

5 Mistakes Influencers and Brands Should Avoid

These mistakes could cost millions of rupees, brand reputation, and audience trust:

Inadequate Disclosure: According to ASCI guidelines, influencers must disclose promotional posts with hashtags: #ad, #collab, #promo, #sponsored, and #partnership; to enable viewers to distinguish between promotional and organic content. Also, filters should not be applied to posts if they are exaggerating the claims of brands like “makes skin fairer” or “teeth whiter” etc. So, it’s advisable for influencers to do their due diligence because failing to do so could result in serious consequences.

Inauthenticity: When customers trust and feel connected to the influencers, only then will they listen to their advice. Product promotions when done excessively could leave the audience doubting influencers’ authenticity. So, to create a good impression on brands and the audience, influencers should focus on growing organically. To avoid reputational damages, they should determine if the particular brand is a good fit and ensure that they share the same values.

Overemphasis: Controlling an influencer’s content, asking for excessive product mentions, and instructing influencers to follow scripts will only result in diminishing viewer enjoyment. When a product is mentioned too many times, the viewers could be left wondering – if the product is substandard. Hence, influencers should be given creative freedom to produce content their viewers will enjoy.

Brand Fatigue: When brands instruct influencers in the same community to post similar endorsements repeatedly, they end up reducing the effectiveness of the campaign. Organizations should focus on scheduling, and they should restrain from choosing influencers from the same community. This not only reduces brand fatigue but also allows influencers to create content for a variety of endorsements.

Overindulgence: Influencers who make endorsements of free merchandise or luxury holidays – they received, could be perceived as less trustworthy. Hence, brands should also focus on giveaways to other communities through competitions or other activities. Also, the expensive influencer incentives can result in increasing the cost price of these brands’ products and thus reduce the number of returning customers.

Brands and influencers should carefully consider what they’re getting into before saying yes to the first thing on their table.

October 23, 2021
Why Brand Intelligence Is Critical to Your Reputation
Your brand is “the promise” you make to keep your customer’s loyalty and build their trust. Currently, the threat landscape in the digital space is vast with cybercriminals attacking your brand through typosquatting websites, command-and-control attacks, and data leaks. The consequences of these attacks are not just limited to financial losses but a widespread distrust and loss of credibility amongst the customers.

The security professionals are blindsided and they do not know when or how these cybercriminals plan on launching their next attack. This is because they have zero visibility on the network outside their organization. An effective brand protection solution should prevent cyberattacks altogether instead of trying to locate the ones that have already damaged the brand’s integrity.

Monitoring Isn’t Enough: Just looking out for brand mentions isn’t sufficient to protect your brand from cyberattacks. While brand monitoring is a great tool to identify brand mentions, it is unlike brand intelligence which can shield you from cybercriminals.

The Brand Intelligence Solution

Brand intelligence is an upgrade of brand monitoring because its focuses on surfacing those mentions that are relevant and actionable. Simply put, it strategically highlights those mentions of your products and organization which point out that your brand is potentially vulnerable. This includes leaked data, phishing, and copycat domains. Brand intelligence allows the cybersecurity team to take measures against threats in real-time before they can cause harm to the business.

Features Of Brand Intelligence Module

Business Intelligence provides visibility on threats by collecting data through various open and closed sources. It helps brands take down malicious content online and proactively provides context to safeguard against cyberthreats. Further, it helps brands take actions against the following:
- Domain Abuse: Business intelligence provides alerts about typo squatting and copycat websites as soon as they are registered. Brands can dig deeper into these IDs or domains based on the information provided through the software and initiate a takedown immediately.
- Data & Credential Leaks: The software processes information from various sites; even from the ones that sell sensitive information. Then it provides instant alerts on any leakages involving your brand.
- Infrastructure Risk: It helps secure your network by providing alerts on threats concerning your domains and IP addresses.
- Industry Threats: It helps you safeguard your brand and infrastructure by alerting you about the emerging threats in your industry or on an organization that is similar to yours. This can help you take measures to defend against cybercriminals when you become their next target.
While risk assessment tools like security certificate verifications and financial audits are crucial, they aren’t timely and lack context. But with brand intelligence software, organizations can take preemptive measures to protects themselves against such threats.
September 20, 2021
Business Success with Personal Branding

Each of us is unique and has a brand in ourselves. Your brand is what people think of you when they hear your name or what they talk about you. Online personal branding goes a little beyond that. It is what pops up in search results when people look for you and what your presence across social media looks like.

For any brand, it can be challenging to stand out from the crowd. There are multiple platforms across the web and finding an apt and relevant way to connect with your audience is not easy. Your personal brand is not just about you, it’s your chance to narrate your story. It goes beyond fancy logos, stylish fonts, or the products and services you sell. Branding is also about the customer experience you provide, your business ethics, and your culture. A brand relates to the feelings it can evoke in a consumer. Unique, authentic, trustworthy, and professional is what you need to be.

How do you build a brand that is exquisite, popular, and trusted all at the same time?

Just like Rome wasn’t built in a day, building your personal brand also requires time and effort to be invested in it to ensure it is successful and different from the clutter.

Here’s how you can easily and effectively build your personal brand.

Understand, explain and define your brand.

The first step to progress is figuring out who you are and what your goals are. Your personal brand is a reflection of who you are and what you do. Hence, it’s important to determine information regarding your expertise, your positives, what holds you back, what you want to accomplish, and what change you want to bring about around you. Once you have answers to these, it is easy to embark on a journey of personal branding and success.

Identify and determine your unique value proposition

To stand out from the crowd, you need to leverage your differences. This is where your unique value proposition comes into play. To define your unique offerings, you simply must understand your strengths and talk about them. Highlight them effectively and efficiently across all branding platforms. To let your uniqueness help you thrive, you also need to apply it to your business to ensure you achieve great results.

Define who your audience is

While we would all like to appeal to the masses, it’s critically important to define your niche and work to appeal to your target audience. When it comes to personal branding or branding of any sort, it’s important to align your personal niche with your business. Identifying your audience and catering to them exclusively not only helps improve customer relations but helps to focus your resources and efforts on this high-value niche segment.

Develop your content strategy.

Content is not the only king but also rules the kingdom. Customers connect with brands not only for the products or services they provide but even for the content that brands curate. Valuable, helpful, and innovative content is what helps customers stay glued to a particular brand. Your content strategy should be based on research and should be flexible as per the marketing trends. Sharing a variety of content across multiple platforms improves your brand value and also increases your visibility.

Optimize your personal website, social profiles, build a community and add value to your audience.

In the world of the web and technology, everyone wants to access a profile or a brand that is easily accessible and engaging. It’s imperative to ensure your website, social profiles are all optimized and updated. Interacting with your audience, adding value through information, services, and products is the best way to retain them. Start building a community, where you interact with your audience and fellow brands. Getting to know each other and helping each other is an excellent way to differentiate yourself and also generate business.

Building a personal brand may seem like a lot of hard work but the payoff is indeed enormous. So, whether you are looking to generate leads, accelerate your career, find a job or a mentor, personal branding is your road ahead.

July 29, 2021
Tips For Schools to Manage and Succeed With Their ORM

Education is one of the key pillars of a sustainable future. It shapes children of today into the citizens of tomorrow by inculcating knowledge and societal traits into their minds in the best possible way. Parents today are very particular about the schools they choose for their kids. More than the investment they must make in terms of fees and other expenses, their focus is to give the best to their kids. Just as in any other sector, the internet is a primary source through which parents search about schools and get to know about them before deciding to make the move for admissions. Additionally, qualified teachers lookout for schools with better reviews as their potential employers.

As such maintaining an online reputation has a direct impact on the enrollment numbers, the quality of teaching staff that can be hired, and the prospects of growth for the school. However, it is not an easy task as most schools do not have the resources or know-how on how to get ahead in their online presence. But it is not an impossible task as well.

Here are a few tips to help schools manage and succeed with their online reputation:

Have a web presence

The first step in building a positive online reputation is to ensure the authentic presence of your school in the entire web landscape where parents search for information and reviews. You can begin with an SEO-optimized website, set up listings on popular review and check‑in sites like Google, Yelp, etc., and ensure information to contact the school authorities is clearly available in as few steps as possible for parents. Your website too can have a review section that allows parents to review the performance of the school and these reviews can impact decisions of future admissions.

Be active on social media

With nearly 55% of the global population active in some form of social media, it is an avenue a school cannot miss out on creating a presence. Maintain official pages of the school on popular social media such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc. It is the best place to identify sentiments about the school and one of the first areas to focus on while making announcements or responding to reviews and public comments about the school.

Engage with content

Be it your website or your social media channels, schools need to have a defined content calendar where they continuously update their web presence with new content. It could be in the form of blogs, informative news announcements, discussions on socially relevant topics where schools can take a lead in bringing about change, and much more. By constantly creating a buzz, a school can enjoy a steady stream of traffic to their websites as well as social media channels, and ultimately this traffic can translate into newer admissions in the future.

Have a response framework

Online reviews and comments on social media have the potential to wreak havoc on the reputation of any organization and schools are no different. Delays in responding to sentiments or failure to pro-actively put out statements on relevant topics of interest can result in severe backlash. To prevent this, schools need to have a responsive framework that holds a set of pre-written communication templates that they can pick and deploy as a response to online engagements. It could be a response to a comment on social media or a negative or positive review on Google Listings, an announcement for crisis management in times like the COVID 19 pandemic, and so on.

Creating a solid online reputation is important for schools to ensure sustained growth for their future. It may not be possible to have this entire activity managed in-house. This is when specialized agencies can help create the best online reputation for your school across all channels.

Get in touch with us to explore more.

July 22, 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
Protecting Your Brand Reputation on Social Media

There are over 4.2 billion active social media users which is around 53.6% of the global population. Social media helps businesses find, connect, and interact with their customers. They greatly help companies grow their customer base. However, in social media customer feedback (negative/positive) can turn viral and be seen by millions of people in a matter of minutes. Though stories of brands going out of their comfort zone to make customers happy do gain attention, it is mostly the barrage of negative sentiments or feedback that often becomes viral.

So, in the age of social media, how can you protect your company’s reputation?

Here are 5 ways:

Respond in Time

In the event of a fallout with customer sentiments, brands need to develop a habit of responding to criticism or feedback rather than keeping quiet. Silence is not a virtue in the virtual world as it results in negative feedback gaining more credibility and reach. People do not wait for factual evidence to come out, they react based on assumptions. So, the first thing to do when negative feedback is being circulated about your brand on social media is to respond to it.

Be Accepting and Professional about Negative Sentiments

Accept negative feedback as an opportunity to help your customer, be courteous and professional in your interactions, and improve your product or service from such feedbacks.

If the negative feedback turns out to be fake or malicious, you can present your case in the same forum with evidence to the contrary.

Have a Crisis Communication Plan

Keeping a set of positive response quotes that can be generically applied to negative social media sentiments can be handy as the first line of response. Also ensure that the right personnel are assigned to quickly handle situations on social media with the right response and prevent further escalations.

Translate Feedback into Action

The critics that bashed your brand online can be your brand ambassadors. Take their feedback, identify how to incorporate it, and portray the results on social media along with an appreciation to these folks who helped you improve.

Stay Neutral on Highly Sensitive Domains

Brands often gain widespread publicity for supporting or standing up for causes. While doing so it is wise to stay away from highly sensitive topics like politics or religion which can drastically impact your business by turning away sections of your customer base with hurt sentiments.

Social media can make or break a brand in no time. While it is nearly impossible to avoid negative feedback on social media platforms, these 5 tips can certainly help you preserve and improve your brand reputation on social media. ‘If you are looking at partnering with an ORM company that can do all this and more for you, please drop us a line.

June 11, 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
How to Manage a Brand’s Reputation on Search Engines
If you’re running a business, one of the most essential things you MUST focus on is maintaining your online reputation. No entrepreneur would prefer a situation where their prospects and customers develop a negative feeling about the business based on the brand’s poor online presence.

Did you know that 25% of an organization’s market value is directly associated with its online reputation? More so because everyone has a voice of their own and the internet is a great platform to express one’s opinions.

If you’re not conscious about your online reputation, it is only a matter of time that you may end up creating a negative brand image.
Here are a few steps to manage your Search Engine Reputation Management (SERM):
1. Keep Tracking your SERM

Before you protect your search engine reputation, you need to learn how to monitor it. Here monitoring is all about knowing what people think of your business or what they’re saying about your business. There’re several tools like If This Then That (IFTTT), Me on the Web, etc. to track your SERM.

This tool can help you with the following:

Scan all your internet mentions and generate a detailed report on the same

Track if your company name was mentioned in any email

Search all the social media platforms to find out what people are posting about your business

2. Make the most of Social Media

Keeping a track of your social media footprint is very essential. Social media is the most important element of your SERM. Many organizations make the mistake of not utilizing their social media accounts to interact with their audiences.

Make sure you actually use your social media accounts to build relationships and engage with your audiences. If you can successfully build trust with your audiences, they are least likely to post poor reviews about you. Also, the higher your social media engagement, the better are your chances of improving SERP rankings.

3. Listen to your Customers’ Response

If you ignore the negative comments, that’s a terrible mistake. Negative comments are an opportunity to fix your relationship with the customers and improve your SERM. So, if customers are complaining, you need to listen and address the challenges they’re facing.

Sometimes customers shed light on valuable aspects that you’re probably missing out on. If you listen to their feedback and take appropriate actions, that can be a great way to build a reputation.

4. Check First Page of Google Search Results and Make Sure Everything is Okay

Most of your prospects and customers will make decisions by referring to the first page of Google. So, you need to make sure that whenever somebody searches your brand’s name, only good things appear on the first page of Google.

Below are some tricks to ensure this:

Make sure all your active social media accounts are displayed on the first page

Link all these social accounts to your official website

Ensure that the third-party websites that are coming on the first page are associated with your official website
5. Try to Stay as much Transparent as Possible

Finally, stay as much transparent as possible. Practice honest communications to build the trust of your audiences. Admit your mistakes and show your audiences that you’re taking proactive actions to resolve them. Don’t forget that millions of people are watching your every step. One wrong move online could cost you big time.

Final Words

Hopefully, these 5 steps will help you manage your Search Engine Reputation Management. Is your company looking for an ORM company that can do all the above and more? Please drop us a line,
June 7, 2021