The following article (linked to here) goes over some ideas for how to monitor your internet reputation from PR Daily. This article in particular, focuses strictly on business, and we’d like to take a minute here at The Reputation Management Way to draw a distinction between the sorts of strategies suggested in the link, and the kinds that individuals would use to monitor their online reputation. First off, the article suggests using automated monitoring software to keep tabs on who’s talking about you and who’s saying what on the internet about the particulars of a business. For an organization that reaches a certain size, this can be quite effective and even necessary. Imagine if you’re a company that has a thousand employees (or much more) and many departments. It may be quite challenging to keep tabs on who’s saying what about you online (especially if you haven’t hired another company to help).
But for individuals who wish to keep tabs on how they appear online, or for certain kinds of companies of certain configurations or sizes, monitoring software may be overkill, and may not be necessary. One should keep in mind the business case and the specific circumstance they’re dealing with in a given instance. The article also has some very good strategies on how to deal with negative reviews, and even some ideas on how to stop negative reviews on sites like Yelp, and Urban Spoon. Specifically, they suggest asking customers to write reviews ahead of time, before any negative reviews are written independently by disgruntled customers or patrons, but we have one suggestion on top of what the article says. If you want to go that route, and you certainly can, you should create business cards that suggest where to go on the internet to write a positive review, but hand those cards only out to those customers whom you like, or get along with, and are confident in general will write positive reviews about your business, you should NEVER hand them out to people whom you have any reason to believe will write a negative review of your company.
We can see that when it comes to ORM, there are many strategies and paths you can take, the article linked to above certainly describes some of them, but no one path is right for everyone, or every situation. Check out our other articles and postings for more on how to make your internet search results pages look better then ever.