Online reputation management is a matter of constant monitoring. It’s also a matter of looking in all of the different places online where your reputation might wax and wane.
Examples of ways of managing the way your brand is viewed on the Internet include:
Facebook Management
If you don’t already have a Facebook page, it’s a good idea to make one, lest one be made for you. It’s better to have control of something that is going to happen anyway without you if you do nothing. It’s a common fate for brands to have someone else beat them to it on Facebook, creating a name that is actually the name of a particular brand, but the profile on Facebook is merely a fan page, and not the property of the actual brand holder. The fan page can be mistaken for the real thing, and all sorts of confusing or even negative information could leak out to the public this way if caution isn’t used. By creating an actual Facebook page, you’ll ensure that your social media marketing strategy won’t be affected negatively by people messing around on the Internet.
After Facebook, Twitter is the single most important website in regards to online reputation management. This is another area where fraud can happen. There’s no rule against taking a brand, any brand, and just forming a page on Twitter around it, and then posting whatever you want about that particular brand. If this happens to be embarrassing content that sours people son your brand, there is little recourse then to put out your own Twitter page and direct people to it if they are confused. Online reputation management is sometimes as simple as making sure people know where the genuine information is coming from and who the fakers are.
Other Social Media
There’s really no reason to spread out as far and wide as you can on the Internet, if only to make sure you get to various social media outlets before others do when it comes to your brand. Google Plus, MySpace, and many others are all available to you for this purpose, which means anyone can pretend to be you on the websites and put out false and potentially damaging information about your brand. That’s why online reputation management is so important; to make sure this sort of misunderstanding does not happen between you and your customers. The damage can be extensive.
