Everything you need to know about online reputation management

Your business’s online reputation may be digital, but that won’t stop it from making a serious impact IRL. A strong reputation management strategy can attract new customers and deepen existing relationships. A lax approach, on the other hand, can alienate both audiences.

Make sure the web is working for you, not against you. Use this article to learn how to establish a comprehensive online reputation management strategy.

What is online reputation management?

Online reputation management is the practice of monitoring, influencing, and maintaining the public perception of your business on the Internet. This includes managing reviews, social media presence and search engine results. The main goal of this process is to control the online conversation surrounding your brand using various strategies to ensure that when people search for you online, they come across information that paints a favorable picture.

Why does online reputation management matter?

Your online reputation management impacts more than just your marketing team. Do it well, and teams across your org chart will feel the benefits in the following key areas.

Brand image

When people search for information on your business, everything they find works together to paint a picture of what it might be like to be a customer. Strong brand reputation management practices ensure that the picture is a good one.

This work is important everywhere but especially online, where good and bad customer experiences live on in perpetuity through social media posts and reviews. With online reputation management, you can bolster praise and account for feedback, giving you more control over your business’s brand image

Risk mitigation

Managing your online reputation requires you to be proactive. That proactivity plays a major role in crisis prevention and risk mitigation—two must-haves for growing businesses.

Continuous reputation monitoring allows businesses to detect potential issues or negative trends in sentiment early on. This early detection supports intervention before a situation escalates into a crisis that might cause lasting damage to your brand and company.

Business expansion

A good reputation has a snowball effect. The better your reputation gets, the more customers you attract. In the past, this work was relegated to slow-moving offline endeavors. Today, the internet can get this process going faster than you can say “avalanche”.

A steady drumbeat of positive attention online creates a strong environment for business expansion. After all, you’ll likely need more space and resources to meet the needs of all your new and existing customers.

Investor relations

Your business’s online reputation matters to more than just your customers—investors also use the internet to vet potential investments.

In recent years, social media platforms like Reddit, TikTok and X (formerly known as Twitter) have become especially popular destinations for retail and institutional investors to discuss and analyze market trends. Without an online reputation management strategy in place, your brand could potentially miss out on business critical conversations.

Consumer insights

At the end of the day, your business’s online reputation is made up of feedback—praise, ideas and concerns ranging from “inconsequential” to “absolutely vital”.

A key element of online reputation management is ensuring that critical feedback gets to the people who can do something about it. When your processes bring your customer to the center of the conversation, you strengthen your business’s ability to deliver on what they want and need.

What factors contribute to online reputation management?

The internet can be a bit of a double-edged sword. There are so many ways to build your business’s reputation online. There are also a lot of ways for that reputation to be damaged.

An online reputation management strategy powered by routine sentiment analysis can help you make sense of the many factors that contribute to your business’s reputation across the web. Those include:

Social media

Social media has brought a new level of transparency into consumer conversations. Whether they’re evangelizing for a brand they love or ripping into a poor business practice, people turn to social to speak their minds.

This constant stream of commentary can work for or against your company. According to a study from GWI, over a third (43%) of consumers across all ages turn to social networks when looking for more information about brands, products or services. Social is the new search engine, making it a bedrock of your online reputation management strategy.

Luckily, managing your brand’s reputation on social doesn’t have to mean hours upon hours of scrolling. Brands can use social media listening to synthesize these conversations into actionable insights. For example, Cummins, a global leader in power solutions, uses Sprout’s social listening tools to monitor their brand health and reputation across major social networks in real time.

Learn more about Cummin’s strategy

Review sites

Your business’s star rating follows your brand across the web. Reviews are easier to find than ever, especially when you consider the rise of mobile search. If someone’s looking for information about your business on the go, chances are they’re also going to find your average review rating at the top of those search results.

The more positive reviews you get, the more reassurance potential customers get out of all those positive experiences. In fact, it may be what pushes them to finally procure their goods or services.

A person browsing through reviews is more likely to have a higher purchase intent than an individual passively browsing the rest of the web, which is why online review management goes hand-in-hand with online reputation management.

News publications

News publications impact more than just traditional public relations initiatives. In this day and age, any reputable news outlet has a digital publication that can be found by individuals well beyond their typical publishing audience. Think about it: How often have you found yourself reading an article online, only to find out it’s from a local paper miles away from where you currently reside?

Today, positive news coverage can be amplified across the web through social media and other digital channels, allowing brands to get more bang for their buck with their media relations efforts.

Influencers

In a way, influencers are like their own digital publications. After all, they create content for a specific audience they’ve grown over time. An endorsement from an influencer within your target market can have the same impact as positive media coverage, if not more.

Your influencer marketing strategy can do more than just improve your brand’s reputation online. It can play a major role in shaping that reputation, allowing your business to expand into new audiences and markets.

For example, Dave & Buster’s and TikTok influencer @CorporateNatalie seems like an unlikely pair at first thought. However, the two were able to make 9-to-5 comedy work for an arcade restaurant for this paid promotion.

Zero regrets on the tattoo @Dave ' Buster's #ykywt #personalityhire #coworker #9to5 #happyhour #comedy #ad

♬ original sound ' CorporateNatalie