Best ways to effectively manage your reputation and brand online
Reputation is something that cannot be built overnight but can be destroyed in no time. On the other hand a ‘brand’ almost instantaneously with excellent marketing skills and successful product/service offerings. We can still listen or read about many people or products that do not exist in the contemporary times but have fared well sometime in the past. This is called as ‘reputation’ i.e. an undying fame of a person or product. Whereas a brand value would fade out once the person or product disappears. But as long as the business runs, both the brand and reputation go hand-in-glove and hence enough attention must be paid by the entrepreneurs in safeguarding them at all time.
Internet has become the best platform for many entrepreneurial activities. Speed is what makes internet the most popular mode of advertising which is a definite help for the businesses to become famous in less time. At the same time, any bad propaganda could damage the reputation with lightning speed. This is because the consumers have become the powerful brand ambassadors than ever. Any negative remark from them with substantial proofs can spell the doom for any company.
What should be done to manage the online reputation and brand?
Following questionnaire can be used by the entrepreneurs to check their online reputation:
- Is my brand is known to people?
- How well it is known to the customers?
- How it is faring against the competition?
- How many visitors are viewing my official website?
- What is being told or wrote by consumers in online communities like social media?
- How many positive reviews are available?
- What are the reasons for the dissatisfaction or negative feedback by consumers?
- How to respond to negative criticism?
- Are there any online reputation management tools? If so, how to utilize them?
This questionnaire can be checked by the online businesspersons periodically to gauge the reputation and brand.
What inferences can be drawn from this questionnaire?
- By utilizing the search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo etc. you could check the popularity of your brand. The position at which your website is listed in the search results could offer a clue on the reputation.
- The number of references and back links that appear in the search list could let you know to estimate how well your business penetrated into the market.
- There are some really good tools like brand.com that could help you in managing your reputation and brand value. You can read more about this organization on Brand.com Reviews.
- Similarly, web search could give you an idea about the reputation levels of the competition.
- Market observers do give comparison charts for the benefit of consumers. You can study them to know where your competition is having the edge over your product/service.
- Periodical assessment of your official website statistics could give you an idea about how and why people are visiting your website. This would let you know what customer is looking for in your website.
- Customer reviews, both positive and negative, can be quite useful to measure the customer satisfaction, fine tuning of product/services and also can help in getting new innovative ideas.
