Online reputation management
Your online reputation is one of your most valuable assets as a brand. Because it helps establish your credibility as an organization, it is important for attracting new clients, hiring top talent, and securing funding from investors. Online reputation management is the process through which you can protect brand intelligence and take strategic action to build a positive brand image.
Online reputation management often involves built-in analytics tools provided by social networking services or more sophisticated social listening software to detect and track negative comments or critical feedback. It may also involve responding directly to dissatisfied consumers when advisable and developing content that will have a positive impact on the online public’s perception of a brand.
Why online reputation management is critical for businesses
Most consumers and businesses will do some research online before deciding to support or work with a certain company. They read articles, reviews, comments, and take low-star ratings seriously when deciding on a major purchase or investment. Online reputation management helps firms mitigate the effect of negative attention by helping them improve overall sentiment around their brand.
With online reputation management tools, organizations can detect and resolve issues faster and prevent critical comments or unfair attacks from turning into a PR crisis. They enable firms to learn not only about what people are saying about a brand — but also about the people doing the talking. If equipped with social analytics capabilities, companies can even obtain insights useful for developing appealing content and engaging with consumers via social media more effectively.
How firms can carry out online reputation management
One way that firms can manage their online reputation is by manually searching for blog posts, reviews, product comparisons, and other places where their brand is mentioned online. They can monitor the social networks and other channels where they think unhappy customers, disgruntled employees, or former clients may choose to vent. However, this takes time and filtering out voices that receive little attention and are therefore not particularly influential takes even more time and energy.
Another way to carry out online reputation management is to use a variety of tools: software alerts you of brand mentions, monitors online reviews for your brand’s products and services, searches for your brand on complaint sites or on forums and messaging boards, or shows you metrics useful for analyzing brand awareness and engagement on social media platforms. The smartest way to manage your online reputation is to leverage a platform that does all of the above and more.
Proactive online reputation management using social listening
Social listening platforms like Synthesio combine brand monitoring software with social media analytics, enabling you to take a thorough and proactive approach to online reputation management. These platforms let you collect and track mentions of your brand across various social platforms—not just social networks but also blogs, forums, customer reviews, and even mainstream news media—and analyze and categorize mentions by relevance or impact. This way you can be alerted to high volumes of negative sentiment or a negative comment by someone with outsized influence in your market. You can even monitor and track mentions of your competitors.
The importance of sentiment when managing your online reputation
Smart social listening platforms leverage social media sentiment analysis. Sentiment is a metric used to measure the tone of online conversations. It shows you how consumers may be feeling about your brand based on the words they use. Using sentiment analysis, a social listening tool can categorize mentions of your brand as negative, positive, or neutral. You can use this metric to assess brand intelligence, better understand the likes and expectations of your customers, detect a possible social media crisis, and benchmark the effectiveness of your brand’s social media efforts against those of your competitors.
Manage your online reputation with ease using Synthesio Social Listening
Synthesio Social Listening Dashboards let you monitor and track brand intelligence across owned, paid, and earned social channels in real time. With Synthesio, you can keep an eye on the mentions and metrics that matter most to your business from a single platform. Synthesio leverages Natural Language Processing and Automated Sentiment Analysis to surface important topics and trends from online conversations, providing you with actionable insights into consumer perception of your brand as well as up-and-coming consumer trends.
Synthesio analyzes real-time social media data and uses a proprietary metric to measure overall customer sentiment around your brand. Synthesio’s Social Reputation Score helps you understand how your online reputation compares to that of your competitors by showing you how satisfied customers are with your brand. You can use this metric for campaign analysis, competitor benchmarking, crisis management, and online reputation management.
