New media, a breakthrough for your brand
Building a brand is difficult multi-faceted and multi-talented work. You simply cannot engage your audience through one single method such as say, TV ads, you must do it across a span different medias. Will it work? Not necessarily. On top of engaging your audience across multiple medias, you must also be creative such as to stand out. With the ever-evolving world of the web, new media tools emerge amplifying your message.
Anyone can say anything
But there’s a catch, many of the same tools made available to you are also made available to your competitors, customers, friends and family, everyone. And they give the same or similar amplifying power to any message good or bad. It follows that anything can be said about your brand and go viral, ultimately affecting your bottom line. Don’t you need to do something to protect yourself from this reputational volatility?
A typical online reputation management situation is negative content portrayed in the form of complaints on social networks or web 2.0 sites such as ripoff report, pissed consumer, Glassdoor, reseller ratings, yelp, or others.
If you don’t actively manage your brand’s image and reputation, you run the risk of others doing it for you. Others include the software we use day-to-day: “bots” that collect and organize online information, which is amalgamated and ranked. Think of Google.
So how do you legally and effectively address such reputational risks?
Protecting your bottom line with an ORM company
The initial impulse for many companies is to launch a lawsuit. While this is manageable in certain instances, it cannot match the scale of online medias. Although a judge can order the removal of content, there is no way to know for sure if it has been fully removed and whether or not it will reemerge at a later time. Strongly legalistic approaches didn’t work for Nestle when it tried to have Greenpeace’s video on palm oil removed. Will it work for you? You may find yourself distracted from your core business by having to dedicate this time to lawsuits. And they are not without cost either. Therefore you must also take a more active approach. ORM companies skillfully engage a mix of SEO, SEM, public relations and editorial skills to manage and reshape the impression left behind by negative messages on social media and web 2.0 sites.