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According to new studies, eighty percent of customers are influenced on advice they get from social media. For business men this is an important issue. Now they need to advertise as well as manage their reputation of their brand. They are only twenty percent of people who buy products after watching advertising while rest of the people trust advice of the peer.
From Coco cola to Wal-Mart needs online reputation. Big companies have realized importance of online reputation for local business. Before 2000 branding of the product had very important. Since 2000, importance of branding has decreased and Importance of Online reputation management (ORM) has increased.
ORM is beyond the personal branding. It is also concerned with product branding. In ORM three process are done,
1) Reducing online negative reviews.
2) Maintain the online reputation.
3) Building the online reputation.
If anyone, searches about a company in any search engine, say, Google if result is very negative, then he/she will surely avoid that company. My friend Kim one day decided to host a website, for that he searched online for best hosting service. Finally, he contacted the hosting provider which had good online reputation. Not only in my friends case, it’s is true for everybody’s case. Now everyone trusts their peers advice rather than believing in advertisement.
A company will lose business if that does not take care of online reputation. Managing the online reputation is new age technique for the improving the business. Companies should spend some money for online reputation management. Big companies have started their own ORM sections.
After browsing through the web site, next a potential customer will certainly search in search engine about the company. If a negative comes up in search engine or bogus rip of report comes up, then the company will lose his regular customer or new potential customer.
In fact, if a discontent customer will take revenge by adding negatives on your website and all other reviewing sites. It is a natural tendency to trash image of someone who doesn’t deliver the service up to the expectations. They will post a below average rate to your service, or write bad report about your service to a rip off site.
Building reputation in market is long term process. But it takes only few negative comments to get bad image in the market. Google is now having auto generated Google places sites to find and collect the online review for the business sites. Google will automatically create a place for every business group even if they don’t ask or request Google to create. These Google places sites will show the review from other search engines like yahoo yelp etc. A bad review on Google or Yelp can ruin nearly all chances of capturing leads online.
Like Search Engine Optimization, ORM has emerged into new industry. Big companies have started their own ORM section. Hundreds of companies which provide only this service have been started. Institutions have started offering course for online reputation management service. Scope of it has rapidly increased. This industry will give lot of youngster job opportunity.
One of my friends has started providing online reputation management services. He says initially he was doing ORM service for branded companies, now he is doing for individuals as well. He gets about 70% of his income through ORM. He was actually a SEO guy, one of his clients asked him to do online management service. He then gathered information through online and did some demo service. Finally he did for his client. From then he started providing online management services. Scope of Online reputation management has improved drastically.
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