Over the last couple years if you are a CEO or a Politician or somebody who is sensitive about your personal brand, you have probably heard the terminology of Online Reputation Management. Most of the time the people who offer this service, fast talk you and tell you about how they have this magical software that analyzes social conversation on social networks to track what people are saying about you. They then proceed to tell you that they are the only ones on God’s green earth that can manage your reputation and that they are experts in the field with years of experience. The only problem is that before the evolution of Social Networks and the dramatic rise of two way social conversation there was no such thing as Online Reputation Management. They tell you that they will monitor all conversation about you on Twitter, Facebook, Myspace etc.
This is all great that the people you are hiring plan on monitoring this social conversation but would it not be more beneficial to your personal brand for you yourself to be actively monitoring this conversation and taking an active part. After all you are the one that needs to learn about what people are saying about you both the positive and negative. The team that you hire should be the ones to both monitor your reputation but also continually put together strategies on how you could actively improve your reputation in the public eye based on what people are saying. Instead of just having someone monitor your reputation and then in most cases post positive feedback or in some cases ask the poster of negative feedback to remove the post which hardly ever is successful and usually back fires. To be successful in Online Reputation Management, the person whose reputation is being monitored must take an active role.
Instead of watching the News or Reading the Newspaper like in the past, people are actively basing their political views and their buying trends based on what they read from their friends on Twitter, Facebook and the various other Social Networks. Reputation Monitoring, and Risk Management is not just a big brand thing anymore in my opinion. People in this day and age feel compelled to voice their opinions on their life experiences more so than any other time in history and on the same hand people are more compelled to take the advice of their peers so with the mix of these two phenomenons the desire for Reputation Management was born.
The next question you are asking after taking the time to read this post is what should I do when I find negative feedback about my product or if in the case of a politician what do I do if somebody is posting negative feedback about my views and agendas? There is no specific Yes or No answer to this question or definitive way to combat this since each case is unique. In most cases though you are dealing with social personalities who feel very compelled to voice their displeasure about your views or your product. One thing you should not do is ask them to discord their post, it is almost like you are asking them to take away their voice. You should read their post and apply their opinion to self improvement of yourself or your product. You should also engage this person directly with the end goal of really deeply understanding on a greater level the purpose of their displeasure to so you could understand their angle and learn from it. According to research done by Emarketer over 47% of companies actively engage the person who posted negative feedback on them. Reputation Management will only grow in the future and will soon replace traditional Public Relations as more and more people migrate their thoughts to social networks.
