In my last blog post I mentioned that reputation management would be the next topic I would discuss.  So, here it goes….

Reputation management is simply the process of being strategic in how you portray your brand online (and offline) and having a system for tracking and responding to information that may be posted by other people or organizations that runs contrary to how you want your brand to be portrayed.

Over the past few years, reputation management has become a very important part of a company’s online marketing strategy.  With the emergence of Web 2.0 and the internet becoming a two-way street for information, so to speak, internet users now have the ability to broadcast their opinions to thousands of people.

As I mentioned in my previous post, the use of social media to promote your business can enable a company to foster an environment in which “brand advocates,” or simply put, people who are very enthusiastic about your brand,  can “virally” spread positive word-of-mouth advertising to their personal and professional networks, which could contain thousands of people.
Although this is an extremely powerful and inexpensive form of advertising, it also creates channels with which individuals who are not an advocate of your brand can spread negative and potentially damaging information and opinions about your company and brand.

The open nature of the internet combined with the power of Google make it easy to find out what is being said about your brand.  How you choose to respond is up to you.  The best way to combat negative information is to prevent it from being posted in the first place, but this isn’t realistic.  Even the most admired companies will have negative things posted about them.  The goal then becomes one of getting the positive posts to outnumber the negative.  If someone is doing research on you and your competitors and come across 1 negative opinion and 100 positive opinion they will most likely consider the negative comment to be an outlier and not a good representation of your brand.

Although it could be impossible to respond to every negative post about your brand, it is important to respond to as many as possible.  In doing so, try not to take the negative post personally, but rather be consultative and non-threatening in your reply.  If the user had a bad experience, apologize and offer something that will encourage them to give your brand another chance.  I would also try to create a dialogue with the individual in an effort to get to the bottom of their dissatisfaction and express your interest in their opinion and how important it is to you and in efforts being made to ensure a better experience for others in the future.

To me, this is the best form of reputation management and an excellent example of a company using Twitter as a reputation management tool is Comcast .  It is very simple to  create a real-time search of instances on Twitter in which your company’s name is discussed.  Comcast will then respond to any issues customers may be experiencing with their service and offer suggestions on how to fix them.

For more information on how Comcast uses Twitter as a reputation management tool, check out my previous blog post which contains an excerpt of, and link to, an article on BusinessWeek.com.

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