Google Alert's Help Manage Your Online Reputation

 In Business

What is Online Reputation Management?

Reputation is defined as “the opinion or social evaluation of the group of entities toward a person, a group of people, or an organization.” When we talk about the reputation of a business, we are referring to how a company brand is perceived.

The reputation is built from what your customers are saying about your brand, what ex-employees are saying about the company, and what the competition is saying about you. A positive reputation brings trust, confidence, and sales, which are ultimately reflected in revenue growth and profitability. In contrast, a bad reputation can lead to a decrease in consumer confidence and a reduction in revenue and profits.

Building a reputation on the web is a growing concept. Information travels quickly across the internet through online conversations in forums, message boards, reviews, blogs, and other consumer driven sites. The online conversations include opinions that could positively or negatively affect your company’s reputation. Search engines include the consumer driven sites when they index, causing the positive or negative opinions to appear in search results for your company brand.

Online Reputation Management is a technique used to monitor and influence the opinions built on the web. It incorporates tools that allow you to observe what is being said about your company and to take action on outweighing the negative with the positive.

Why is Reputation Management important?

Today’s society is becoming more and more reliant on the web. Customers use the internet to research and make buying decisions. Even when purchasing products or services offline, they do the pre-work on the web. Whether it is comparing one company to another or determining the cheapest price of a product, the web gives customers on the spot information.

Any information available to your potential customers affects your reputation and their buying decisions. Say for instance, they do a search on your brand and the first result to come up is a negative review posted by a previous customer that was unhappy with your product or service. Not only will the negative remark influence their opinion of your brand, it will also cause them to look elsewhere.

Online Reputation Management is important because it gives your company a means to actively listen and monitor what is being said online. It creates an opportunity to participate in the conversation and take action on preventing any negative remarks from building an unwanted reputation.

What are Google Alerts and why are they important to Online Reputation Management?

Google Alerts is a free online tool that allows you to monitor any word or phrase on the web. The alerts are created through your Google account. Once you set up the words or phrases you want to monitor, Google will send you an email every time the word or phrase is mentioned online. It will include a link to the website so you can become involved in the conversation.

It is important to note that Google Alerts is solely a notification system. It does not add information about your company onto the web. It only notifies you of what information is already out there.

Google Alerts help with Reputation Management because they give you the opportunity to track what is being said about your company brand, your products or services, key employees, and the competition. The alerts present the positive and the negative so you can take action in influencing your reputation.

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Showing 7 comments
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