The Reputation Management Blog

Reputation capital is the value of the intangible assets of a business. Anything from reviews to brand identity can build reputation capital, and it all boils down to one word: trust. How much do people trust your business? The more trust there is in your business, the greater its reputation capital.

• A positive reputation enables you to better control your prices, and achieve industry recognition and thought leadership.
• Businesses with a strong reputation capital can overcome a crisis easier than those with negative reputations.
• Reputation capital is both one of the most important aspects of any business and the most difficult to quantify.

If you're here, you probably know exactly why reputation's such a big deal in 2020. You want you or your company to have access to the best opportunities, and a bad reputation can prevent that. A great reputation will open doors to fantastic opportunities and (if you're a business) unhindered access to your ideal client base.

Your reputation is the single-most important aspect of your business. It affects everything from the number of followers on social media to your overall business revenue. Here are just a few other benefits of a good reputation:

• More business opportunities
• A better selection of prospective employees
• Higher company value
• Lower marketing costs

What is Reputation? Reputation is the subjective qualitative belief a person has regarding a brand, person, company, product, or service. Reputation is the key to success.

Reputation is best defined as a third-party perception of your, or your brands, character. It is a malleable thing. Malleable by others, or by you. This is because today, people depend on Google to make decisions for them. Whether you're selling water or running for President, your online reputation precedes you. By changing how Google portrays a brand you can change one of the main ways people perceive reputation.

Your online identity is how others see you.

In today’s digital environment, reputation is more important, more pervasive, more unforgettable, and more meaningful than ever. It's difficult to build, enhance, sustain, and protect a reputation that'll last (even for a reputation management agency). It’s also easy to neglect, abuse, reject, or shred a reputation in just a short amount of time. A disaster can happen in minutes, circle the globe within hours, and live on to haunt your search results. That's why it's so important to maintain an active reputation management strategy.

Let's unpack what reputation really is.

Well-written but less-than compelling content won't generate user signals to improve branded search results.

A great brand story improves click-rates, increases dwell time, reduces bounce rate, helps branded content rank better in search results, and lowers the cost of promoting online content because it gets people to do much of the work.

One of the first questions we get from most of our reputation management clients is, “How long will reputation management take?” (The next question is of course "How much does ORM cost?")

Their anxiety is understandable considering that more than 80% of consumers now search Google before doing business with a company. What Google’s first page says about your business practically determines how potential clients and partners see you. And this is why determining just how long it will take to conquer that first page and secure your brands online reputation is not as simple as you might think.

ORM, PR, and SEO -- what are all of these acronyms for? Let's break them down, and then delve deeper into how they all fit together.

1. ORM: (Online reputation management) is the repair and maintenance of a person, company, or other entity's online image.
2. PR: (Public relations) is the how organizations, businesses and people communicate with the public and media.
3. SEO: (Search Engine Optimization) is the effort made by online content creators (of words, images, videos, or other media) to help a website rank higher in search engine results.

PR, SEO and ORM are all specialized disciplines of online marketing.

Do you define your reputation, or does your reputation define you? Do you control it, or does someone else? The good news is that perception can flow in both directions - for example when a business or person works to actively curate or repair their own reputation.

Summary of the Streisand Effect

On May 30th, 2003 it was reported that Barbra Streisand sued a man claiming an invasion of her privacy because he had shared aerial pictures of her Malibu home. Streisand inadvertently attracted more attention to her home by trying to suppress the images. The Streisand Effect is when the action of suppressing something to reduce or remove visibility it causes the opposite to happen. Similar terms include blowback and astroturfing. 

Our client is a global PR firm with clients in the US, Europe and Middle East. Over the years we have been tasked with a number of interesting projects ranging from helping politicians succeed to boosting search results in Thai and improving search results to enhance hiring. This case study examines a project to clean up search results for a company with detractors using YouTube, blogs and complaint websites.

Launching an online reputation marketing campaign is a great way to raise your personal or corporate profile and ensure that you’re controlling the online conversation around your key search terms. But with so much chaos and clutter in the digital world, the idea of carving out a positive space for you or your company—a fortress of digital brand authority that suppresses negative content and introduces you to others on the best possible terms—seems daunting, even laughable.

But it’s doable.