Online Reputation Monitoring

Every single day, someone, somewhere is discussing something important to your business, brand, industry and to your competitors. Conversations might vary from person to person. Usually people express their thoughts on variety of brands, their experience with various products. All these conversations might not affect directly but indirectly it affects future buying decisions of the customer. Because we all have an apt to take negative things bit seriously just to be on safer side.

So it’s very important to keep a tab on what people talk about your product. May be people have wrong perception about your product or a bad experience with product, which is indulging them to spread negative thoughts about the same. Therefore it is needed to identify these conversations and try to tell them the reality, the facts. To begin monitor their conversations, identify the negative ones and try to convert them into positive.

Overall Consumer Generated Media Tips:

· Investigate facts internally before taking action

· Be honest!

· Explain what you have done to rectify any issue

· Offer to resolve any complaints personally - have a senior-level staff member make the offer - try to continue discussion offline

· Rally friends, clients, peers and utilize your allies

· Don’t create new “personas” to support your position in blogs, forums and message boards as you’ll likely be caught

How to conduct outreach to Consumer Generated Media (CGM)

Forums, user groups and message boards:

· Task someone in-house with joining and participating in any applicable forums or user groups.

o When trouble strikes, impact will be reduced if someone from your organization is a regular contributor (has credibility already) and can voice your company’s side of the story.

· Consider sponsoring most influential forums.

o Less likely to see sustained criticism if you are a supporter/sponsor.

· Build alliances/partnerships with most vocal members.

Blogs:

· If a blog post is factually incorrect

o Ask for removal or retraction and send supporting evidence.

o Offer to keep blogger informed of future news

· If blog post is true, but negative

o Send your side of the story.

o Explain how you are addressing the situation.

o Add comment to post.

o Indicate your willingness to receive any email questions - take it offline.

Balancing Negative CGM:

· If it’s true:

o Don’t ignore or hide

o Participate in the discussion and be honest

o Add response to your web site

o Issue statement addressing what has been done

o Engage crisis communication expert with CGM experience

· If it’s not true

o Politely request blog, forum, news site owner remove or retract

o Consult a lawyer

o Contact other blog and forum owners with correct information

o Ask them to consider publishing your response

This is about monitoring and overcoming negative conversations but monitoring in itself is a tedious job unless and until we don’t know the online tools available. Few tips are

· Subscribe for RSS feeds

· Sign up for Google and Yahoo email alerts using your desired keywords

· Determine message boards/forums to track

· Determine groups to track

So here you go to read the complete article, which is enlightening. Source

This is all about negative conversations and negative speakers; but personally what I feel is even the positive speakers of brand, deserve attention they can’t be ignored. Patting on their back doesn’t put us into loss but it might create better image, better relationship and it might generate brand advocates to the product.