Reputation management is about taking an active role in the perception of your brand. It should be noted that you cannot control everything being said about your brand online, but by actively listening, participating in conversations with both fans and detractors, and promoting and distributing positively charged content you can better manage your brand’s reputation online.

IMPACT ON SALES

Would you buy something from a company where 5 out of 6 customer ratings blasted the company for poor customer service, lousy quality or late delivery? Probably not. You might search a little longer for a company that didn’t have such bad customer reviews and you might even be willing to pay a bit more if you knew the company had a solid reputation. This negative feedback can directly impact sales.

IDENTIFY

A new blog is created every six seconds. Many of those will not amass a large enough audience to worry about. But there will be a number of blogs and forums where there is a good-sized audience, who are engaged and active within the online community. Some ways to measure engagement include the number of pages viewed in a session or the amount of time the average visitor spends on the site. The more pages viewed and/or time spent on site, the more engaged that audience will be. The social media space is made up of a lot of moving parts and can be daunting to try and control. Your efforts should be focused on those blogs, forums and sites that have the largest, most vocal audiences, as these will be the places where conversations about your brand are most visible.