“It takes twenty years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.” – Warren Buffett
In the current world of digital advancement, the Online Reputation of every business is crucial to its survival in the longer run. A consumer’s trust and certainty profoundly affect the organization’s primary concern for doing business. It is significant to keep the reputation intact as the business is at stake. Indeed, even high profile personalities and elite companies have to continuously monitor reactions of buyers or followers to keep up their reputation all over the internet. Reputation, in the earlier years, was based on the degree of how much satisfied the stakeholders are. But, this perception has quite changed and moved towards a customer centric approach on how people (generally the customer) perceive you/your brand over the internet.
A company lands up into a bad internet reputation when there is a breach of trust on the customer’s end and he/she ends up writing a negative review of you online. There are audit destinations actually for each business in the market and they have customers talking and examining the administrations and items offered by the company. A negative review has a tendency to spread quickly, easily and damage the reputation of the company. Hence it is significant to monitor and respond to negative reviews.
Let’s look at some of the drawbacks of having a bad reputation online.
Rise of Scepticism:
We are in a world where businesses talk and work around the concept of developing faith in consumers through their engagements on social media channels. These thoughts have given the world new opportunities like brand association, brand equity, brand loyalty and many more. While advertising a product, businesses often tend to give false hopes to customers which they later find difficult to fulfil. This leads to mistrust of the customers and once it happens it is difficult to objectify the above-mentioned opportunities.
Deprivation of Company’s Intangible asset i.e. Employees:
We all prefer to buy products from companies that have a good reputation in the market. Similarly, we all want to work for a company which has a good reputation both online and offline. Individuals working for a company with bad reputation might start questioning their own products which will eventually lead to people quitting jobs. Hence, it is important for an online reputation monitoring system to inculcate positives and clean negatives to retain employees of a company.
Deterioration in Search Results:
A terrible online reputation can diminish a website ranking on engines like Google and Bing. Clients and customers are bound to proceed with products or services offered on the initial three pages of the web pages. They are more averse to jump to the second page on their first pursuit. A terrible online reputation can make the organization’s site rank on the third or fourth page or even a page past it.
The Transactional Loss:
80% of the customers look and analyse the reviews on your products and services before buying anything from you. Positive reviews do play a role while negative reviews easily affect the sentiments of the potential customer’s willingness to associate with your brand. Reviews can be regarded as word-of-mouth for the online world. Negative publicity has a huge tendency to decrease your sales and hamper your reputation in the longer run.
You would have understood by now how costly and time-consuming affair is brand reputation monitoring in the long run which might have been damaged if not taken preventive measures at the right time. The type of expertise needed to deal with a company’s reputation is generally difficult to maintain by the company’s itself. Online reputation management deals with addressing damaging content associated with your brand and using customer feedback to solve problems hampering online brand reputation.
With the concept of outsourcing emerging in the 21st century, many companies consult agencies to provide online brand reputation management services. Online reputation management agencies provide this technical expertise and help maintain your strong reputation sensibly.
Online Reputation Manage has a team of experts and all effective tools for best online reputation management. We deal with everything related to your brand’s value in the online community. We also have a blog on Techniques to Improve Online Reputation.This community comprises search engines, online forums, blogs and of course, social media. They serve the purpose of their diverse clients from the Fortune 500 list.
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