5 Essential Habits of Online Reputation Management

According to ReputationChanger.com, ORM is a paramount concern, not just for Fortune 100 brands and for political campaigns, but even for small business start-ups and individuals. Why is this? More than ever before, people are using the Internet to do all of their research, looking into products before they buy and looking into job applicants before they hire. What the Web says about your personal or corporate brand, then, could make or break you.

With that said, the best principles of online reputation management remain tricky to pin down; what can individuals and small companies do to develop positive online images, and keep negative comments at bay? This article reviews five bedrock principles of online reputation management. Read on.

It All Begins with Monitoring

To begin with, you cannot protect your reputation—or repair your reputation—unless you first know what that reputation is. That’s why online reputation monitoring is job #1. There are numerous online tools that make it easy to keep tabs on your reputation, ranging from Google and Bing Alerts to the Reputation Changer Command Center. Not only is this a critical step, but it is also an easy one—and all of these monitoring tools are free!

Defend Your Domains

The next step is to protect yourself from doppelganger domains—that is, online domains established in your name, and meant to defame you. This is an increasingly major problem that companies address; it can even impact individuals, especially if they share their name with infamous namesakes. Protect yourself by acquiring the rights to YourName.com, .net, and .org; or, for companies, get YourBrand.com, .net, and .org.

Broadcast Your Achievements

Establishing a positive online reputation means making your achievements well-known. There are a couple of online portals that will allow you to do so; establish profiles at Completed.com and LinkedIn, and use those sites to list all of your accomplishments, as an individual or as a business.

Build Robust Social Media Activity

Additionally, you can build a strong, authoritative online presence by cultivating strong social media activity. This means posting engaging and original content on a regular basis—daily, even. The more social networks you can implement, the better, but Facebook and Google+ are particularly essential.

Take Up Blogging

A final recommendation: Remember that keeping your name clean on Google means filling the search engines with positive content—and there is no better way to do that than by starting a blog. Make sure its domain and title match your name or company name, and make sure you’re updating it regularly, with brand-enhancing content.

Online reputation management is not something that can be reduced to a recipe or a magic formula; it is simply a matter of flooding the search engine algorithms with positive content, and ensuring that this positive content keeps negative listings at bay. ReputationChanger.com reviews all the latest ORM trends, and notes that these five tips remain tried-and-true principles of ORM.