Online Reputation Management: 8 Steps to Build and Protect Your Brand Image

Online reputation management (ORM) is all about controlling the online narrative around your business.

Almost 80% of EU businesses have an online presence to meet demand from the 86% of internet users across the continent. Google and social media are now two of the most common avenues for audiences to learn about businesses and their products and services.

While the internet acts as a virtual storefront for millions of businesses, it’s also a place where reputations can rise and fall instantly.

One scandal can go viral and swiftly harm a brand’s reputation. A good news story, meanwhile, could catapult a brand into the public eye and generate huge success.

Your online reputation is about how your business is perceived online – from customer reviews and social media mentions to news articles and search engine results. Brands need a strong strategy to cover all the bases and ensure problems don’t become reputation-threatening crises.

This guide walks you through the eight steps to managing online reputation so you can stay ahead of the game. Let's get started.

What is online reputation management?

Online reputation management is the practice of creating and maintaining a positive public perception of your business online. It involves monitoring and influencing how your brand is presented across the internet.

This spans everything from search engines to social media, review platforms, news sites, and anywhere people talk about your company. In short, ORM means taking control of your brand’s narrative on the web.

Media managers must oversee the entire media landscape to ensure their brand’s reputation is healthy. There are ways you can influence public perception directly, such as publishing content via your owned media channels (website, blog, and social media profiles).

You can also achieve earned media via organic mentions of your brand by others. It includes things like press coverage, word-of-mouth referrals, backlinks to your site, and customer testimonials or reviews on third-party sites.

Shared media helps generate positivity via user-generated content, where audiences share their positive views of your brand. If you’re savvy, you’ll repost and highlight shared media to expand its reach.

And finally, there’s paid media. Advertising remains a vital element of online reputation management – even in the age of ad blockers and ad-free subscription services. While paid media is primarily advertising, it plays a role in ORM because it allows you to shape the narrative directly.

By following the PESO model – Paid, Earned, Shared, Owned media – you can get a complete picture of your brand’s online reputation and influence it on all fronts.

How does online reputation management work?

Proactivity is at the heart of online reputation management. It’s about consistently putting your best foot forward online and engaging with what others are saying.

Think of it like tending a garden: you plant and nurture the flowers (positive content and customer experiences) and promptly remove the weeds (resolving issues that could harm your image).

Doing it effectively requires software to help you disseminate good news stories and product launches while spotting and addressing reputational risks.

This is where tools like Brandwatch and CisionOne come in handy. They cover the entire media landscape, from social media to traditional forms like newspapers and TV shows.

Armed with the right tools, you can promote and publish the positive things about your brand. Publish content on your owned media channels and liaise with journalists to ensure great earned media coverage.

You can monitor online conversations and run sentiment analysis to see what audiences feel about your brand. It’s then a lot easier to engage with your audience and align your strategy to suit their needs.

Your brand’s reputation can rise and fall depending on how well you handle negative feedback. There are tools that can help you respond to critical comments or queries, with artificial intelligence helping to streamline the customer care process if you’re handling a large number of conversations.

Look after your audience, and you’ll achieve better-shared media while adding a dose of paid media into the mix to keep brand awareness high.

Now, let’s break down a step-by-step strategy that you can use to manage your own online reputation proactively.

Building an online reputation management strategy

Getting started with online reputation management can feel daunting, but breaking it into clear steps is easier. Below is a step-by-step guide to creating and executing an ORM strategy.

These steps are designed to help businesses of all sizes – from small local shops to large enterprises – protect and enhance their online presence.

1. Audit your current online presence

The first stage of any strategy is to step back and understand your current position. Audit your brand’s existing online reputation and ask: What are people saying about us, and where are they saying it?

This audit will reveal both the strengths you can build on and the weaknesses you need to address.

Use a listening tool to start the auditing process. A platform like Brandwatch Consumer Research can automatically collect mentions of your brand across millions of online sources, including social media, blogs, news, and forums.

Pull all the data into one dashboard so you can see everything together. This way, instead of manually searching every corner of the internet, you can get a holistic view of your online reputation in one place. 

You can also run competitor analysis and see what other brands in your industry are doing with their online reputation.

By the end of the audit, you should clearly understand where your brand stands online: the good, the bad, and the neutral. This sets the foundation for all the work ahead.

2. Develop your strategy

Once you have your data, it’s time to strategize. To do this, analyze your findings and identify major themes within the audit.

What are the positive and negative things said about your brand? Are there product issues or shipping complaints? Does your product or service provide excellent value? Are there any misconceptions or inaccuracies being spread?

Compare these findings to your desired brand identity and values. Are there gaps between how you want to be seen and how you are seen?

From here, you can develop a strategy for aligning your online reputation. Draw up a priority list that addresses quick fixes, underlying issues, and highlights to amplify.

You’ll soon have a list of negative things to address and positive things to shout about.

The next step is to plan how you’ll proactively tackle each item on the list. This will likely involve creating content, engaging with audiences, and figuring out how to respond to issues – all things found in later steps.

3. Create quality content that reflects your brand

Managing your online reputation needs quality content that accurately depicts your brand’s standards. A multinational corporation can’t get away with cheap-looking content these days.

You’re in control of your owned and paid media, so make sure it looks the same.

Think of content as your brand’s voice. If you’re not talking about your own business online, someone else will do it for you – and you might not like what they say.

Start by brainstorming content ideas that mirror your brand identity and address the themes you found in your analysis.

From there, you can create blog posts and articles to sit on your website, which improves search engine optimization (SEO) and promotes your brand how you want it. You can develop eye-catching and interactive social media content, which helps build an audience.

You can send journalists press releases and interesting news stories to secure some positive earned media coverage.

And, of course, you can develop ads that sell your brand the way you want it to be perceived.

The ideation stage is often the hardest part of content creation but also the most important. Ensure your content matches your strategy, and you’ll create something that genuinely resonates with your audience.

4. Optimize your search engine presence (SEO)

This is a crucial aspect of online reputation management. SEO is about ensuring your brand, products, and services topGoogle’s results when people search for you, your products and services, or your industry.

Optimizing your website is a good place to start. Ensure it’s easy for Google to crawl through and has relevant keywords in titles and headings. Fix technical issues and follow SEO best practices (like descriptive meta tags and using schema markup for things like reviews on your site) to improve the chances that your own pages rank highly.

Be sure to secure your brand’s domain and profiles, too. Your official website must appear as the top result for your brand name; otherwise, it will look unprofessional. Claim your business profiles on platforms like Google Business Profile (for Google Maps results), LinkedIn, and Meta to create a more holistic online presence.

5. Engage with your audience on social media

A lot of the work you’ve done so far has been about building the background assets that help improve your online brand reputation. Now, it’s time to get stuck into audience engagement.

It’s vital to actively engage with your audience on social platforms and be more engaged, responsive, and authentic in interactions.

The aim is to avoid simply broadcasting marketing messages. While you should publish high-quality content and promote your wares on social media, you must do unplanned work, too.

This means responding to comments and messages – whether they’re critical or positive. You need to participate in conversations beyond your direct mentions and be seen to be part of the community.

Encourage UGC by rejoicing in positive reviews or comments, perhaps even rewarding those who engage in social media competitions or challenges.

Make sure you stay human while doing all this. AI is great for responding to initial concerns or redirecting people to customer service, but it can’t replicate genuine interactions. 

Remember, every interaction on social media is a chance to either reinforce or repair your reputation. A quick, thoughtful reply can turn a neutral observer into a fan.

On the other hand, ignoring someone’s public complaint can be more damaging than the complaint itself. You build a reputation for excellent customer care and approachability by being active and engaged.

6. Respond to negative reviews, bad press, and feedback constructively

There isn’t a brand in the world that is immune to negativity and bad customer feedback. Shutting it out and ignoring it only makes the problem worse. If a brand cares about its customers, it needs to prove it.

Whether it’s a one-star review on Google, a critical tweet, or a disappointed blog post, what truly defines your reputation is how you handle these negatives.

You can tackle small, individual issues one step at a time. Stay calm and professional, and reach out to whoever is being critical. Apologise and explain the situation before promising a resolution.

Remember to take the conversation offline where needed. You might be deadline with a major accusation that shouldn’t be aired in the public domain. Or you might simply want to prevent others from seeing negative feedback.

Dealing appropriately with individual cases usually ends in a calm resolution. In the best cases, your critics become your brand advocates!

What happens if a big crisis hits? Using a tool like Brandwatch, you can spot a social media storm or PR disaster before it gets too big. It’s worth having a crisis management plan in place to address escalating problems and protect your reputation as quickly as possible.

7. Amplify and leverage coverage to boost positive reputation

It’s natural to sweat about managing negative coverage when there is a deadline with a brand’s online reputation – but don’t forget the good things!

Positive reviews and satisfied customer experiences are your reputation’s best friend – they’re like little beacons of trust scattered across the internet.

By promoting and leveraging these positive moments, you can strengthen your brand’s image and encourage even more goodwill.

It also makes your owned media far more believable if you can back it up with other people’s advocacy.

Start with showcasing testimonials and success stories. We do it at Brandwatch! There’s no better way to show your positive impact on customers than to ask your customers to share their experiences.

You can also encourage satisfied customers to speak up and reward them for their advocacy. Giving them prompts could even transform a positive post into something shareable on your social media platforms.

By amplifying positive reviews, you help drown out any negative noise with a chorus of praise while validating potential customers’ decision to choose you. This is known as social proof and can be hugely influential.

Moreover, promoting good reviews often encourages more to leave their own positive customer feedback – people like to join in when they see others speaking up.

It’s a virtuous cycle: great service leads to great reviews, which leads to more customers and more great reviews.

8. Monitor and maintain your reputation over time

Online reputation management is not a one-and-done project – it’s an ongoing commitment.

Once you’ve done your background research, set your strategy, and published your content, it’s time to monitor and maintain it all. 

Think of it like physical fitness. You don’t stop going to the gym once you get in shape; you keep up the habit of staying in shape.

Similarly, you must regularly watch over your brand’s online image to ensure it’s in top form.

To do this, set up a monitoring tool like Brandwatch Consumer Research to get real-time alerts and in-depth analysis of brand mentions across social media, news, blogs, and more.

Be consistent in your posting schedules and address concerns proactively rather than waiting to respond to crises.

Track your performance over time and use in-depth data to spot gaps in your service. Over time, your online reputation should improve, using sentiment analysis and feedback as a guide.

Keep learning and improving to generate better brand awareness and customer service. Use your findings to build a crisis management strategy for when something bad happens so you’re insulated from the worst of the fallout.

In maintaining your reputation, the goal is to catch any issues early and keep the positive momentum going.

By continuously monitoring, you ensure that you’re never blindsided by what customers are saying. It also allows you to celebrate and amplify new positive stories that emerge over time.

Take charge of your reputation management today

By proactively implementing the above mentioned strategies, you can take charge of the narrative and foster a positive online reputation that opens doors for your company.

Listen to your audience, learn from feedback, engage authentically, and consistently put your best foot forward.

Online reputation management is an ongoing journey of improvement and engagement, and it pays off immensely in customer trust and loyalty.

With Brandwatch Consumer Research, you gain access to deep consumer insights and social listening capabilities, allowing you to monitor your brand’s reputation across millions of sources in real-time.

With Brandwatch Social Media Management, your team can efficiently manage and respond to all your social media engagements in one place, ensuring no customer interaction goes unnoticed.

Let us help you turn the vast world of online conversations into actionable insights and positive outcomes for your business.

With the right strategy and tools, you can ensure your brand is seen the way it truly deserves to be – and that’s something worth striving for.