Getting Creative With Online Reputation Management

A big part of establishing and maintaining the online reputation for your business or brand has to do with developing content online. That content must be creative, diverse, and represent your company and brand well. Many companies and organizations may not realize that establishing an online reputation is about creating content and building out social channels and websites online. It is about controlling the conversation online and telling consumers that are searching for information online about what your company is all about. Your company is the expert about itself, so you are the best entity to tell your story. Let everyone know what you do, what you are up to, and establish your credibility and reliability with creative content online.

Building Your Story

When it comes to building an online portfolio all about your company, organization, or brand, you want that portfolio of websites and social channels to accurately represent what you are about. Think of this as telling your story. The tone and writing style should reflect your company’s culture. Can someone reading about your company online get a sense of what you do, what you sell, or the services you offer? Are your employees and management introduced and spotlighted? Can they understand your company culture? All of these questions should be answered and fully explained in your online portfolio, which builds your organization’s reputation online. The more content you create to show your company in a

positive light, the less effect one or two negative postings from disgruntled customers will have. This is the basis for good reputation management. It is preventing problems from occurring and protecting your brand from would-be attacks on your reputation.

What Types of Creative Content?

The types of creative content will certainly also depend on your company culture and what you do. Regardless, though, it should still be a mixed media of creativity that shows off your company and what you do. In addition to writing and textual information, there should be plenty of imagery: photos of your headquarters, photos of employees, an image gallery in the “About Us” section can tell so much about your company. Remember that a picture is worth a thousand words. It can show your staff in suits and in impressive business roundtable meetings, or highlight the casual coffee house atmosphere of your office. No matter what your style is, this should come through in the photographs you use. In addition to pictures, there should be other graphic representations, which can be graphs and charts to show your company’s success, infographics, and graphic timeline of important events or dates in history for your company. Video is another excellent way to creatively build on your company’s reputation online by telling stories about your company or about what your company does.

Some other forms of content to consider:

Online PR

Document sharing

Company videos

Business profiles

Case Studies

eBooks

Creative Social Interactions

A big part of your company’s online reputations management takes place in social media channels. Your presence in social media helps to steer the conversation and allows you to engage and respond in real time. If you think that avoiding social channels will reduce or eliminate reputation management problems, think again. The truth is quite the opposite in fact, because consumers will be online talking about their experience with your company whether you are there to listen and react or not. So, you may as well come to grips with the fact that being there is half the battle and no matter what type of company you are, a social presence is very necessary. Today’s consumer wants to be able to see that you are real and that they can engage with you on social channels, if they chose. Many consumers will feel more comfortable about doing business with a company or brand if they have a social channel, even if they never “like” or engage with that brand on those channels at all. Many companies stay away from

social for fear they are inviting negative comments or complaints. Of course, the first step against that is delivering excellent customer experiences. Even still, we all know that you cannot please all people ,all the time. However, those few disgruntled customers complaining on social channels can snow ball into a larger problem if you are not already established and prepared with your arsenal of good and creative content across multiple channels. All of the pictures, graphics, video, and textual content builds up more positive than negative.

Conclusion and Takeaways

Hopefully you take away from this article that your online presence should not be boring. Mix it up with text, images, video, and pictures. The mix in media will help show the personality of your business, even if that is a very professional corporate environment. Use some creativeness to show the public and your potential customers what your company is about. When it comes to social, having a presence not only allows you to monitor and respond to consumer engagement there in real time, but it allows you to represent your company in creative ways and show a personality – even if that personality is a corporate professional that you would not imagine uses social channels. Having that social presence can help instill confidence in consumers and increase sales.