Online reputation management has become an extremely powerful word when it comes to brand management and promotion. Today, a brand, regardless of the industry or sector to which it belongs, must allocate a portion of its expenses to promoting the brand online and, more importantly, to direct the perception of the brand to obtain Favorable results. Online reputation management has gone from being an option to becoming a necessity. Nowadays, people spend a huge amount of time on different blogs or social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. People shape the perception of brands and influence others online. People can share information in the blink of an eye and also between geographic locations.
There is more than meets the eye! Previously, it was easy for companies, especially those in high-tech based industries, such as those involved in the manufacture of mobile phones, televisions and computers; first introduce their products in developed countries and then, when the technology became obsolete, dump them in developing countries. The digital medium has completely changed the whole ball game of selling and buying goods. Now, an outdated technology that finds its way into a developing country and sells for a high price has to face repercussions that may be much more damaging to them than they can imagine. Not only will the product in question be condemned, but the brand itself would be marginalized.
Since the process of launching new technology simultaneously around the world is happening very gradually, so to speak, digital means are sought to maintain decorum in the internet space. So, comes the savior “Online Reputation Management”. This can be done in two ways. One is to monitor what’s happening on the internet and then respond to people’s complaints. The second is to create as many properties in the internet space as possible and rank them on the first page for certain phrases that potential customers like you and I are going to put on Google or any other reputable search engine.
The main problem is not really labor, because this problem can easily be addressed by companies based in developed countries that outsource work to developing countries. The bone of contention is how accurately do you spot relevant queries across the internet and where are people actually talking about the brand? Huge amounts of data to view and process, and you may be talking about products that can cause problems for many brands simultaneously. For example: if a certain financial instrument is being condemned in a forum where there are hundreds of members and thousands still landing on the page via search engines day after day, all companies in the industry are going to have a hard time. . ! And these forums could be talking specifically about the financial instrument in question with experts from all over the world talking about it and giving their expert comments. However, if in these circumstances one of the brands allocates a part of its spending to alleviate this problem, in turn it also helps its rivals. Such is the paradox! But in case the brand in question is a market leader by a wide margin and mainly due to the financial instrument in question, then it turns out to be a much more advantageous proposition for the brand than the compensation caused by online reputation management.
Thus arises the need for tools based on Online Reputation Management. There are many online reputation control and management tools on the market, but none are good enough. More often than not, they choose sentences that have no real meaning for the brand in question. These tools take keywords and search the internet for those keywords. Keywords in layman terms is a “word” or “phrase” that best represents the brand and is highly searched for. Generally, a keyword, as far as ORM tools are concerned, is the name of the brand itself. Now these tools give you access to charts and excel sheets that give information like; sentiments in the internet space, pie charts representing geographic distribution around the world, excel sheets providing links to the keywords in question, and many other sophisticated analyses. But the important thing to keep in mind is that these tools can never measure the emotions and psychology of the people who write it. Therefore, most of the time an erroneous analysis is performed. These tools are nothing more than scripts and thousands of codes written to crawl websites, but they don’t feel the sentiments behind the mentions. In making these tools efficient, natural language processing will play a critical role. The day is not far off when these tools will be so efficient that they will become the main factor in influencing consumer buying behavior.