Protecting a company’s online reputation is necessary to grow a brand in the 21st century. Although a cogent argument can be made that peer to peer word of mouth is still the most effective advertising, the online reputations of businesses are quickly becoming the top determining factor in attracting new consumers. A positive or negative online review will live on virtually forever in cyberspace, swaying the opinions of future potential customers for years to come. A negative online review has a permanence that word of mouth does not. A reviewer might have visited a restaurant and written a negative review because of other factors in their life that day and then visited the restaurant a few more times and loved the food. Perhaps they neglected to go back and edit their original review or post a new positive review. This type of problem presents significant challenges to business owners and is compounded by the fact that consumers are more likely to complain and post negative reviews when they have an unpleasant experience than they are to rave about an excellent product or experience.
Especially for an early stage business, unjust negative online reviews can significantly affect revenues. This is because larger companies have received more online reviews so the damage of a negative review is lessened by the sheer number of voices on the Internet, whereas a smaller company relies heavily on each review and online mention. Protecting online reputations is crucial for small and medium sized companies as they seek to grow.
No company has the time to assign an employee to manually search for online reviews constantly. The depth of publicly available social media conversations, threads and wall posts alone is daunting without even factoring in posts on specialized review sites. There are over 300 million tweets per day on twitter alone. That’s well over 3,000 tweets per second. Companies also don’t have the proprietary software to automate a coherent search for reviews and online mentions. Reputationobserver not only tracks all online activity related to a client company, they also have effective strategies for countering negative reviews and boosting a company’s online reputation. The software can even ferret out obscure reviews and posts related to the company. Reputationobserver’s software has the ability to analyze online mentions and categorize them, adding a useful data metric for executives, one that can be measured daily. This real time tool improves response time to consumer issues in addition to tracking online opinion. Particularly during product launches or other sensitive blocks of time like the holidays, fast and accurate analysis of consumer sentiment is crucial to profit margins. The data provided by Reputationobserver’s sustainable reputation platform is a powerful tool for companies requiring instant feedback.
Reputationobserver also helps protect intellectual property rights online. A company’s brand is its rightful property and can’t be exploited by other companies or used without permission. Affiliate companies could generate negative feedback or take actions that do not mesh with a certain brand’s public image. Copyrighted media can also be stolen. Reputationobserver’s platform seeks out brand abusers and instances of copyright infringement and automatically sends out cease and desist notices. The combination of raw data gathering ability and active reputation protection make Reputationobserver a potent tool for combating negative and harmful online activity.
