Michelle Rodger: A virtual reputation has to be founded on traditional values

Published on Saturday 10 April 2010 14:02

YOU'VE heard of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)? Doubtless some of you will have thrown a pretty penny at achieving the ultimate SEO with scarcely a ROI (return on investment). Well apparently it's useless without ORM (Online Reputation Management).

If you think I'm lost in a sea of confusing acronyms you'd be correct. At least I was before I began to realise that a lot of it is smoke and mirrors conjured up to create an illusion that you need gurus, expensive social media gods, to sprinkle their wisdom over your website like fairy dust and magic up a number one Google ranking.

It's not true.

ORM is about trust. It's about integrity. It's about engaging honestly, openly and passionately with customers, potential customers and employees, and the best social media guru in the world won't be able to help you unless your business has engagement, enthusiasm and focus on customer excellence and exciting communication at its core.

Which is why Nestl stuffed up big time. If you haven't read the fallout online, the story is this: Nestl's Facebook Fan page was deluged with criticisms on deforestation, sustainability and poor social media relations. Greenpeace was allegedly behind the organised social attack, which spurred a mass of online criticism – and Nestl's comms team responded defensively, almost aggressively, and the result was a flurry of comments that were negative at the very least.

Regardless who was behind the attack, Nestl responded poorly and left the field wide open for detractors to have a go. The jury is out on the long-term cost of damage to the corporate brand and customer loyalty.

But Nestl is just the latest in a long line of corporates who rushed to engage with social media without ensuring that the engagement they craved was being cultivated by people who cared. Faced with Facebook-fan and Twitter-follower envy, big fools rush online without a clear strategy and without ensuring that they've joined all the offline dots first.

And if the big boys working with big budgets and expensive consultants aren't prepared for organised social attacks, how on earth can SMEs cope? All it takes is a disgruntled ex-employee, a dissatisfied client or a supplier that hasn't been paid and your reputation – online and off – is in tatters.

Neil MacLean, founder of Reputation Plus, says Nestl learned the hard way that social media can spark a digital forest fire that will burn right up to your gates if you don't meet it quickly and early and show a bit of intelligence. In fact, he reckons Nestl's digital team seemed to have kerosene in their water pistols.

"The thing about online reputation is that it has a direct connection with your business accounts. People buy more and will pay a higher price when a company has a great reputation," he said. "There are too many examples now of online damage hurting the bottom-line for us to ignore the correlation.

"Ignoring social media is not the answer. People will still talk about you when you are out of the room. You just won't be there to influence the conversation."

All too often companies think that younger members of the team are best placed to handle the new touchy-feely-techie approach to communications. Wrong. Don't put the tea boy in charge of your digital communications just because he has a Facebook account, warns MacLean, who recently met a Glasgow business team who wanted to put their work experience new start in charge of the brand's Twitter strategy.

"I checked; he had five friends on his own account and I suspect one of them was his mother," says MacLean.

Joking aside, there are too many people out there making money from the fact that they are perceived as experts in an emerging field.

You can't assume that any PR company that has recently tacked a social media module on to its list of products and services will be the right business to help you build online relationships. Many of them, says MacLean, are just one step ahead of their clients.

SEO without ORM just doesn't work. Traditional sales, marketing and social conversations with customers, existing and potential, are key and should be aligned with any online strategy.

Gordon MacIntyre-Kemp, founder of First Tuesday, who claims to have invented the term online reputation management, has been preaching the benefits of ORM for some time. Now MD of Intelligise, a business development consultancy, MacIntyre-Kemp believes it's all about whether or not your business looks like one someone would want to engage with.

Do you have a good reputation – offline as well as on – do you have a good brand, do you have case studies and references from clients? Is there internal trust? Do people have the right credibility and accreditation?

It all goes to the DNA of the company. The first place people look when they are considering a new supplier is online. They Google you, or look for you on LinkedIn. This is where you can engage with people in the decision-making process and respond to both negative and positive comments. They start to see you as a company they want to do business with.

You have to be social, insists MacIntyre-Kemp, and that means not just holding and attending seminars, events and exhibitions, but videoing and putting them on YouTube, Tweeting where you are having these events, and putting feedback on your blogs. It all comes together as one, he says, creating a positive message, sharing knowledge and engaging and answering questions.

"If people see you as engaging they will engage with you – that's inbound marketing and the benefits are significant.

"When your sales person goes in he doesn't have to go from zero to hero to close the sale because the foundations are already in place."

In the run-up to the general election with many MPs, and indeed senior politicians, embarking on a social media strategy to woo voters it will be interesting to see just how their online reputation management – without the integrity, honesty and passion they lost offline – actually works. I suspect it won't.