Increase your online reputation: tips, best practices, tools & software

QuestionPro's CX software with innovative reputation management tools can help you easily and effectively monitor and improve your online reputation. Be informed about bad reviews in rating portals and social media platforms and react immediately to negative ratings and reviews. We also introduce you to other tools and software.

What does 'online reputation' mean?

Reputation or online reputation is the opinion, idea or concept that people form about an institution, brand, company or person based on their experiences with them. It is important to realise that online reputation is not under the absolute control of the subject or organisation. Beyond the image projected by the brand or company itself, online reputation also consists of the messages, comments and opinions expressed by third parties on social networks, forums, blogs, review portals and online media. However, a good online reputation can be maintained if you are visible through well-positioned content, act transparently, have a solid and loyal customer base and listen very carefully to what people are saying about your company, brands and products. This is especially important on the internet, where it is very easy to generate information and opinions through platforms such as forums, blogs or social networks, rating portals and easily damage the good reputation of brands and people. Therefore, it is very important for companies to monitor and act on these digital spaces, for example by responding to negative comments and entering into a dialogue with their critics. And that is the task of Reputation Management (also Online Reputation Management (ORM) of a company).

What is reputation management?

Reputation management can be defined as the conscious control and influencing of the reputation of companies, organisations and individuals. Reputation management thus includes planning, controlling, building, monitoring and ultimately maintaining a positive reputation.

Why is reputation management more important now than ever before?

Branding alone is no longer enough today

So-called branding, where a company builds its brand by developing and communicating certain values and characteristics that make users identify the brand and distinguish it from the competition, is no longer enough, as consumers have their own opinions and publicly share these opinions and likewise the experiences they have had with your company. So your own share of influence in shaping the online reputation of companies has dramatically decreased.

Your company's online reputation exists outside of your own perception

Regardless of the size of your company, you can be sure that people are talking about your company on the Internet. Customers share their experiences in public networks or rating portals. This public opinion does not have to match the values and ideas you have about your company. The impact of public opinions on social networks or rating portals should therefore not be underestimated. The viral nature of today's information can do a lot of damage to your business from one moment to the next. Think of the many shitstorms on social networks. Your reputation is a reflection of the overall health of your brand and business (brand health) and therefore an important indicator of success and growth potential. This is why reputation management to influence consumer perceptions of your online reputation is so important.

Customers read public comments and reviews in order to decide on a product. That is a fact!

Thanks to the information available on the internet, customers are educated, highly informed and make quick decisions. One of the most valuable sources of information is the content generated by other users, i.e. what is said about your brand in reviews and social networks and how you are rated online. These public reviews contribute significantly to your online reputation. If potential customers don't like what they read, they will go to the competition. Reputation management allows companies to use data from consumer and brand interactions to improve brand awareness and customer experience.

Tips, tools, apps and software for your reputation management to improve your online reputation

Below you will find some best practices and valuable tips, tools and software for your reputation management.

• Don't wait until you face a bad review or hear negative comments to start improving your online reputation. Build a sustainable reputation strategy and implement it step by step. How would you like to be perceived? What are your values ​​and mission statements? What information about your company would you like to make public?
• Follow the 80/10/10 principle when deciding which content to focus on first when building reputation management. 80% should focus on the content that belongs to you, such as (and most importantly) the content on your website; 10% should focus on public content that you actually control (e.g. social media) and 10% should focus on the content that could influence you (the content that you have to ask someone else to do). to update or remove, for example from search engines or rating portals).
• Every detail of what is made available on the web through the design of a website, the images chosen for social media profiles and the content shared on the company blog contributes to and helps build online reputation audience to get an idea of ​​the company. So choose texts and images carefully! It is very important to pay attention to each of these details so that nothing is left to chance but responds to a predetermined strategy. Think of it as applied reputation management. Only if all details are taken into account will it help you to sustainably improve your company's online reputation.
• You are what you tweet. It's becoming increasingly difficult to expect that you can keep your personal and professional posts separate, or to think that what you post personally won't have an impact on your business. Therefore: Separate professional from private matters and ask your employees to handle them the same way.
• Train your employees! Let them know that the information they post online can have a positive or negative impact on your company's online reputation. Why not further training in media skills? In particular, managers and employees who are in close contact with customers and are visible to the outside world should be taken into account first. Make your employees part of your reputation management too.
• From a business perspective, ensure that both official social network accounts and employee accounts contribute to a positive brand image. A company's employees represent it and can be excellent ambassadors. Therefore, it is important that they themselves contribute and convey the values of the brand, thus helping to build its online reputation.
• If your online reputation declines, you will have a difficult time trying to restore your reputation. So work out a concept for your reputation management right from the start, HOW you want to appear publicly and WHO will appear publicly for you. You can't prohibit your employees from having a social media account, but you can try to influence what your employees communicate about what posts concern your company.
• Be authentic and transparent. If you appear too “constructed” in your external presentation, you will become untrustworthy.
• After you've reviewed and adjusted your own content, start monitoring any review sites you're listed on. This works particularly well with the reputation management app from QuestionPro. The QuestionPro app notifies you fully automatically if you have received a negative comment or rating.
  → Reputation Management
• NEVER leave a negative comment about your company, your brands, products and services uncommented, but respond IMMEDIATELY.
• In the case of negative comments in review portals, make it clear that you are really interested in eliminating a faux pas or even structural difficulties that led to dissatisfaction. Instead of saying, “We’re sorry for any inconvenience,” say, “We’re sorry this happened. Here’s what we’re going to do to make it better.” This will positively influence the perception of your company and boost your online reputation!
• If you have finally eliminated errors or structural difficulties that were criticised in public evaluations, then communicate this, even if the evaluation itself was weeks ago. Put this on your calendar or use the QuestionPro app for your reputation management. Here, you can mark negative comments from rating portals as critical and reply to them at a later time and then mark them as done.
• To avoid surprises or unexpected problems, it is necessary to have at least one community manager who has the necessary training to manage and develop your brand in terms of online reputation. Social networks are a very powerful tool where you have to interact, listen and create a sense of community around a brand, not just to promote products or services.
• In order to know what is being said about your brands and your company, it is necessary to set up an active "listening mechanism" (social listening) that allows you to identify what kind of comments about your company are prevalent in the public networks, what their tone is and whether they are positive or negative. Text analysis mechanisms that search the web for comments and reviews about your company and analyse comments with the help of artificial intelligence are excellent here. Here you can find more information on tools and software for semantic text analysis. Modern text analysis mechanisms are an indispensable part of reputation management and help you to improve your online reputation in the long term!
• Conduct regular customer surveys and measure your customers' loyalty using the Net Promoter Score! You can determine the Net Promoter Score quickly and easily using survey tools from QuestionPro.
  → Net Promoter Score
• Stimulate customer feedback! Actively collect customer feedback and create channels for this, for example on your website or in social networks.
• Use the opportunity of feedback promotion, which means that you actively give your customers the opportunity to provide positive feedback. for example from customer surveys or resolved complaint cases, to be shared on social networks. This can actually have a positive impact on your online reputation. And this is how you use customer survey software from QuestionPro for active feedback promotion
  → Feedback promotion
• And here you will also find valuable tips on how to gain more positive feedback to improve your online reputation
  → Received positive reviews
• When it comes to reputation management, also pay attention to your own company: Satisfied employees carry their positive experiences to the outside world and thus also improve your online reputation. This is why it is important for companies to develop an employer branding strategy. Therefore, conduct employee surveys on a regular basis. With innovative software, you can conduct employee surveys easily, quickly, regularly and cost-efficiently.
• How many press releases about you exist that you have not published yourself? To improve your online reputation, it is important that you build a good relationship with press organs, from local press to national newspapers, magazines and online media. So regularly inform editors and journalists about important things concerning your online reputation.
• In this day and age, it is important to live what you present to the outside world. You are quickly convicted of greenwashing, for example, because the internet offers a high degree of transparency. Ecological or social "paint jobs" have a significant negative impact on your online reputation. It is the task of reputation management to prevent this.

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