Online reputation management

You have built your Web site. You have opened accounts on the various social networking platforms and it has been going well. Now all of a sudden your marketing manager - or most likely an intern in you marketing department - has started asking questions about online reputation management (ORM).

ORM is vitally important for any and everybody in the hospitality industry, from the biggest hotel group to the smallest guesthouse in the Klein Karoo.

And while it sounds like a mouthful, doing meaningful ORM isn't difficult. In fact, it's what any good business has always been doing in the real world, merely shifted into the digital sphere. ORM is, quite simply, protecting your brand's reputation online. Hospitality industry professionals, perhaps more than any other business, understand the damage that can be done through acquiring a bad reputation - deserved or not. In the olden days, if someone had a bad experience they had a few avenues to pursue, like telling friends over dinner or writing in to tell you. But thanks to the Internet, and in particular, social media, an unhappy guest now has an array of tools to make their complaints heard.

The key consideration behind ORM is the actions of consumers online. Based on this, ORM focuses mainly on social media marketing, but the other key consideration most companies don't take into account within the social media strategy is the power of Search Engine Result Pages (SERP).

According to Nielsens: “Sixty-three percent of consumers say they trust the recommendation of other consumers above (that of an) advertisement.”

With statistics showing that people are increasingly looking to their social networks for information, reviews, advice and/or recommendations about a product or service. The power of social media cannot be underestimated (noting that the average person, for example, has at least 50 friends) and thinking it is only review websites, forums and key social network sites like Facebook that are the only areas of concern, place you squarely in the world of 2005 technology. The other biggest effect on your brand reputation online is the effect it has on your SERP.

“There's bad news and good news about the way consumers interact with brands on social media networks.”

ORM must be taken as part-and-parcel of your social media marketing strategy and beyond that, the social media component of ORM is best seen as an online extension of traditional customer relation management. This is because when customers complain on social media, those complaints can be tarnish your brand's name to a wider audience faster than ever before. It's human nature that people will gravitate towards the negative posts rather than good posts when researching a place to stay. But the good news is that just as complaints travel at light speed, so do compliments or resolutions.

It's therefore critically important that the person you employ to run your social media marketing campaigns must be fully cognisant of what to do should they receive customer complaints or negative comments about the brand.

But while there are many negatives related to ORM, there is also a “positive” and this is found in the social media aspect. A well-executed social media marketing strategy - one which leaves a consumer feeling that the brand is part of their digital life - is also ORM.

If, with your overall social media strategy, you build long-lasting and effective relationships with your target market on social media, you will have fulfilled this component of a good social media ORM strategy.

Planning responses and strategies for negative feedback from customers on social media must, however, also be part of your overall planning.

When receiving a negative post there are a few basic steps in dealing with it:

* Don't try to hide the offending news or deny that something occurred if it did;
* Research whether there is any merit to the negative complaint. If not, show the facts you have uncovered and ask for a correction. If there is merit to the complaint, if possible take the discussion private (ie, e-mail, telephone, private messages on social networks);
* Chronicle what's going on and what you are doing to fix the situation (transparency and honesty can be a positive in a negative situation);
* Should the negative post escalate into an online uproar, a “crisis” fuelled by a number of posts from multiple people, be ready to write your post responding to the case. Don't lower your standards - maintain a legally sound and professional attitude; and
* Most importantly, as with all social media marketing, listen, be honest, and transparent.

A consumer with no prior information or experience of a hotel will most likely use search engines to find information online. An owner or manager of that hotel would want the information the consumer encounters to be that hotel's proverbial “best foot forward”.

However, anybody has the power and tools to upload content to the web that may not necessarily put your best foot forward. What if, when they did a search on your hotel, the post they see highest in SERP is in fact negative comment and content (rightly or wrongly) about your establishment especially, now that comments on social networks are getting indexed by Google to an increasing extent. Google is also giving increased prominence to reviews in their index. Combine these factors and the result is that a poor review, comment or negative post has a significant chance of showing up in the SERPs when people look for your company. Now what?

The technical term for this would be the monitoring, addressing, or mitigating of SERPs. This form of ORM attempts to address what comes up when someone searches for your company on search engines, Google primarily.

There are a few examples of local, industry-specific ORM failures. The most famous in local hospitality is that of company that had four guesthouses in the Western Cape, because the case became a media discussion point. When you search for this business on Google, as any business would hope, the first results are the website, official blog, and Twitter account of the portfolio. With all these profiles being well and regularly updated, the owner has executed a very strong digital marketing strategy. The downfall of this enterprise's online reputation is the sixth result on the first page.

A customer was so disgruntled with the service he received at one of the guesthouses that he claims to have gone around the web collecting complaints posted on various websites and posting them all on one particular site. Whether the complaints are genuine or not isn't important. What matters is that this site; first created in 2007 and last updated in 2010, still appears in the first page of results on Google.

To fix something like this, there are two basic strategies:

The first would be to contact the writer of the negative post and try to rectify the issue (eg, as part of your overall ORM Strategy), with the aim that they remove the post or edit it.

Failing that, one can try to essentially flood out the post, posting new content online that will push the negative post down on Google's rankings. These new posts could be from any Web site. For instance, you could invite a blogger for a stay at your establishment and write a review. It doesn't matter what the content; the aim would be to create new content to push down the negative post.

While this strategy may sound simple, it actually is not.

Google employs a complex and very secret algorithm which decides how to rank pages. Essentially, if Google ranks that negative Web site post as being of a higher quality than what you post afterwards to try to force it down the rankings, to push it down becomes a Herculean task requiring the aid of specialised agencies. Here are a few tactics to help you on your way:

If you already have a Web presence, your social media pages have a good chance of being in the top positions (as mentioned in the hotel case above). A search for your hotel should show your website, Facebook and YouTube pages within these results. This means that not only can you have control of the top position, but you can probably show position two and three and maybe even four. And since your social media pages should be full of the good, they should show off your website in the best light possible.

It's important for every small business and in particular the hospitality industry to make sure you get good reviews, on top of a good social media strategy. You can start externally also by finding other sites where reviews of your website or hotel are relevant. You can usually do this with a quick search in Google for 'your market + reviews'. Once you've compiled a list of Web sites where reviews could be posted, you need to start getting them! The other way to do this is when your customers or Web site visitors give you positive feedback, ask them to leave a review on one of the reviews Web site on your list.

By taking control of the whole SERPs for your brand you can push these reviews to the bottom of the page or even the second, etc.

Remember it is not new...

The digital sphere may seem to be daunting but consider the following:

Would you leave a billboard on a major highway making negative comments about your establishment unaddressed? Failing to have a SERP mitigation strategy is doing that.

Would you place someone ill-equipped to deal with customer complaints front-of-house? Failing to have a plan for dealing negative comments on social media is doing that.

In a nutshell, those are the cornerstones of ORM. It is not at all new; it is only the real world shifted into the digital sphere.

“Changing times: Word of Mouth now replaced with Word of Click.”