Listen - can you hear me? – The art of Online Reputation Management

Online reputation management or social listening and response management, is the cornerstone of most business. This is not only true for consumer facing businesses, but also B2B companies because social listening is the best way to track what your core Target audience is talking about, their interests, along with what people think about your brand. More importantly today about 64% of people trust search engines for research and so it’s important that your brand has a positive perception online.

Today there is an entire suite of tools, both free and paid that enable companies to do this. The question often is, how do we get started. Here are a few things you should consider before getting started-

1.What's your objective – Start by deciding why exactly do you want to invest in ORM - broadly there are a few different objectives you could have:

• Engage with people talking about your brand or category
• Understand trends in your industry
• Understand the sentiment around your brand
• Understand share of voice and competition brand sentiment
• Identify content opportunities to engage

Objective setting is critical because all further decisions will be derived from this.

2. What keywords should you track - At the heart of social listening are the keywords that you think are relevant for your brand and your category which your tool will track. For example, a brand like Make My Trip might also want to track people who are talking about travel or flight bookings in general. Similarly, in the past Taj has interjected conversations about people asking for hotel recommendations in a particular city. Your keyword set needs to cover your brand name and different variations, all your products and key people in your company. You also should cover certain category keywords so if you are an app analytics company, conversations around growth hacking might be important for you to know about.

3. Which tool should you use - While the list of tools in the market is extensive, my current favorite paid tools is

Konnect insights which is a good tool when it comes to mapping brand mentions. They have a lot of inbuilt screens which can be used for live tracking and these come in handy while running a campaign. You can quickly identity and engage with the top influencer interacting with you brand, see trends, word clouds etc. The best part is that this comes at a good cost and customer support. 

You should also consider Unmetric for competition tracking in particular and Buzzsumo for PR

Along with this, there are some free tools in the market, but generally the use cases with them are slightly limited.  

4. What should be your response management strategy

o  Be human and engaging – Nobody wants a robotic answer to their question. While you will have certain templates, customize them based on the question asked. Use images, GIFs or FAQ videos for this.

o  Don’t be overwhelmed by the urge to speak about every issue – Often brands try to contribute to topical events by fitting their brand – unfortunately sometimes this might backfire. Take for example Cinnabon did for Carrie Fisher which backfired because people thought they were being insensitive. Similarly, DiGiorno Pizza tried to be funny with the #WhyIStayed trend, but this was about awareness about domestic violence and again led to a negative perception about the brand

5. How should the agency team be structured – Typically agencies hire executives based on the volume of mentions- a day in the life of these executives would be working for 8-10 hours, which they spend mostly tagging each mention into the positive, negative and neutral bucket. The reason for this is that today no tool can give more than 60-70% accuracy of categorizing mentions and so this had to currently be a manual effort. You should have a standard set of answers to your most frequently asked questions and mentions that your agency can customize and use. Also have a strategy on how you will deal with detractors who are constantly being negative about your brand online. Along with this have a crisis management and escalation metric in place.

6. What should you be tracking

o  Mention volume – Number of mentions that your brand is getting online. You should track this for the main brand and sub brands. For an FMCG brand like HUL, the mentions of each core brand could be much more than mentions of HUL.  

o  Positive-Negative sentiment – Ratio of your Positive: Negative: Neutral mentions – Having a positive to negative ration of 4:1 is generally industry standards.

o  Key themes which contribute to positive and negative mentions for your brand

o  Turn-around-time followed by your agency for the first response and internal teams to close the case – the first response should be between 5-10 minutes.

o  Detractor cases – every brand has a set of negative influencers whose aim is to harm the brand image online – you should track these cases daily and either block or engage with them to resolve their issues.

o  Share of voice compared online to other brands

Eventually the main thing for you to know is that social listening is essential and the sooner the brand starts on this journey, the better tuned you will be to consumer needs and preferences.