Have you ever wondered what people are saying about you behind your back? At one point or another, everybody asks themselves this question. Now have you ever wondered what people are saying about your company? Online Reputation Management (ORM) is the process of monitoring what is being said about your business on the Internet – both positive and negative feedback. As consumer generated media on social networking sites (such as Facebook and Myspace), on blog posts, and on other user based online content aggregators multiplies in number across the Internet, it is important that your business listens to that online chatter to find out how you can respond and, in turn, improve your marketing strategies and your business. ORM is a relatively new marketing strategy designed to tackle the many challenges that businesses have been facing since the popularization of online social media; since technology has birthed new business hurdles, new tactics have also been birthed to overcome them. Utilizing ORM can be an effective and powerful tool to get ahead of the competition, increase your customer base, and maximize your consumer support.

On the Internet, people are talking about what they like and they what do not like. By monitoring these conversations, you can gain powerful insight into the customer’s mind and find out how you can increase the goods or services that they like, and decrease the ones they do not like; use this information to spread the word about your brand and raise awareness about your company; get the inside scoop into what your competition is doing, and in turn do it better; and also create an early warning system for reactive and defensive PR. By doing all of these things, you will save time and money by reducing your marketing spend and being just as effective by using a much more inexpensive method of marketing than traditional marketing techniques from past decades. Also, by utilizing ORM, your business will discover new tactics that your old marketing strategies are incapable of finding.