Categories: Articles

The Truth About Online Reputation Management

Here’s another dirty little secret about your brand and how you manage your online reputation…

There’s no difference between what’s being said online and in the "real world."

In fact, let’s call a moratorium on the separation of the two… because that no longer exists. If someone tells you about a brand, product or service, what’s your first action at that point in time? You do an online search (Google, Bing, Yahoo, Twitter, whatever…). You don’t run down to a retail store to look for yourself, and you don’t call up an office and ask for more information ("can you please mail me your corporate brochure?"). You look to see what is being said about the brand online (by them, their competitors and your peers). Positive, negative or neutral, that is your first brand interaction.

Most people have their first brand interaction at a search box.

But that’s going to change in the coming months and years as most people’s first brand interaction is going to happen in the palm of their hand (and then, maybe, the second brand interaction will happen online). And so it goes: the world continues to blur. There is no online and real world, and there is no longer a "mobile" and the "Internet." It is all this simply this: one unified brand reputation that is not divided up by technology, platform or channel.

How messy it already is.

Most brands still keep the two separate (or try to). That was made abundantly clear to me when I was asked to be a part of the article, Looking good in cyberspace, which was published in the Montreal Gazette today (full disclosure: I have a business column that runs twice monthly in this newspaper). The message is trickling both up and down the business world – from the corner dry cleaner to the multi-national brands: any one individual can say whatever they want about your products and services – whether you enable/empower them or you don’t. They can spray it on their Facebook wall, tweet it out to their Twitter followers, post it on a review platform like Yelp!, or even on their own Blog. It’s there, it’s public and it’s permanent for the world to see. Not just the virtual world.

Let’s do everyone a favour (brands, consumers and marketers alike) and drop the "online" part from "online reputation management."

Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.