Here is a fact – and that too, a statistically proven one – “70% of consumers trust recommendations from their friends and family, a whopping 92% trust the opinions posted by other consumers online”, publishes Forbes. I am surprised, aren’t you? But those who have been there done that, would literally be laughing it off. The pros know that out of those 92% that the real users trust, 60% is a trap. Those 60% make the world go round, at least the virtual one. Those 60% comprise the force that work towards creating or belittling a firm’s online reputation.

What’s the Deal? How Online Reputation Management Happens

In its simplest, ORM is just like competition. You pull someone down to get to the top. In a way its economic – just like the free of the economy, on the basis of certain factors, a winner emerges from absolutely nowhere. And if you still haven’t got it, think PR.

ORM is all about pushing the bad stuff about your company down and inflating the good stuff in the virtual world. It’s just like saying that you scored total 7.7 GPA in your annual, pushing down the fact that you scored a D in Economics (guess what no one really knows how much you scored in which subject). You passed with a distinction and that’s what you should leverage on.

With ORM it is all about getting your content and information on the first page of Google. Solely that can earn you a good amount of organic traffic. Plus, no one is going to read what is being written about you on the third page of Google, unless it’s SEOed too well. However, what most people know is how to positively promote. Only a handful of them are able to cut through the negative hype being created.

Why ORM is Important?

It is believed that just like dreams, if you don’t control your brand online, someone else will. Let us quickly look at how online reputation management helps you with. There are basically four things that ORM helps you with: enhancing search results, enriching snippets, personalizing search, and boosting universal search.

The stakeholders of ORM comprise consumers, business partners, marketers, journalists, coworkers and last but not the least, your personal contacts. If done correctly, ORM can be the key to the success of your business.

Whilst companies make every effort to ensure they hire only the best for developing their applications, writing their content or designing a marketing strategy for a product, there are always some loopholes unattended. And there are certain departments or positions for which companies spend considerable resources, but not much emphasis is made on hiring the best talent or for that matter, retaining it.
 
Training of the Junior Level Employees
 
Let’s say you are hiring SEOs. To start with, you must have highly qualified and experienced SEOs working for you already. At the same time, a good investment should be made into hiring new talents who have the potential to assist your organization after being properly guided. Building a pipeline for talents would serve you well in the long run. If you promote people within, that would mean occupying of senior positions by talents you are sure of, a reduced transition time and it would also mean making savings on budget.
 
Hiring
 
Your company needs to have its presence felt on the social networks – LinkedIn being the most important. When an SEO at mid-level or senior level is looking switch companies, he/she is seeking to work for a brand that would look good on her resume. Not only to their work experience, but they are also looking to increase value to their own brand as a professional. Make sure as a potential employer, yours appears to be a lucrative place at work at.
 

 
Environment within Your Organization
 
You are the boss alright, but you are drawing your force from the employees that work under you, particularly those who report directly to you. They would expect to be you to keep them abreast with the moves your company is making, the direction it is likely to take for the next quarter. Keep them in the loop.
 
Maintaining a corporate culture in the company that gives employees a chance to indulge themselves not only in work, but also in some fun activities, enjoying happy hours and organizing mini cultural programs would do well to drive away some mental clogs that keep developing from time to time.
 
Whilst there are many technical bullet points to keep in mind while hiring talent, when you talk of corporate environment, it also means hiring employees for your organization that don’t make a bad company.
 
Image courtesy tribepad.com

Visual rhetoric is an art of communicating with images and visuals as opposed to other forms such as audios and written words. The form though has present since time immemorial, has gained recent success because of the advent of digital media. The form of communication has touched a number of aspects including business, arts, philosophy, science, spirituality, religion, culture, socialism as well as technology.

It is not easy to define visual rhetoric in a sentence or two. For it is not limited in its essence. Moreover it is rapidly expending its reach and quickly making an impact on a number of worldly (and superficial) aspects. The basic aim or objective of visual rhetoric is to use communication tools such as imagery and words to bring a concept to life. It is not easy as it may sound because each and every element that goes into its development has to have an emotional impact. If its not worthy of giving goose bumps, it is dumped.

Through visual rhetoric concepts such as relationships, beauty, consciousness, social discrimination gain much more power and impact than solely written words could have lent them. The process of writing through a picture is almost as similar to as writing about one, but with a different motive. A visual rhetoric does not aim at explaining a picture but on elaborating its mood and expression. So each and every word is linked to explaining a theme or a concept and not a fact. Even though the image will have an identity of its own, it shall not fail to explain the reason behind why that particular picture is perfect to explain that particular theme.

The concept of visual rhetoric in its classical form has a number of concepts such as arrangement, emphasis, clarity, tone and ethos. These concepts individually or in synchronization are capable of making a marvelous impact. While words give us an answer in hand, visual rhetoric makes us understand it thoroughly.

Logos have always managed to create a place for the business in the corporate world. These tiny little symbols hold the power of making an enormous impact on the entire macro-environment of the business. Some of the most well-renowned and impressive logos that represent great companies today have a unique story to tell. Thee logos were never conceptualized in the way they have been perceived. Nevertheless, they are a tremendous hit. Here are a few

The McDonald’s Logo: The M here was never meant to be an M. It was rather an arc that was at the time of the conceptualization of the idea, was used on the sides of hamburger restaurants. The logo however, became popular as the M representing McDonald’s and since then is communicating the same view.

Adidas: Not only the logo of brand Adidas speaks of a story, the name to is an abbreviation that a few know about, Adidas stands for all day I dream about sports. The symbol or the logo of Adidas represents the peaks of a mountain that represent future growth.

 Sharp: This Japanese company has a logo communicating only its name. However, this simple logo too clearly conveys its essence to the world. The font that has been used in the logo has sharp edges and a sharp color. The name of the corporation itself comes from the product that it sold during its incorporation, which was a mechanical pencil (the Ever-Sharp).

The above cited examples give a clear vision of the power of a logo. Perception also plays an important role in what a logo communicates to the outer world. Logos hence can be considered as a powerful business tool that holds the capacity to attract customers.

Often women blame men for their abusive and teasing glances that they often exhibit while someone of their opposite sex crosses their eyes. Women are fortunate enough to be devoid of that talent. But let’s not forget that human eyes are just so dynamic in nature that sometimes even we are amazed by their ability. When your eyes are looking for some of the spicy Hollywood gossips on the internet, you will care little about clicking the link of Hollywood history, although it may be one of the top links found by your search engine. I agree that not all of you are that insane, but gossips are always fun! For most of the social networking and also general websites, it is their primary goal to provide the most demanded stuff to the readers. If they fail to do so, Content Curation is their only savior.

All you need to do is populate your social web with the best and the most relevant content on some specific issues. With this, you will ease the search of your network of friends, connections and followers for quality content. Also, with this you can be a trusted source for all of them. You earn ‘social capital’ which is actually very important for those of you who think social networking is your life blood! So start setting up Google Alerts on certain keywords. Also, don’t forget to set up a Google RSS reader monitoring relevant blogs and websites and finally, update your Linked in status with the best content links. That’s it! You just became a star…..

You have incorporated every trick from the book of SEO on your website, but when you type the keywords in the search tab, apart from showing organic results to your website, the search engine also displays a few websites and forums that are bad-mouthing your product. That can be such a bummer!

Today, solely implementing search engine optimization techniques to create a wider reader draw to your website cannot help in building a company’s brand over the internet.  With hoards of online communities, review platforms and forums available, reputation management is very much pivotal in enhancing one’s brand power. The functioning of a business is proportional to its brand identity and a positive identity can lead to increased efficiency as well as revenue. Online reputation management (or ORM) helps companies and businesses to prioritize and position the good over the bad by pushing them lower on search engine page results with the purpose of decreasing their visibility.

The main aspects of ORM are publishing positive content on the web and wiping away or at least covering the negative and misleading details with a thick dark blanket so that any user when searching for a company cannot see the detrimental results. Through extensive involvement in the social media (which includes blogs, Facebook, forums, Twitter, etc.), creation of positive content and promotion of existing content, companies are able to improve their online identity to a great extent.  At times companies also make formal ‘take down’ requests to site managers to remove negative or inappropriate content, and if that does not work the last option is to file a lawsuit.

Realizing the importance of ORM several companies have sprung up to help businesses and individuals manage their online reputatio. It seems Google (I have a new moniker for them – The Trailblazer!) might help companies (specifically the big ones) in doing away with ORM needs entirely. Its latest roll-out is huge site-links that take up almost half of the first page, pushing the organic links down and the bad links way further down.

Come to think of it, these monster-sized links can make generating online traffic through keywords quite tricky. Do SEO specialists need to worry? Well that’s a topic for another blog post!