Studies show more than 70% of customers do research on a business or person before doing business with them.

What do you think would happen if that customer found slanderous statements on the first page of a search engine when your name, brand or business was typed in?

As a result businesses have been losing customers and millions of dollars, but very little could be done about it.

This can be avoided with Online Reputation Management.

Online Reputation Management (ORM) is a relatively new industry but has been brought to the forefront of professionals’ consciousness due to the overwhelming and many times unpredictable nature of both professional journalistic content and amateur user-generated content (or UGC), the latter of which there is far more, and not the least because of the wide number websites that offer such an opportunity to visitors, typically with very low barriers to entry--often just by creating a screen name, registering one's birthday and a geographical location, and providing a valid email address to complete the account-creation process. Thus, the type of online content monitored in ORM spans professional, journalism sponsored by traditional news and media giants as well as user-created and user-generated blogs, ratings, reviews, and comments, and all manner of specialized websites about any particular subject, be it a person, group, company, business, product, event, concept, or trend.

• Traditional or mainstream websites
• Social networks (E.G. Twitter, Facebook, MySpace)
• Consumer review sites
• Sites which allow reviews of individuals
• Social news/bookmarking sites
• Collaborative research sites such as Yahoo Answers and Rediff Q&A
• Independent duscission forums
• Complaint directories (E.G. RipOffReport, Complain Boards)
• User-generated content (UGC) Consumer Generated Media (CGM)
• Blogs and Blogging Communities

• Improve customer satisfaction by gaining insights from consumers about what is good and bad about their product or services
• Increase perceptions of brand by creating opportunities to listen to and engage consumers
• Gain insights about competitors and their customers’ perceptions about their products and services
• Maintain shareholder value by mitigating risk by having ears close to the ground where opinions about a business are being formed and propagated
• Engage in more effective public relations by understanding who the real influencers are
• Gain understanding of the relationship between user generated content and traditional forms of online media, for example; news, print, etc.
• Provide early warning systems for reactive and defensive PR
• Reduce marketing spend by learning how to reach out to customers more cheaply
• Reduce internal costs by employing services which save time and effort, as well as money
• Help identify gaps for products and services which can be developed for profitable niche markets
• Gain insight into online networks and keywords and key phrases found in user-generated content, which can help to bolster natural search results about the person, product, or business