No matter whichever walk of life we are from whether it is education or marketing social media sites are used as our source of communication. In the era of information, digital transformation is inevitable.
Technology has advanced so much that you can’t survive in the 21st century with the knowledge from the 20th century. The changes are not only seen in the education sector the entire way in which marketing is done is the talk of the past.
New marketing trends are emerging each day. With the expansion of marketing trends, a new field of management emerged. Digital marketing brought with it ample opportunities but the greater the cause, the greater its drawbacks. In order to tackle this, another term was introduced PR or Public Relations.
How does Public Relations affect your business?
Public relations is an umbrella term, PR has been in existence since the time of the stone age. PR is used by businesses to build rapport with investors, customers, the general public, and even employees.
By using PR in your business, you can identify the target audience and influence them and their opinion favourably. In simple terms, PR helps you to manage the communication between your organization and your public.
A common misconception that exists about PR is that it is often mistaken for propaganda. Information technology has revolutionized communications which makes PR more important. Since the entire world has shifted to being an online community from education to office work everything became digital which means there is always a chance for miscommunication.
Communicating digitally might not always give you the result you want. The person on the receiving end might not understand your tone of communication. Similarly, when an organization tries to communicate with its public, the public might misunderstand your message and that is where PR comes in.
PR helps you to effectively communicate your message to your public which helps you to build a long-lasting relationship with your audience. It is important for any business to have a PR team as they help you i
n the entire communication sphere.
The PR team is the first to respond during a crisis. If your organization were to face a crisis it is the PR team that handles everything and makes sure the reputation of your organization is not tarnished. As the entire market has shifted to the online mode it has become important to have Online Reputation Management(ORM).
Online Reputation Management Vs Public Relations
Before we get a jumpstart on the importance of online reputation management it is first important to understand what ORM for. As a result of the continuous expansion of social media, Public Relations gave birth to a new idea and that is online reputation management.
In general, online PR involves the publication of information and articles about organizations and individuals that try to portray them in a favourable light. ORM can play a preventive, stabilizing or even restorative role, which is mainly about producing positive information and disseminating it through the right channels
According to Edy Portmann “An online reputation is the publicly kept social evaluation of an entity based on the entity’s previous behaviour, what was posted by the entity, and what third parties share about the entity on the Internet.” A strategic element of a firm’s competitiveness is its online reputation.
As Public Relations uses strategic methods to avoid any conflicts between the organization and the stakeholder ORM helps to avoid any conflict between the organization and its public in the online community.
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How effective is Online Reputation Management?
Any searches related to your organization on search engines and social networks can reveal significant clues about your organization’s product and service quality, customer relations as well as corporate reputation. This shows how the public perceives businesses and brand names on virtual platforms.
Online reputation management helps you to manage these perceptions. Online reputation management (ORM) consists of monitoring digital media through which they detect relevant content. ORM helps analyse what people say about your organization or business and, if necessary, interact with customers. Interaction is what keeps everything going.
Better Safe than Sorry
Digital transformation is no longer a choice. Masses are consumed by social media which makes us come to the point that social media plays a huge role in the reputation of your business.
An online image can be tarnished easily by social media trolls. So, it is important to manage your online reputation by professionals. They will help you to keep track of the posts you have made so far in the online community, see if offends any group of people and crosscheck before proceeding to post anything to the public.
In any case, if a post receives a backlash an Online Reputation Management team would know how exactly to proceed with it. To conclude Online Reputation Management is not something that can be overlooked and businesses should practice it.