« I Have to Add my Voice
The Continuing Ethical Debate About Ghost-Written Blogs »

Online Reputation Management vs Online Reputation Monitoring – Is there a Difference?

I have noticed a trend recently. When people are referring to companies who undertake online reputation management, what they are in fact doing is talking about companies who provide monitoring tools – often exclusively so. This is confusing me a little – as my understanding of the term ‘management’ differs somewhat.

There are various definitions for the term management – a search on dictionary.com brings up definitions such as ‘administration’, ‘guidance’, ‘control’, ‘direction’ and ‘handling’. To me, these are all quite active things. They suggest proactive involvement by the person doing the management in order to solve issues, make suggestions and move things forward.

Now, monitoring is a fundamental part of online reputation management – don’t get me wrong. Any ORM company which doesn’t offer monitoring is not an ORM company at all in my opinion. However, it is not the ONLY part of reputation management. In fact, although monitoring can provide the ongoing information, in order to manage your reputation, you can’t just sit there and watch.

Therefore, in order to truly engage an online reputation manager (as opposed to a monitoring service), I believe you need to receive strategy development, consultancy, advice and even implementation services. You need to get help interpreting the results that come from your monitoring but equally important is the assistance you receive in acting on those results. You also need to receive proactive ideas and thoughts based on other factors which may be external to the direct monitoring. This requires a knowledge of the industry as well as the ability to keep on top of changes that are occurring both in technical terms and in global terms.

If you are looking to engage the services of someone offering online reputation management, then you need to look carefully to see how active that company is. Do they just set up monitoring (albeit highly sophisticated), interpret the results but then leave you to get on with acting upon them to improve your reputation? If so, then you are engaging the services of an online reputation monitoring company instead. It may be that that is what you need, but it is important to be aware of the difference between watching, understanding and actually doing.

Img: bogenfreund

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

If you like this post, why not subscribe to our RSS Feed. Or you can visit our main website at Tiger Two or follow me on Twitter or Friendfeed

Post to Twitter

Tags:

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 6th, 2008 at 3:59 pm and is filed under Online Reputation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • John
    Hi,
    Nicely explained and i agree with that OR monitoring is a fundamental part of the OR management. I hope after reading this article anyone who is confused in differentiating between Online Reputation Management and Online Reputation Monitoring, will be clear.
    I have used a tool AirCheese and its worth checking. Visit http://www.aircheese.com. Its beta version is available for download.
  • Great post Nancy!

    Online Relationship Management and Monitoring are corresponding processes and cannot work without one another. While management processes bring out the areas of concern and issues, monitoring processes make sure they are resolved and the website has a good reputation online!
  • Nancy is absolutely right. Online reputation management (ORM) encompasses a wide range of services and actions in order to design, maintain and if necessary repair an individual's or an organization's online reputation.

    As the only professional in my country fully occupied in ORM, I can testify that very often I need to rely on a wonderful support team with SEO, web design and editing skills amongst others. ORM brings together may disciplines and has at its core the best strategic communication, crisis management and online PR practice.

    Monitorization, as Nancy duly points out, is just one element amongst many, and does not qualify by itself as ORM.
  • That's a useful distinction to make Nancy and I'd agree with that.

    I think we're firmly in the 'online reputation management' category and we try to keep the monitoring part as simple and common-sense as possible.

    The world is awash reputation management software at the moment. The ones I've trialled so far are at best moderately useful, at worst junk. And in most cases, they're beyond comprehension for most of the 40-something business people I meet on a day to day basis.

    In terms of monitoring, businesses can go a long way just by using the same tools as their customers will be using to decide whether or not they're going to trust them - i.e. Google & Google Alerts.

    So far, our experience has been with clients who have come to us as a result of having been attacked online in one form or another. Up til that point, they've never thought of monitoring their reputation.

    From that point there are really only two things that we're dealing with: the first is helping a client respond in the kind of way that will boost their reputation rather than damage it - and that's about communication skills more than it is about technologies.

    The second is helping them to use the experience as an opportunity to learn more about the field and take some action towards building a stronger online presence as a kind of insurance for the future.
blog comments powered by Disqus