Online Brand Reputation: Befriend and Defend

by Sachin Bhatia, chief marketing officer, MakeMyTrip

The WWW is a bit like the Wild Wild West and bloggers its cowboys [which is not necessarily a bad thing:-)]. Online posts and comments can destroy or make online reputations for both brands and people. There is no policing, censorship, rules or standards to what gets posted on a blog, in a discussion forum or on someone’s Facebook wall.

Even the most cautious people take what they read online as gospel truth without bothering to research further and hardly ever going beyond the first few links on Google. What can brands and personalities do in this environment to ensure that negative or biased comments on the web don’t stay there for long and also how to actively get written about positively?

Well if a band, service or a person really sucks then there is little to shield them from the online community. Any amount of reputation management will be able to do little to defend them. But there are countless brands and people, which are either misunderstood or did not live upto consumer expectations that one time, and some that are wrongly castigated online. For them there is hope and a number of things they can do to be seen in a more positive light.

First and foremost, make online reputation management the responsibility of the relevant team either in customer service or even CRM. Their job should be to scrounge the internet, discussion forums, review sites, blogs etc for comments or posts about the brand or person. This should be compiled as a weekly report and both positive and negative posts listed and shared with the senior most management. The team would need to get to the bottom of all issues and see if a resolution is possible with the customer.

If the comments are on someone’s personal blog, an appointed person should get in touch with the blogger and try to resolve the issue or put forward the company’s point of view. An active engagement and discussion is usually helpful and shows that the company is sensitive and pro-active towards consumer angst. One could also go to a professional Reputation Management Consultancy to do the above job. Even positive posts should be addressed and engaged in a dialogue as some of these bloggers / customers could become ambassadors of sorts and help evangelize the brand.

Secondly, search optimization plays an important role in driving down posts on other sites and bringing one's own pages high on ranking. Therefore when someone is searching for reviews on a particular brand, ideally most of the top links should be taken by pages from the brand’s site itself, thus relegating posts (both positive, negative or neutral) lower in the order. This requires a very smart SEO team and is often difficult to achieve. Brands would do well to have a dedicated section on their sites about all positive reviews and customer testimonials they have and also link out to all the positive posts or articles about them.

Thirdly, an active engagement with review sites like MouthShut also helps and they have packages to assist genuine brands that are having a rough time on their sites to help get balanced reviews or confront any heavily biased reviewer.

There are also cases where competition or folks with vested interests try to sully a brand's reputation online. This needs to be treated very carefully and tactfully. One needs to get to the source of such propaganda and judge if confronting the perpetrators is a better strategy or a counter offensive.

Lastly, brands should invest in identifying opinion leaders (and not in the traditional sense but popular bloggers, editors of online journals, reviewers etc) and engaging them in product demos, or a presentation of one’s service etc. This will result in brands getting positively reviewed in online articles and customers tend to place a lot of trust in these articles.

An interesting example in the travel sector is a section launched on MakeMyTrip’s online travel community site, OkTataByeBye.com. The community has created a platform for customers to voice their issues and grievances with airlines and hotels. When a customer posts an issue on the site it is sent to relevant folks (who have been pre-identified) at the respective airline and hotel. The team at OkTataByeBye constantly follow-up till the customer gets a resolution or acceptable response.

With e-commerce growing in India, the internet becomes a great place for people to both review and then buy a product. Therefore, it’s critical for brands to ensure that they are positively mentioned online; that positive reviews are far greater than negative comments and that customer ratings are high for their products. If done right, this can lead to immediate and higher conversions.