Online PR And Reputation Management

Public relations (PR) can help raise your business’ profile and improve your reputation. If done well, it can be a cost-effective way to get your message to a large audience. However, it can be tricky to guarantee success.

Online Public Relations (E-PR, Digital PR) functions the web relationship influence among the cyber citizens and it aims to make desirable comments about an organization, its products and services, news viewed by its target audiences and lessen its undesirable comments to a large degree. Online PR shows differences from traditional public relations. One of these is associated with its platforms.

Compared with traditional public relations channels (such as TV, radio and printed press), the network systems used for online public relations vary from search to social platforms. In the era of digital marketing, the major online PR tools for the PR professionals and marketers such as content marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are the results of mixture of digital technologies and public relations.Those approaches have become the mainstream digital marketing machines and learning to take advantage of these marketing tools is an essential part of modern PR strategies.

Differences between online PR and traditional PR

• The organizations can communicate with its audiences directly through a variety of online platforms instead of depending on the media channels only.
• Audiences exposed to the information are linked to the network and then the flow of information is multi-directional among people.
• Multiple sources of information provided can be accessible to audiences.
• Audiences are entitled to the right to review, comment and assess.

Benefits of public relations

The advantages of PR include:

• Influence – Audiences are more likely to trust messages coming from an objective source rather than paid-for advertising messages. It is one of the most credible forms of promotion and can be persuasive.
• Reach – A good story can be picked up by several news outlets, exposing your message to a large audience.
• Cost-effectiveness – PR can be an economical way to reach a large audience in comparison to paid for advertising media placement, particularly if it is done in-house.

Challenges of public relations (P.R)

Some of the downsides of PR include:

• No direct control – Unlike advertising, you can’t exactly control how your business is portrayed by the media, when your message will appear, and where it will be placed.
• No guaranteed results – You may spend time and money on writing a press release, getting suitable photography and speaking with journalists, but you can never guarantee your story will be published. This can result in a poor return-on-investment.
• Evaluation – It can be difficult to measure the effectiveness of PR activities. You can count media mentions and published stories, but it’s harder to determine the impact this has on your audience.

Online Reputation Management (ORM)

Online reputation management (ORM) is the practice of crafting strategies that shape or influence the public perception of an organization, individual or other entity on the Internet. It helps drive public opinion about a business and its products and services.

By using ORM, a company may try to mitigate the effects of a negative viral video, create proactive marketing strategies for online consumption or broaden its domain holdings to ramp up online visibility.

One broad ORM philosophy is using positive material to counteract, balance or “push” negative material. An example is using online content to influence Google’s search engine results pages (SERP). Because the first SERP page can hold only a finite number of results, some successful ORM projects include generating large amounts of positive content about a company or entity. Other ORM campaigns involve multichannel strategies, including email, social media and website projects.

Reputation handlers can build extensive website projects to distribute text, video or other elements, or use social media analytics to determine a company’s status before engaging in products that influence reputation on a social media platform like Facebook or Twitter.

Social media management has become a major ORM element because many users participate in the most popular social media platforms and because of features that quickly help create significant changes in a company’s online reputation.