Reputation management: the opportunity to improve your customer service

The digital era has extended marketing channels and provided a variety of new ways to communicate with consumers. Web 2.0 technologies, such as user generated content and social networking, have improved interaction between organisations and consumers, but also facilitated multi-way interaction between consumers (Barker & Roberts, 2010). Known as eWOM, this chatter has the ability to affect a company’s reputation both positively and negatively, giving rise to the need for Online Reputation Management (OMR) (Chaffey, 2011). This study sought to identify current ORM practice from a marketing/management perspective, exploring the level understanding and implementation of ORM strategies. The results indicate that organisations understand the principles of reputation management (Greyser, 2009) but show little consistency in the language used to describe ORM or who to consult for assistance. Organisations demonstrated a range of strategies. A minority of organisations employed highly sophisticated social media guidelines, but around a third still had no strategies at all. The majority acknowledged a need but demonstrated only ad hoc processes to deal with issues. The research recommends a simple model to start the ORM process and identifies further areas of research to aid the construct of best practice guidelines