Reputation Management Strategy: the Bulletproof Guide to ORM

A reputation management strategy is part of brand building, and it’s so much more than making sure your company has great reviews. This guide will help you navigate the world of reputation strategy in the online environment. Online reputation — that intangible asset, that electronic chimera — is hard to assess, let alone fix. Many CMOs, publicists, and executives are genuinely confused about the exact techniques needed to repair a damaged reputation.

This article is your guide — a method of showing you what an online reputation is comprised of and how to develop a solid strategy to repair or protect your company’s online reputation.

Contents

• The building materials of an online reputation
  • Earned content
  • Owned content
  • Paid content
• The development of an online reputation
  • Google’s Algorithm
  • Social Media Algorithms
• How to create a reputation strategy
  • Research
• Assimilate
• The Plan
• Conclusion

The Building Materials of an Online Reputation

Reputation management is both known and unknown. There is theory and there are objective results. This combination enables us to understand how to build a reputation. Like a house, you must know your building materials from the beginning. In the field of online reputation management, there are three main building materials — earned, paid, and owned content.

Note: The word “media” is interchangeable with “content” throughout this article.

Here is a helpful way to visualize them.

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Each of these components is used by reputation management professionals to help shape an organization’s reputation, often using a combination of ORM, PR, and SEO.

Earned Content

Earned content is the online information about your business that doesn’t require you to pay for it or write it yourself. You can think of it as free publicity. Online reviews, social shares, re-posts of your content, and mentions of your brand all fall into this category. If you’re lucky, a mainstream media organization like the New York Times or Wall Street Journal may even pick up your story.

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Owned Content

Owned content is the material you create yourself. This is content you have total control over, most commonly your blog, website, or social media presence. While these are extremely important when managing your online reputation, they only comprise a small slice of your search engine results — and therefore your overall reputation.

All of the properties just mentioned are the standard fare of reputation management companies. Beyond those are industry-specific types of owned media that differ for every sector.

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Paid Content

The final category, paid content, comes in the form of PPC (pay-per-click) advertising, display ads, paid social media promotion, content syndication, paid influencers, and all other forms of content that require direct financial investment. Paid content is not less valuable than the other two forms, but it is essential to dedicate meaningful time and resources to earned and owned content as well.

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How an Online Reputation Develops

With those three building materials, an online reputation is formed. But those building materials work within larger systems that heavily influence a company’s online appearance. The most important of these is online search, closely followed by social media algorithms. Remember that quality is the cornerstone of a good reputation strategy — that’s why practitioners rely on spam-free, content-first approaches.

Helpful Resource: The Anatomy of a Search Result Page and How to Rank

As much as we like to conceive of ourselves as independent thinkers, our entire process of research and opinion-forming is shaped by the tools we use to search.

Google’s Algorithm

When discussing online search, we might as well call it Google. When people want to learn more about something, they Google it.

Tools like Google have engineered biases that can shape the viewpoints of their users. Consider Google’s ability to know your location. If you live in Miami and search for “tacos near me,” you will not see results for Portland, Oregon. Google gives you the results it thinks you want to see. This is how people find brands online — and it is the science of SEO.

Google’s algorithm rewards quality content, serves fast results, and learns from your search behavior over time. The algorithm is constantly evolving. Major updates — including BERT, Core Web Vitals, the Helpful Content Update, and the rollout of AI Overviews — have each significantly reshaped how results are ranked and displayed. For the most current picture of these changes, Google’s own Search Central blog is the most reliable reference.

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Smart people can create content that rises to the top of search engine results, thereby suppressing other results. This is one of the primary techniques online reputation management professionals use to “remove” negative content from search engines. Sometimes bad press can be removed at the source, but not often. To understand the full range of options, see our guide on suppressing negative news articles.

Social Media Algorithms

Social media is teaching us what to think. Just as Google has its own complex machine-learning algorithm, social media feeds have theirs as well.

Meta’s Feed ranking algorithm — once known as EdgeRank but now a far more sophisticated system using thousands of signals — can be simplified and visualized thus:

The News Feed algorithm operates differently.

These algorithms learn from your social behavior — whose content you engage with, what you search for, what you like, and what you post. They also factor in your social connections, recognizing that the people you’re linked to exert real influence over your interests.

A business’s online reputation is therefore largely dependent on the vagaries of social media. Consider a politician running for office. Whether her coverage appears positive or negative depends heavily on the viewer’s inferred political leanings — shaped by what pages they’ve liked, what content they’ve engaged with, and who they follow.

These algorithms intuit your social, political, ethical, moral, and religious biases and respond in kind. They reinforce existing viewpoints through the psychological phenomenon of confirmation bias.

Earned, paid, and owned content are like the bricks of an online reputation. Google and social media algorithms are the mortar, binding those bricks together in a particular way. But unlike masonry, online reputation is flexible — and that means it can be changed with the right strategy.

How to Create a Reputation Management Strategy

The process that follows is a framework. The specifics depend on your unique situation, but this outline applies whether you are repairing, shaping, or protecting an online reputation.

For the sake of continuity, assume you are the chief marketing officer (CMO) of a medium-sized business. Your mission is to shape a strategy for protecting or improving your company’s reputation.

Research Your Online Presence

Your first task is research — Google search specifically. In this phase, you will search for every iteration of your company name and product and document the results.

Gauging corporate sentiment

In this phase, you want to get an accurate barometer of your corporate sentiment. What is your corporate reputation? Pay careful attention to the following and record them in a spreadsheet or document:

• Positive coverage and earned content
• Negative coverage and earned content
• Similar companies or competitors
• Influencers in the space — media companies, individuals, publications, etc.

Private search

Conduct your searches in a private browser window so your cache and history do not skew the results.

• Chrome: More → New Incognito Window (Command+Shift+N or CTRL+Shift+N)
• Safari: Pages → Private (Command+Shift+N)
• Firefox: Menu → New Private Window (Command+Shift+N or CTRL+Shift+N)
• Edge: Settings → New InPrivate Window (CTRL+Shift+N)

Here is what to search for:

• Your company name
• Your company’s notable products (e.g., MacBook Pro, Samsung Galaxy)
• Company executives or leadership, including name variations (e.g., John Goldsmith, John A. Goldsmith, ABC Company CEO)
• Your company name combined with words relevant to your situation (e.g., ABC Company scandal, ABC Company bankruptcy, ABC Company reviews)
• Searches from other languages or locations where your business has a presence

Research social media sentiment

The goal of social research is to identify positive coverage, negative coverage, similar companies, and industry influencers — not to chase every comment thread.

• Review your company’s owned social accounts: posts, comments, engagement, and follower counts
• Search for your company name, hashtags, and bashtags on X (formerly Twitter), Threads, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, and YouTube

Next, review the relevant review platforms for your industry:

• Local businesses: Google, Yelp, Facebook
• Restaurants: Yelp, Google, OpenTable, Zomato
• Products: Amazon
• Hotels or tourist attractions: TripAdvisor
• Movies: Rotten Tomatoes
• Startups: Crunchbase
• Publicly traded companies: Bloomberg
• Employers: Glassdoor, Indeed
• Software and SaaS: G2, Capterra
• General business: Trustpilot
• Healthcare: Healthgrades, Zocdoc
• Legal services: Avvo

Follow the same research process for your top competitors. This reveals industry benchmarks and helps you develop greater objectivity as you move into the assimilation phase. Focus on the top five competitors rather than attempting to research every player in the space.

Your goal is to produce a clear picture of corporate sentiment — a documented list of positive coverage, negative coverage, similar companies, and industry influencers. For a deeper look at tools that can automate this process, see our overview of the top online sentiment monitoring platforms.

Assimilate Your Findings

Once you understand your corporate sentiment — the good, the bad, and the ugly — you have everything needed for the assimilation phase. Here, you ask a series of questions about the information you’ve collected. You may not have clear answers to each, but working through them will point you toward a final strategy.

• What is your overall brand sentiment?
• How does your brand sentiment compare to competitors? Better? Worse? Middle of the pack?
• What is your brand’s story — and what factors shaped it? If you suffered a reputation setback, allow it to become part of the narrative. The most compelling brand stories move fast, carry some shock value, and end at a point of triumph.
• What aspects of your story can you control?
• What is the sentiment of your online reviews? What is your average star rating?
• Would your brand benefit from a strategy to improve or protect online reviews?
• What new content or properties could you create to improve your reputation?
• Which competitors have the strongest reputation, and what drove it?
• What can you do to achieve similar results?
• Which influencers are available for outreach, and what pitch would compel positive coverage?
• Which social media channels are most influential for building a positive reputation in your space?
• What negative information is tarnishing your reputation, and where is it published?
• Can that negative information be suppressed or removed?
• What is the reputation of company founders, leaders, or executives? If negative, should those individuals be distanced from the brand?

Building the Reputation Plan

The strategy-creation process is organic — answers emerge through analysis rather than appearing all at once. In this final phase, you will assemble a list of action items across four categories. These categories roughly parallel the strategic planning technique known as the SWOT analysis.

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Begin by identifying the single most damaging factor in your reputation and creating a list of remedies. This should come first, especially for organizations that have suffered a reputation setback.

Address Weaknesses Serially

Address remedies one by one, in order of priority. Reputation strategies are typically serial in design — a sequenced list of actions taken in a deliberate order. For a practical look at how this plays out after a crisis, see our guide on rebuilding reputation after a crisis.

Identify Your Strongest Levers

Identify the content or intangible assets that are already performing well and apply the same approach to weaker channels. Focus on the techniques that would produce the greatest improvement to your reputation and address them in sequence.

Example: Your brand’s Facebook page has a massive following and loyal fans. Use the same publishing schedule, content approach, and engagement tactics to amplify other social media channels and your blog.

Examine Reputational Vulnerabilities

Every brand has areas vulnerable to a reputation attack. Determine where you are most exposed and create a plan to strengthen those properties.

Example: Your brand’s website does not appear on page 1 of search results for branded terms, leaving you with essentially no owned content in front of searchers. A likely strategic action would be to improve your website’s SEO. You may also want to conduct a full online reputation audit to identify every gap in your search presence.

Mimic Successful Competitors

Select the competitor with the best reputation and reverse-engineer their approach. Most brands have at least one rival with a stronger search presence, better reviews, or a more robust social strategy. Identify what produced their success and adapt it.

Example: Your competitor has brand mentions in high-profile publications such as Forbes and Inc. By examining their coverage, you identify a handful of contributors who frequently mention and link to brands. You pitch those writers directly for a brand mention.

Conclusion

An online reputation strategy is never a cut-and-dried, templatized affair — though many reputation management companies use that approach anyway. Brand reputations are like personalities: nuanced, detailed, and shaped by history. Effective strategy requires first understanding that complexity, then assimilating it, and finally allowing the right plan to take shape.

Any brand can recover its online reputation regardless of what happened, how low its reviews are, or what its leadership has been through. The process requires time and resources, but there is always a path forward. To learn more about the full scope of this work, explore our complete guide to online reputation management.