As the good folks over at Distilled mentioned last week, aggressive reputation management puts your business ahead of the game. There are several levels of ORM campaign commitment. We’ll briefly discuss each level and then revisit each later (future posts) in greater detail. Keep in mind that in 90% of all indsutries or sub-industry categories, your company will be light years ahead of the competition by engaging in Beginner’s Level One, let alone the Intermediate Level 2 or Expert Level 3. Let’s take a look at each, starting with the beginner.

LEVEL ONE (Beginner)
Level One consists of on site reputation monitoring, corporate blogging, corporate forum responses, and press releases. The reason this is considered Level One is that every aspect of this program looks only at the corporate website. You receive questions, comments, and complaints via email, blog comments, forum posts, and telephone inquiry. But all of these comments come to you, and you make the effort to answer each one through your corporate network: site, blog, forum, press release. Each of these can be posted on your domain, and the customer or interested party must return to you to get an answer or explanation. Under normal circumstances, Level One would be named “Superior Customer Service”. But in the world of Web 2.0 (sorry Mystery SEO – had to use the term), this level of reputation management will make you look really good to the people who want to be customers but have complaints.

LEVEL TWO (Intermediate)
Most reputation managers fall under the category of Level Two management. A Level Two approach consists of external reputation monitoring (Google Alerts or special RM software), well-written comments on external blogs and forums, guest blogging on relevant sites, Digg / Reddit submissions, plus all the internal responsibilities listed under Level One. The purpose here is to seek out negative press wherever it exists, address those issues, and promote the company in a positive manner. Whereas Level One campaigns involve customer service, Level Two takes the fight, so to speak, out there on the battlefield. If a celebrity is quoted as saying something negative or even scandalous about your company, find the most equal or superceding method of responding and promoting on that same site. Most websites love traffic, and will allow both sides of a dispute to voice their opinions if it means more visitors and notoriety.

LEVEL THREE (Expert)
We sometimes blur the defining lines of responsibility for Level Three activities between reputation manager and SEO specialist. As a reputation management expert, you aggressively pursue rankings by generating fresh content before anything negative has been said. Look to fill the top 10 search results for your names and nicknames with positive articles, blogs, press releases, guest blog posts, forum comments, etc. On top of that, follow the advice of the folks at Distilled and seek to rank for in the #2 or #3 spots for your competitor’s name, product, or service. Use this valuable real estate to promote your prices, quality, or reputation over theirs.

The Dark Side of Level Three involves creating blogs and forums online that appear to be run by customers. This fake UGC (user generated content) boosts the apparent credibility of products, services, and corporate reputations. Organizations such as Wal-Mart have attempted to promote themselves in this manner and been caught, thus further damaging their reputations (who wants to shop at a store that has to impersonate rave reviews?). Hundreds of companies still do this, however, and are not discovered. Successful black hat reputation management depends on the thoroughness of the campaign approach (or so I’m told).

I don’t encourage anyone to pursue black hat ORM. To fail in the process is to damn the organization even further than it already is. There are grey tactics in which you can pay for positive posts in blogs where the post is marked as a sponsored post, but there are drawbacks (how much authority would you give a blog post that is sponsored?).

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