Marc 2 Market

Even in EDU Marketing, firms have started to push reputation management as a new form of online marketing. This is a response to the expansion of the Internet, with notable growth in social media and user-generated content. As quickly as the Internet generates content, it is indexed and archived. This content is hard to erase, especially with the wave of social media in recent years.

Whenever a user searches for information on the web, the positive or negative reviews build in the user’s mind the qualities, without necessarily having any first-hand experiences. Because of this fact, it is essential to, in a sense, “make a good first impression.” Countless types of users will be using search engines daily. With diligent management of online reputation, a good first impression can be made on users such as:

• Consumers

• Stockholders

• Journalists

• Employees

• Business partners

These are the users who eventually have the most power in the market and on sustainability.

Online Reputation Management (ORM) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) have similar approaches and methods, but their objectives are different. SEO modifies content on websites to appeal to search engines, while ORM seeks to control the information that shows up from a search. Because search engines optimize search results constantly, it is essential in SEO and reputation management to monitor the results continually as well.

There are a myriad of for-profit education services in the United States; it is not only hard to gain exposure, but it has become difficult to maintain that exposure. Reputation management for education services seeks to utilize all the tools of traditional ORM, but applied to the education industry. This includes managing search engine ranking pages (SERPs) and optimizing these results to generate good exposure. Reputation management is much more complex than management of content, as it is an extension of marketing and focuses on the end user. Eventually, reputation management will be as essential as managing credit scores.