Online presence management is the process of creating and promoting traffic to a personal or professional brand online. This process combines web design, development, blogging, search engine optimization, pay-per-click marketing, reputation management, directory listings, social media, link sharing, and other avenues to create a long-term positive presence for a person, organization, or product in search engines and on the web in general. Online presence management is distinct from web presence management in that the former is generally a marketing and messaging discipline while the latter is Governance, risk management, and compliance operational and security discipline.
Theory The theory of online presence management considers a website to be insufficient to promote most brands. To maintain a web presence and brand recognition, individuals and companies need to use a variety of digital platforms such as Google Maps, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Flickr, YouTube, and Pinterest, as well as cultivating a brand presence on mobile apps and other online databases. The online presence management process starts by determining goals that will define an online strategy. Once this strategy is put in place, an ongoing and constant process of evaluating and fine-tuning is necessary to drive online presence towards the identified goals. An online presence management strategy consists of several components. Generally, these will include search engine placement (making sure the brand appears high in search engine results when the end-user has a relevant query), monitoring online discussion around the brand, and analyzing the brand's overall web presence.
Elements An online profile or reputation is a product of multiple activities and platforms. It includes the following:
Web portfolio management The online portfolio helps to build the visibility of a brand or individual. It works as a centralized hub for all the activities related to the brand and includes the contact info of the brand, what the brand is about (history, vision etc.) and a product showcase. The web portfolio comes in different forms. The most common form of a portfolio is the website. A website, usually built on the same domain as the brand's name, represents the business/person throughout the web. Brands and companies prefer to use websites to establish themselves and gain higher brand awareness levels because it is very important for the company to maintain relevance over time, and promoting a product online makes it much easier to keep up with the times. Businesses need to keep online visibility high as well as their performance compared to their competitors. Online reputation management should be tracked to see how consumers react and feel towards a company's brand.
Blog A blog provides a brand with a way to express itself. It allows the brand to talk and get their voice/opinion heard on any topic they choose. Blogging can promote a brand through consistent, interesting content generation associated with a particular brand or the market said the brand caters to. Blogs can be created on the website or third-party platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Quora, WordPress, Blogger.com and Medium, etc. Apart from conventional blogging, social media has enabled Microblogging (through services such as Twitter and Tumblr) which is particularly effective in establishing a brand name and building the brand's recognition through interaction with the masses. It is also a quick way to respond to brand-related complaints and queries. Corporate blogging is a powerful tool when attempting to communicate an idea important to the firm's identity. However, there are a few rules to keep in mind when utilizing corporate blogs:
Blogs can be both internal and external - This means that they can be effective to communicate new products or ideas to customers or make sure everyone inside the firm is on the same page. Blogs are personal - Blogs are meant to be written from a first-person perspective. Blogs need a good author to be successful, but it does not have to be the chief executive officer - Some believe that chief executive officers are too busy running the rest of the firm to also write a blog. Companies like Boeing and General Motors, for example, have successful blogs that are not written by their chief executive officers. Blogs are targeted - Value the audience and write for them. Blogs can be short-lived - Corporate blogs should not last long. They are created for a purpose, used, and then shut down. They are not meant to go on forever. Blogs should not be used as feedback devices - Blogs are not meant to have personal dialect within them. They are not for conversation between employees.
Search engine optimization Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most popular techniques to build traction and turn a web page into a revenue-generation machine. Search engine optimization allows companies or individuals to:
Identify keywords that are likely to bring potential customers or audiences to their website Embed those keywords into the web content, naturally and in a value-added way Allow search engines to crawl the web page and index all the content Search engines use a spider or a crawler to gather listings by automatically "crawling" the web. The spider follows links to web pages, makes copies of the pages, and stores them in the search engine's index. Based on this data, the search engines then index the pages and rank the websites accordingly. Major search engines that index pages using spiders include Google, Yahoo, Bing, AOL, and Lycos. Some methods that help optimize a web page for the search engine include:
Link Building — creating relevant and natural links for the website Creating keyword-optimized content
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