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Definition

Online reputation management

The practice of monitoring, influencing, and responding to what's said about a business across review sites, social media, and search results.

Online reputation management (often abbreviated ORM) covers everything a business does to shape how it appears online: collecting reviews, responding to negative reviews, monitoring mentions on social media, optimizing what shows up in branded search results, and managing crisis communications.

For local SMBs, ORM is dominated by review collection and review response on Google, Yelp, and Facebook. The single highest-leverage activity in this category is consistently asking every customer for a review — most businesses with bad reputations don't have bad customers, they just don't have a system for asking the good ones.

Enterprise reputation management platforms (Birdeye, Reputation.com, ReviewTrackers) bundle reviews with surveys, social listening, listings management, and competitive benchmarking — useful for franchises with hundreds of locations, overkill for single-location SMBs. Focused tools (SignalRoute, NiceJob, BrightLocal) handle just the review-collection piece.

See also

Related terms

Review routing

A review collection method where customers are invited to leave a public review on the platform of their choice (Google, Yelp, Facebook, etc.) — and unhappy customers are also offered a private feedback channel as an alternative they can opt into.

Review velocity

The rate at which a business accumulates new reviews — typically measured as new reviews per month — and a key signal in Google's local search ranking.

Google Business Profile

Google's free business listing product — formerly Google My Business — that controls how your business appears in Google Search and Google Maps.

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