You may already be well on your way to doing a superb job of monitoring your online brand or reputation. Whether your strategy involves using vanity searches, a collection of feeds, or a paid-service like ours, you have taken the all important first step to safeguarding your brands and reputation. Online reputation monitoring (ORM) is one of the fundamental enablers to your business success.

As the subject of this blog post suggests, reputation risks are incidences that occur during the course of your online monitoring. Some are unavoidable. Others you are able to mitigate with a significant amount of success. These are occurences which you must not overlook, and this post is meant to act as an awareness tool in helping mitigate any potential reputation risk that may arise from stern corporate mandates to enforce access control.

Access Control Situation - The best way to describe what I mean to point out here is to explain it through a written dramatization echoing a real life event. You locate a negative online incident and you dilligently communicate it with the appropriate crisis communication expert by email and a phone call. They call or email back explaining that they are not able to access the link. They go on to say that they suspect it might be blocked by their company firewall.

What do you do?

The reality is that online reputation monitoring (ORM) is still at its infancy. Corporate buy-in is happening, but not quickly enough to align ORM strategies with existing corporate access control or data leak prevention mandates. If you think that such an occurence is likely to happen solely within the traditional enterprise landscape, then you might be surprised to know that this continues to happen with people who are specifically hired to mitigate such risk.

Solution: Whether your title is social media coordinator/director, ORM consultant, or crisis communication expert, you will need buy-in from the IT department. Involve senior-level management in any such discussions to support your role and your business case. All that may be required is to open a port on the network firewall or to have a dedicated terminal in the company with no access restrictions. There are other approaches, but what is important is that you are able to properly mitigate reputation risk, still keeping within the parameters of any existing corporate mandate.

Timely retrieval and action on serious online incidences is key, and while you may be able to copy and paste text from the original post and email it in a pinch, mirroring multi-media content from websites like YouTube might present some challenges.

A great post put together by Max Gladwell for businesses who are closely following new social media developments, or those wanting some ideas on becoming greensmart.