As your company grows, you’ll need to keep on top of what people are saying about you online. As you’re growing, you’ll also have the opportunity to monitor and set up alerts for what people are talking about, online, which is related to your type of product or service. You can also continue to do this as you turn into a large organisation. After all, you’ll never stop looking for opportunities.
If you’ve just started a business then you won’t already have a brand so online reputation management and brand management will not be so important to you. This is because no-one or very few people will actually be talking online about you…or typing in forums, Tweeting, posting on Facebook or doing anything else online relating to you or your business. Therefore, it most likely won’t be worth the investment in setting up processes to listen online at this stage. But you can still listen to opportunities related to your types of products and services.
There is a lot of cross-over between SEO and online brand management. It’s particularly worth noting that the two specialisms are quite intertwined due to the nature of how search engines rank results. If you Google your company name and ‘your company sucks’ or words to that affect appear you’ll know that you’ll need some reactive SEO to solve this particular issue. Unless, of course, the posts/comments/web pages displaying this content can be proven to be defamatory.