For several months now, we have been experiencing a kind of hysterical frenzy over what is called “online reputation”—in my opinion, a misnomer. A brand, person, company, or product may have a certain “fame,” awareness, or recognition, but this is not the same as its reputation.

This term has been as misunderstood as “public relations” once was; the term was so trivialized that anyone became a professional expert in the field, regardless of their education or whether they had dedicated their professional life to it. Fortunately, in this country, we have great experts in reputation management, regardless of whether their focus is the Internet or not, because there is only one reputation, and it is not divided by media but by the audiences of each object of study.

We hear in many conferences, read in blogs, and constantly tweet about online reputation; for months, we have seen it as the new trend, a profession that seems like the evolution of community managers, as if reputation management had just arrived in this sector.

There are communication agencies, consultancies, and institutions that have been dedicated to this important “subject” for over 40 years.

It is true that there are now new ways to understand the perceptions we generate among our audiences, for example, through monitoring tools and a team of analysts. However, the most important thing is not just what is said about us or the companies we work for. The key lies in what values we want to convey to our audiences, what they actually perceive, whether there is a difference or not, what causes that gap between what they believe and what is, and, above all, what we will do to minimize that gap.

Therefore, it makes no sense to call it online reputation management, but simply reputation management. Obviously, we will need interdisciplinary teams that can work hand-in-hand, each with the appropriate resources, to optimally manage reputation, but understood as a transversal matter. Managing a company’s reputation is not just about monitoring, or knowing what voluntary or involuntary presence it has on the Internet, or generating content about the company, or doing SEO to position or de-position information related to the company and its professionals. To be more specific, I would state that we need to understand the perceptions generated among its different publics or stakeholders, but I would certainly not divide it into online reputation and offline reputation, because that is merely scratching the surface.

After the presentation at AERCOMPARTE, we became a Trending Topic in Spain
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