Case Study: Public Relations

We work behind the scenes to make PR agencies look great to their clients
Daten ORM strives to provide transparency to our clients, and we also respect our client’s autonomy and trade secrets. We signed a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) with the public relations agency before learning the names of their clients. One client of theirs was a celebrity CEO, another a technology executive, and the third a politician, and each one required their own campaign.

The CEO had an exposé written about him, the technology executive had problems with the recipient of his charitable giving, the politician had made some errors in judgement earlier in his career and was attempting to fix search results.

How reputation management is different than SEO
Reputation management consultants use SEO as part of the solution. SEO firms typically work on one site, reputation firms work to promote many. SEO firms focus on ranking, reputation firms on ranking, sentiment, and search result domination.

Interfacing with the PR agency
In this case the agency was of medium size, which is not large enough to have a dedicated online reputation team. We provided sales support by participating in end-of-sales-cycle calls with the client acting as their in-house specialists. We then helped the agency craft proposals for each of their clients with no identifying information about Daten ORM. The proposals were provided in Google Docs format so the client could easily download the information and edit it into their normal proposal format.

After the PR firm closed the deal
Once the agency closed the deal with their clients we moved quickly to put our plans in motion. Because the Daten ORM team had already helped close the sale and provided advance proposal help, we knew the client’s issues intimately. We set up online reputation monitoring for each of the clients, and then got to work on strategy documents.

Strategy approval
The agency rebranded the strategy documentation we provided without any Reputation X branding and presented it to the client. We were brought in to provide support over the phone in case the client had technical questions about the strategy, which did happen two or three times. Once the strategy was approved we got to work on each of the three clients.

Execution of the strategy
We worked with a single point of contact within the agency which ensured consistency across campaigns. The plan was developed so that constant improvements and updates could be provided. Each of the campaigns demanded different solutions for different objectives. In one case only a few very high profile articles were produced, which were then promoted by approximately thirty lesser articles providing inbound links. Another client needed five complete websites developed. The last client required that the project be developed in multiple languages, which was carried out by Daten ORM.

Outcome
We have been working with the same agency for many different clients for more than three years and continue to provide high quality reputation management services to them as a white-label reputation vendor.