Is Reputation Management the Same as SEO?

If you’ve done anything in the world of online reputation management (ORM) then you will notice that a lot of ORM is similar to that of SEO. With both ORM and SEO you are trying to rank high in the search results for specific terms and outranking your competition. There are many similarities, but also many differences as well.
Online reputation management is also about knowing what your customers are saying, how to get your positive reviews in front of the right audience and suppressing negative results from the search engines. It’s not so much a question of if ORM and SEO are the same, but how to build a plan for them to both compliment each other.
Brand.com has asked many well known ORM experts the following question:

Can you recommend three useful reputation management tactics that will help people control what people see when their Googled?

Michael Streko of Knowem.com said the following:

Make sure you link all of your social profiles. One of the things that will help you the most is linking these profiles together.  Just because you own a blog on your own domain doesn’t mean that you should point every link and anchor text to it.  Switch it up a bit and link to your twitter, Facebook or any other social media account you own.  This will give all of your profiles a dynamic link background and help them to rank.

Andy Beal of Trackur.com also had the following to say:

You have to take control of your online brand. Register a domain name, secure the username for different social media profiles and then get to work building them out and using them. In the absence of anything that you create, Google will fill the reputation void with anything else it might find…and you may not like what it finds!

In the world of SEO these are both common practices for making content rank well in the search results.
The bottom line is that while many companies are claiming themselves as “online reputation management experts“, many of them just have a background of SEO and don’t know what they are doing. If you are looking for an SEO or ORM specialist, make sure they are actually a specialist in each field and have a wide background and history in each. ORM is not SEO and SEO is not ORM… though they both compliment each other extremely well when worked in tandem.