What is Online Reputation Management?
Online Reputation Management is a somewhat new term (within the last five years or so) that is becoming more and more crucial for businesses. To boil it down to its basics, it is stopping business customers finding 'bad' reviews or pages about that business.
Typically it will be things such as a review site (or local directory with user comments) where there is an unfair (in the eyes of the business) post. This negative post will often be on the first page of search engines like Google and potential customers may see it. So the idea behind Online Reputation Management (ORM) is to try and stop those negative posts and pages appearing in the first few pages of search engines. (People very rarely go past the first few pages in search engines so the main and initial focus is often to get these negative pages away from the first page of Google, Bing, Yahoo etc).
This is distinctly different than SEO - search engine optimisation. They share a lot of common methods but the end result is completely different. If a company wanted to optimise their site for search engines they would ensure THEIR site was 'higher up' in search engines (position #1 when searching for their keywords). Online reputation management is the act of ensuring the OTHER websites DON'T show in the top results for certain keywords. I.e. ORM is more about hiding other sites. SEO is about making sure your site is found.