Reputation Management Online

Over the last 12 months we have been focused on reputation management and are often contacted by companies and individuals who have an issue with negative content showing in the search results.  Often by this time it’s to late and the damage is done.  It’s much more difficult to bury a web page once it has gained momentum and reached the first page of Google.  It’s a bit like cancer, if you catch it early enough or do the things that will help reduce the chances of getting it in the first place like not smoking then you have a much greater chance of stopping or preventing it.  However leave it and ignore the symptoms and you could have a major issue that in some cases can be fatal.

So reputation management is often seen as a luxury rather than a necessity until of course it’s to late and they have been hit by some negative content that’s effecting their sales.  This could not be further from the truth, by thinking and adapting your business to take in reputation management as part of the marketing mix cannot only help prevent negative content rising to the top of search engines but also help throw a bigger net out to catch more customers and create more sales.

Another great positive outcome of reputation management is as you start to monitor what’s being said about your company or product through the web, blogs, social sites like twitter, you can soon get feedback of what customers think about you or your product.  Sites like Twitter allow you to search keywords in peoples tweets, Google Alerts is another great tool to spot any potential issues, there is also quite a few products out there to help monitor the internet as a whole and spot potential issues.

Here are a couple of our main Dos and Don’t s to help get you on your way:

• Do sign up to as many social network sites using your company name as the user name, even if you don’t use all the sites, it stops other people from pretending to be you.
• Do control comments on 3rd party sites, if you a prone to getting negative remark, either turn off remarks or allow only remarks once they have been approved.
• Do keep blogs and main social sites like facebook and twitter up to date, it shows that you are an active company.  Make sure to also link to these resources from your site and email signature, this will help with the ranking of these 3rd party sites for your company name.

• Don’t try and fight a thread publicly on a forum, more often than not you will attract more negative comments back and also encourage google to rank the thread higher.  If thread is untrue and libellous contact the site owner and ask for the thread to be removed.
• Don’t ignore negative content, the attitude from PR companies reference damage limitation is to ignore it, as more often than not the bad press will go away after a few days.  This is the complete opposite with the net, if you leave it, it can gain momentum and become a bigger issue. Unlike a paper that is thrown away the following day, on the net it’s there 24 hours, 7 days a week.  The only way to deal with such content is to either have it removed (very difficult and time consuming) or bury it.

In the old days celebrities read about themselves in newspapers and magazines, today celebrity stories abound across the web and some of the most popular searches in search engines are for celebrity names. Indeed, some of the fastest moving stories arise around celebrity misdemeanour’s and misadventures. Every trip and slip of a celebrity is analysed and commented on by an army of consumer reviewers, fans and critics.  It is an on going piece of work to make sure that your reputation is protected by continuing putting out positive content out there.

The simplest way to explain how to combat negative content is if you have 1 website then you can only possibly control maybe two spots on the first page of the search results.  The other 8 or 9 spots are therefore open to anybody else who wants to write about you. By creating blogs, more websites, sub domains and social network pages then you have more opportunity to control the first page.

One last bit of advice we have gained this year, if you are starting a business or launching a product take time to research a name.  If you don’t want a big presence on the net then choose a company name that is very generic for example Direct Shoes. This will stop negative content coming up about your business as the keywords are far to general.  However if you do want to be found on the net then use a more specific name like AZA Direct Shoes (hope that company does not exist or they need some SEO help), but be aware it also means that anything negative about your business could also rise to the top of the results a lot easier.

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