Online Reputation Management

People are beginning to awaken to the term "Online Reputation Management". This is a term for the actions taken to scour the internet for negative comments, reviews, posts or other content about your company, firm, practice or person. With the abundance of blogs, forums, gripe sites, and online review sites there are opportunities for disgruntled cutomers, ex-employees, and even unscrupulous competitors to post content that will be very damaging to your online reputation, branding and the perception of potential customers. Therefore, it is extremely important to locate any negative content and neutralize it as quickly as possible.

How do you do this? First, you must be willing to invest a lot of personal time or hire a qualifed reputation management company to handle the work. Whoever gets the assignment should be able to do extensive internet searches on the major search engines to find any problem content. Your initial endeavor into this research will consume a LOT of time. After the initial research it will be easier to maintain an eye on new content posted online.

When you find negative content you need to assess your options to neutralize the problem. Depending upon the site where the information resides, and the age of the information, your task could be relatively easy or could require exhaustive efforts to manage a successful outcome.

Your options, in order of preference, are to get the information totally removed (unindexed), attempt to post a rebuttal statement, or displace the information from a high visibility placement. The tactics to do these things take far too much time to explain in detail however it is well worth your time to learn how to do this or to hire a reputation management company as soon as possible.

In most cases a reputation management company can perform a relatively inexpensive "top level review" to find any significant problems. Obviously you can engage the company to dig deeper if you need a greater sense of comfort. When any information is found, the company can provide you with an estimation on the time, cost and expected results from their efforts to neutralize the problem content. Some companies offer results-based-fees while some companies charge for their time without any guarantee of any specific results.

The one certainty is that negative online content will damage your business reputation, branding and customer perceptions. We believe that it is worth a phone call to learn more and protect your company.