As you might know, your reputation is an important thing. If you have a bad reputation, people do not want to befriend you and they will not make the effort to get to know you. The same goes for businesses. When you own a business, the last thing you want is a bad online reputation.
When “customers” are leaving negative comments about your business it can severely impact your brand and your reputation in the industry. This is why reputation management is so important. If you do not have the budget to pay a marketing company for professional reputation management, review these priceless tips and do as much as you can yourself.
Have A Defense Strategy In Place
If customers or even competing businesses are going to try to tarnish your company’s name, the first place they will go is the most public place on the web. They might leave reviews on Google, Bing, Yelp, and Yahoo. They may even go to other blogs that are related to your industry and leave negative comments.
Make sure you register all of the user names that are related to your brand or your company name. If you register these names before disgruntled clients try to do the same, you can prevent the people from using the company name against you in the future.
Post Content To Suppress Negative Comment
People have freedom of speech on the web. This means that you cannot force someone to erase their negative comments about your company. What you can do is post content on the same blog on website so that the negative comment is not the first thing consumers see.
If you post content and push the relevancy of the comments back, the comments are not likely to affect you. Strategic reputation management techniques involve replacing the negative comments with strong and compelling positive content. This is a great way to cover up the bad with the good to your benefit.
Take Action By Responding To Negative Attacks
While it might sound easier to ignore the negative comments, this is not the best action to take when you are dealing with your brand’s reputation. Just because you are ignoring what the competition is saying about you does not mean that your clients are going to do the same thing.
The longer you leave the attacks unanswered, the more damage that the attacks can do on your reputation. You should take action by responding to all of the comments as soon as they appear.
To respond to attacks, you need to know when these attacks are being published to the web. If you are not sure how to do this, do what the professional companies do and set up alerts so you are notified whenever your company name is mentioned.
You can even set up alerts on social media websites through a tool called Social Mention. When you do this, you are never blind to what comments are out there.
Having a bad reputation online can really affect your business. You will have difficulty generating new clients and you may have difficulty keeping the clients you already have.
If you want to protect your online reputation, you need to take action and defend your business. Always respond to attacks, suppress negative comments, and take your reputation seriously.
Jean is a highly experienced writer and an internet marketing entrepreneur. Her ideas on web reputation management are highly effective, borne out of decades of experience. She specializes on providing consultation services to businesses in need of solid online reputation management. Follow Jean Ryan on Google+.
Some priceless tips indeed. I especially liked the second one where you post your own content to minimize the damage done by the negative comments. However to do all these it is important to have an effective monitoring service.
These are great tips. Online reputation management is a very important thing to maintain for every business. Monitoring it regularly and taking steps whenever required is a good step. It takes years to build a name for any business and it doesn’t take long for that reputation to get spoil.
Thanks for these tips, reputation management is definitely more uncontrollable nowadays with the presence of a vast number of social networking and other online resource platforms. It pays to really check how your business is fairing online with the general public.
False publicity, rumor mongering and the like has become a common practice to put good businesses down. I hope that business owners will be more vigilant about the matter, check for “unofficial” pages on social networking sites and report them most especially if you see that it’s doing your business more harm than good. Be interactive and address all of your customers’ concerns.
Thanks for the solution-oriented share. I think it pays to remember that we should never underestimate the power of feedback left online, address all issues accordingly by answering questions promptly and utilize social networking platforms to make clarifications.