What is Reputation Management?

A good reputation is something which takes a long-time to create but can be lost very quickly; something which RyanAir must be learning to its cost. If you are in business, your good reputation is the result of being competitive and supplying the needs of your customers or clients effectively and your online presence is an extension of your good reputation.

Why is it important?

Without a good reputation, you lose trust and without trust there is no business. While most transactions run smoothly, occasionally things can go wrong, be it faulty product, misunderstanding or even just an awkward customer. The power of internet makes it possible for a dogged person to do a disproportionate amount of harm to your reputation. That is why it is important.

How can you Reduce the Impact of Negative Publicity?

In most case reputation management consists of simply putting things right before they get out of control. Therefore, effective customer service is important first line of defence to keep things in check before they can escalate. Keep an ear to the ground and identify what your customers are saying about your brand on the web. Identifying potential problems can be a simple as performing a search for your company’s name in Google, Yahoo and Live search engines and looking at the results. Are there any results which show your products in a negative light?

When the negative sites are identified, try and resolve any negative publicity by trying to fix problems. Forums and blogs are an obvious place to give an opinion but they frequently also allow you the right to reply. In this case you can put your case if it is not your fault and defend yourself. However, it is important to stay focused on the issues rather than the person and not resort to personal attacks. If it is your fault, the best thing is to acknowledge the problem but say what has been done to resolve it.

Twitter is also taking the role of reputation management as one of its many uses. One tip would be to start a Twitter account in the name of your company. While you could use any account, obviously, a Twitter account in the name of your company will carry more weight.

You can use Twitter search to find incidences of your brand occurring in tweets. In a previous post I talked about WebMynd which allows you to search Google, Twitter and many other sites at the same time. If you identify a case where your brand has been spoken about negatively, you can limit bad feeling by taking steps to rectify the problem. In this way you can be seen to be doing the right thing, potentially defusing a public outburst against your brand.

It is important not to be paranoid about your reputation online in many cases the negative publicity will not be seen widely but fixing any problems can result in customer satisfaction and willingness to do business again. In perfoming search for negative publicity, Twitter might also be used to promote your products and find sale opportunities by searching for leads when good results appear.

Where negative publicity cannot be resolved, other strategies include promoting sites in the results that are neutral or unrelated to push negative results to the next page. However, such campaigns of are like anti-SEO projects and can take a long time and so remain the last resort.