October 28, 2011
Reputation Management on Steroids
If you lose your reputation what do you have left? Nothing.
In the instant-news, always-connected, everyone-has-a-soapbox kind of world we live in today, your reputation is all you have and it can disappear or take a nosedive faster than you can send a DM on Twitter.
Whether you’re applying for a job, running a business, or just socializing with friends and family, reputation management is vital and you can’t always do it on your own. You need your own Lindsay Lohan-style team to help maintain your online image or combat an Internet pitfall from time to time, because you can’t control what other people say about you, but you can chose to take an active role in controlling how their comments are viewed, if at all.
Management Tool Options
The fact is that the Internet social world is really no different than the real social world in a sense; you have every right to represent yourself how you see fit and protect and defend that representation to the bitter end. Your livelihood and future could depend on this defense … it’s not something to be taken lightly.
When it comes to the free publishing world of the Internet, no one can be trusted. Competitors can say pretty much whatever they want about you, whenever, wherever they want and there’s nothing stopping them. No matter how honestly you run your business, there’s always someone out there willing to badmouth your company, your services, products, employees – anything – if for no other reason, sometimes, than just to hear themselves talk.
While a quality SEO and reputation management service would never give away its true secrets, the general approach to preserving your online “face” is to push out the disruptive content. This strategy may include bumping negative comments back a few pages in search engine results and replacing that content with new comments representing you and your organization in a much more favorable light.
Rip-off Report Removal
If you’re a business, there are tons of potentially damaging sites out there that claim to report on company rip-offs, but these sites aren’t always all they’re cracked up to be. They have a reputation of not being able to substantiate their reports (sounds like they may be in need of some reputation management themselves) and not allowing filed complaints to take on any legitimacy because there’s little viable legal recourse against them.
The best way to fight these reports is through a reputation management service. A quality reputation management service should be able to push back these reports to the far-reaching pages of Google, or any other search engine, within just a few weeks. Once the report has been removed from the first few pages, most searchers won’t see what you’re trying to hide because, surveys show, they stop scrolling after page three; it’s as good as gone.
Most reputation management services will follow up by working on monitoring and maintenance to prevent the report from resurfacing and to police any other reports that may pop up. Daily maintenance is just not something all individuals or businesses have the time, money, or energy to carry out effectively. Consider paying the experts to take care of it for you.
