Practical Ways to Combat Potential Negative Publicity
January 14th, 2010 by
WOW! This company truly needs some online reputation management. Online reputation management is simply the process of monitoring a brand online, dealing with anything negative and understanding how to be pro-active to prevent negative content. The tactics are mostly used by companies to pro-actively protect their reputation from damaging content found online, unfortunately some companies use online reputation management to reactively “fix” the damage that is already done.
Reputation management is more important than ever in how your company is positively or negatively perceived. Think about the popularity of search engines, emerging social media and blogging. These things make it easier than ever for the public to voice their opinions – good or bad – to a very large group of people.
So, how can you maintain control of your online presence? Here are 4 ways:
1. Create new pages to rank higher
In other words, create positive content to replace negative content. This will help push any negative content further down.
2. Create pages on other sites
Set up a lens on Squidoo and send some links back to it. Start a blog on wordpress.com or blogger.com. Keep up with posts, add some links and watch it climb. Set up social networking profiles on Facebook, Twitter, Linked In or My Space.
3. Respond to the issue if a blog or forum post
One day, someone is going to find the page so why not respond. If the person is genuinely upset, don’t get defensive, just apologize and try to resolve the issue. If the post is false, contact the site, even though there is no guarantee it will be removed.
4. Encourage happy customers to post positive reviews.
It is not as motivating to make a happy customer leave a review, as it is an irate customer. Make it easy for them to share their experience. Offer a link to a review site in e-mails to your customers, and perhaps even some sort of incentive.
The above four ways are a great start to managing your online presence. There is always something that can be done to work on this. Take the time to find where your company is mentioned or listed, and be sure to check back every so often. Reputation management isn’t a one-time thing, it’s an ongoing process!
[…] 3) Post positive- Here are just a few ideas: […]
[…] This beauty supply store has bigger issues than their Yelp spamming. There are quite a few reviews blasting their customer service. Perhaps, they should consider better ways to combat negative publicity. […]
[…] One thing not to do is to put a search of yourself in relation to these poor reviews; this is will only make matters worse. BUT you will need to be pro-active and monitor the sites that are hosting these scurrilous rantings and continue to move past it by creating you’re a positive presence around your company. It’s extremely time consuming but imperative to make a mark using social media tools to sweep the unfavorable mentionings under the “e-rug”. Here are a couple of sites to reassure yourself with some positive press and use some Online Reputation Management Skills. […]