Online Reputation Management is the practice of protecting a companies or individuals reputation from attacks online. This can happen via blogs, websites, forums or other online discussion points. Managing this can be a a skilled task, as it requires an extensive knowledge of PR, SEO, an ability to develop innovative solutions as well as a range of contacts within the internet world.

Typically reputation management is important for prominent individuals and businesses. We know of cases of companies that have lost millions of dollars in contracts because of false reports about the company that are listed online. The loss of one such contract could have been offset by being proactive with Online Reputation Management.

There a number of possible threats to your online brand and profile. These include:

A Bad Report about the company is added to a certain page. This page gets indexed and gets a strong ranking in Google. Anyone who searches for a companies brand name will find the bad publicity page too. This can lead to a loss of sales  and maybe even more media coverage from other outlets that find this page and comment on it too. These unwanted comments can create a snowball effect of sites that list and discuss a negative report about your company.

An Upset Customer discusses the company on a forum. This happens a lot within technically savvy industries, where customers are as equally well informed if not better informed than the companies they are upset with. Often these forum discussions can be indexed by the search engines and this can lead to the discussion appearing in the search engine results pages.

Malicious Wikipedia Pages can be created by people upset with your organisation. These can create a biased and unbalanced view of the organisation and tend to have extreme importance in the search engine results. Other well ranked discussion formats can often list well too.

A Fraudster creates a fake hate site for the company in question. This can lead to extortion attempts on the company for removal of the website.

There are other possbilities too, with websites such as RipOffReport.com that specialise in posting bad reports about companies without verifying the facts of the cases. We have both proactive and reactive strategies for dealing with this threat.

This is the best form of reputation Management. Often a pro-active executive within a company will see the risk that exists to a brand profile from negative reports on their brand name. Maybe a competitor is suffering from the same thing. Maybe a friend has suffered from adverse publicity on the web. Either way, with the amount of money and effort that is invested in a brand protecting it should be a number one priority.

There are many ways of achieving this, please do not hesitate to contact us to discuss this.

Reactive Reputation Management is normally something that is undertaken in direct response to an existing threat to your online profile. Maybe there is some negative press about your company occupying the front page of the search engines. Maybe a discussion on a forum that says negative things about your company and/or services. Maybe your competition have built pages that rank for your keywords, potentially stealing your customers away from you.

At this point removing these results from the first page of the search engines becomes a priority. This can be a lengthy process as we try and get offending articles removed whilst creating positive content about your organisation to push down the offending pages.

If you or your organisation is suffering from this type of issue please do not hesitate to contact us.