FAQs

Reputation management is the process used by public relations (PR) and digital marketing agencies to manage the brand identity of a business or individual on the internet. When someone searches for something related to you or your business, what do they find?

Good reputation management helps them find the message you want.

You have a limited amount of control over what the search engines say about you, and the first goal of any reputation management campaign is to ensure that you’re WORTHY of a good reputation online.

From a practical perspective, reputation management consultants try to ensure that brand-friendly results rank higher in the search engines than brand-hostile results. When possible, they also try to get brand-hostile and inaccurate results removed from the internet.

Any reputation management consultant worth his salt has a wide variety of tactics at his disposal for this kind of influence.

Reputation management is more important than most businesses and people realize. From the perspective of a corporation, ineffective reputation management can be the death of a company. From the perspective of an individual, ineffective reputation management can be the death of a career.

Huge corporations like Enron were destroyed by their inability to manage their reputation. Some companies survive reputation problems, but they paid a dear price.

The internet has caused the importance of a good reputation and a good experience to level up. Twenty years ago, if you had a bad experience with a company, you might mention it to a dozen friends if you were feeling especially angry.

Now, the average person can publish a negative review to a website like Yelp and have their review seen by thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of good customer service and integrity when managing your brand online.

But even when you’re doing everything right, a simple misunderstanding or an unreasonable customer can ruin your business.

And not everyone has honorable intentions. Slander on the internet is also a possibility.

Luckily, you and your clients don’t have to fight negative press alone.

You can take lots of practical steps to improve your reputation online. Your clients can also take some of these steps. Not all of them are appropriate to be done in-house, but some of them are. Serious reputation management problems are often better left to a company (like ours) that has a lot of experience with such matters.

The first step in any effort to improve your reputation online is to become aware of what people are saying about you or your brand on the internet. This means identifying which search queries people use to research you, your clients, and/or your company.

Once you’ve done that, you can decide to try to get more positive press that will outrank negative press. An easy way to do this is to encourage your satisfied customers to write positive reviews on third-party review sites like Yelp.

Another option is to make sure you and/or your clients have more of an internet presence. If your client wants to control the message about his company, he should have a Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter presence.

If the search engine shows 10 results for your client’s or his company’s name, those should take up three of those spots – which means that they’re controlling that much of the internet real estate.

These are only a few of the tactics you can use to improve your reputation (or your clients’ reputation) online.

The first step in getting positive reviews on the internet is to provide an excellent product or service at an appropriate price.

The next step is to ask your satisfied customers to help you by publishing positive reviews on third-party websites. Some businesses incentivize such reviews with discounts, although that might run counter to the terms and conditions of some sites.

An unethical approach to this problem would be to hire shills to create fake positive reviews on such sites. We don’t recommend that approach, although it’s not uncommon.

You can also turn dissatisfied customers into satisfied customers if you provide them with excellent customer service. When you do so, asking them to update or remove their negative review should be a standard practice.

Finally, when you do get positive reviews and testimonials, feature these prominently on your website and across your social media accounts.

The benefits of reputation management – especially if it’s done well – are clear and obvious.

The first of these is having negative information about your brand, client, or company removed or demoted in the organic search results. This will enable anyone to get a better job, find more clients, and charge more for their products and services.

The other big benefit is a clearer awareness of how the public perceives you. Sometimes the appropriate solution is to change the way you do business.

But if you’re not aware of where the problems with your online reputation are, you’re flying blind.

If you hire a legitimate, reputable company to handle your reputation management, the risks are minimal.

If you hire someone sketchy to handle this process, you can do more harm than good.

Any company you hire to do reputation management with should detail exactly what work they’re going to do for you. If any of their practices are questionable in the eyes of the search engines, they should share with you exactly what those risks entail.

Under no circumstances should you pay a company to create fake personas on the web or write fake reviews of your company. Not only is that illegal and unethical, it’s unnecessary.