Sunday, January 2, 2011

What Could Happen with a Blemished Online Reputation?

By Alfred Kennedy


Celebrities and people in high places stake their reputation everyday and ordinary folks can throw rocks at them just for the fun of it. It happens with famous brands every single day and just about everyone online joins in the fray.

It gets easier to throw rocks online where your brand is visible to roughly 2 billion users. From blogs to forums, product reviews to social media sites, online brands are vulnerable to some of the severest criticism that easily cross the bounds of decency into malicious slander and libel. This holds true whether the brand is famous or not.

The Internet is the freest form of expression and communication, and it is also home to the most malicious content. Your competitors could very well engage in defamation of character to bring you down as stealing market share from you is so much easier than building a new one. Paid consumer review sites can have the nastiest things said about your brand and even dismissed employees can spread lies about you in various blogs and forums to get even.

Once your brand gets an onslaught of malicious attacks, a couple of things may happen. The damage to your image can be so severe as to render the product unmarketable that it would be wise to just drop it entirely. Or it can earn a notorious name, which would still cause you to lose your markets. Either way, you'd be better off spending to promote a fresh brand name instead of wasting more cash to revive your smeared reputation.

Take the effort to not let malicious content ruin what you've built. It makes more business sense to manage online reputation from the get-go rather than to start again with a new brand. You can opt to ignore a few posts or review that border on slander and libel, but when they don't go away, you have to be more aggressive before they start to eating away at your reputation.

Getting aggressive can be a matter of filing a lawsuit against the persons responsible for the content. But you can never be sure of winning the case. You can be sure, however, of spending a lot of time and money in the process. Theres a much better way to be both proactive and aggressive. You will need to harness some tools in online reputation management to ensure sustained brand protection.

The most sensible option against defamation slander is to tap into SEO strategies and tools for online reputation management. Do it right from the start to push knock offensive sites down the search result pages where they can no longer do any damage. This is one subtle but cost-effective method which can mitigate the situation at the soonest possible time.

While it's a good idea to learn how to do this yourself, this method requires advanced tools and strategies that would take while to master. And in the battle to win back your reputation, time is of the essence. So do your brand a favor by getting a SEO professional trained in defamation slander repair services to do the job right away.




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