Friday, January 7, 2011

Why You Need To Manage Online Reputation

By Kelly Miller


All companies strive to create great brands. No one in their right minds will pay a lot of money for brands if its reputation is questionable. If a brand has been badmouthed to death like the Ford Pinto (1976), you cant sustain customers patronizing your products or services for long-term. You might as well just start over and instead of trying to rehabilitate it.

Business or brand value normally has to do with revenue. If your company is being merged with someone else, chances are, they are trying to expand market share and acquire new coustomers. Your company reputation, popular brands and profitable product/service lines are key things that they investigate.

In the age of the internet, a presence in cyberspace now brings in as much revenues as traditional market channels. But along with an instant global market reach, your reputation online can be subject to all sorts of unfounded hearsays, negative rumours, unflattering product reviews, bad mouthing from disgruntled customers, employees, and even competitors in blogs and forum posts

You may choose to disregard these. Besides, they can vanish as quickly as they appeared especially if these are just a few ramblings of some unknown individual. But if you get caught in a whirlwind of slander and libel, you could be in big trouble. For one thing, do not allow it to remain out of control and unmanaged since it can cost you your company.

Some people choose to manage this problem through the justice system. A threat to file a case against the people or person responsible for the offensive content might change their minds. But really contemplate when thinking about doing this, since it can harm your and your brand more than you can imagine. It's possible you could win the battle but your brand may not win the war. In fact, you may even lose a lot of customers while it is ongoing.

Thats why companies with brand protection high in their priority maintain professionals who are tasked to manage online reputation with the diligence and online vigilance to keep them abreast of whats being said about their brand online. There are internet tools that do this tracking well. Once the slightest upsurge in negative content start to appear, they start harnessing search engine reputation management to neutralize the threat.

Managing web reputation means being proactive rather than reactive. Using proper SEO methods can guarantee that all the negative articles or reviews get pushed 5, 7, or even 10 pages down search results.

Online reputation management is essentially all about protecting your reputation. It can also restore your damaged one, but its best to go the way of protection first instead of waiting for your brand to get broken. The earlier you can detect negative online content against your, the better for the SEO experts who are great at manage online reputation repair services to do their job at reputation management online.




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