Reputation management entails promoting and monitoring a person’s, brand’s or company’s reputation. It is also concerned with looking out for damaging ideas, opinions, or reports and correcting or influencing those notions.
Online reputation management takes these functions to online platforms and aims to present the reputation of a person or brand in a good light and prevent any problems that would negatively affect such a reputation.
An online reputation manager should remove negative news article on the brand’s behalf from the internet. In addition, he should also respond to unfavorable comments on social media, negative rumors, complaints, or accusations to solve them strategically.
With the increasing need for great online reputation management by brands and individuals, we have put together 5 best practices for online reputation management.
- Run a Google search on your brand or name
The quickest way to find out comments, stories, and mentions of your name or brand is to search the billions of databases on Google.
Look patiently through as many results as you can even if they run into hundreds. You don’t want to omit something that might be costly to your reputation.
During your search, you might come across negative reviews and comments that you need to address so they don’t remain in the online space and harm your reputation.
Generally, the aim of running the Google search is to find out if you have any challenges or problems associated with your brand that you need to devise a plan to resolve.
- Analyze the strength and weakness of your reputation
When you run an online search, you are likely to find some negative comments, especially if your brand is popular. However, you shouldn’t only focus on the negative results that come up.
While you find a way to correct negative opinion about your brand, you must study the good results from your search as well.
Analyzing your strengths and weaknesses helps you define the health of your reputation and how to move forward.
Consider how many critics you have, what are your numbers of supporters, how would you rate your controllable assets, and what are your greatest content gaps? Sometimes it could be not easy task and I would recommend using the services of the best online reputation repair companies.
One way to promote and build an online footprint for your brand is to begin putting out lots of content that you can control. You can do this by having multiple domains. This way, third parties cannot set up domains and attack your reputation successfully.
- Build your controllable assets
The most efficient way to keep negative content off the first page of online searches is to fill up the first page with actual contents controlled by you.
The way Google works, online searches will first produce content that you control. So when people search your brand, they will come across blogs, websites, and social media pages you own.
The goal is to ensure you have as many active blogs and pages you control as you can. This way, even if Wikipedia may post third party blogs and content, yours will still hold the front.
- Boost your online presence
Once you have your online contents actively developing, the next plan is to get your name, brand, or company on as many online publications, interviews, positive reviews as possible.
Work with influencers in your industry, get into social responsibility, feature articles on major platforms, and get in the positive spotlight.
- Avoid controversies online
The safest way to keep your reputation intact is to avoid controversial topics that could put your brand in a bad light. Steer clear from religious, political, and other such arguments.
If you must contribute, take time to properly draft your message bearing in mind the different ways it could be misunderstood, and make your opinion very clear.