Online reputation management for beginners

September 4, 2010 Online Reputation Management, SEO No Comments

For many businesses, being high up in Google seems to be of high importance but how many businesses keep a close eye on what else is appearing prominently in the search engine results when your company name is typed?

Clients, whatever form they take, will become ever more powerful online and however much a company does to raise its online visibility, if there are unhappy customers then there will always be websites that put (often rightfully so) a spanner in the works.

As an example of this, if someone was interested in iphoneworldwide.com and had typed that into Google, they’d see several website links related to that website.  However, just below that they’d see a link to the url http://www.sitejabber.com/reviews/www.iphoneworldwide.com and then another one below saying ‘BEWARE of http://www.iphoneworldwide.com/’. 

The first site (Site Jabber) allows people to say positive and negative things about websites.  In the case of iphoneworldwide.com the feedback is heavily negative and would make someone think more than twice before using them.

Everyone knows that it’s possible to engineer such comments (it wouldn’t be hard for competitors to instigate the writing of negative things about any company, multiple times under different names – or indeed,  a company could engineer positive comments about themselves) but the point is that if the comments are believable then people will react accordingly.

The subject of online reputation management is huge and this isn’t the blog to go into detail about the best policy for companies to adopt.  No, the point of this blog is to provide a (perhaps obvious) beginners tip that applies to any company.

First of all, it’s worth answering the comment of “that wouldn’t happen to me!” …

Actually, it could happen to you – if not now, but in the future.  As people get more comfortable with making complaints online, more and more websites will spring up that enable them to do that, often anonymously.   So, let’s say you’re a company that’s messed a supplier around and hasn’t paid them, resulting in a breakdown in the relationship.   Within no time at all your company name could appear high up in Google as being a bad payer.  That’s just one example and the simple message is: “this could easily happen to you as the web evolves, so be prepared”.

There are plenty of software solutions that help with online reputation management but for many companies (particularly smaller businesses) the following simple process may be sufficient.  It’s a manual process and there are better ways to do things but this keeps it simple, albeit a bit more time-consuming and not instantly responsive to online changes …

  1. Put a note in the diary to check at a regular interval (e.g. each month, fortnight, weekly).
  2. Search Google (and optionally other search engines) for your company name.  Look through at least the first 20-30 search results.
  3. Click through to any websites that you’re unfamiliar with.  They may contain content about your company that’s fine.  They may also contain something negative.  Quite often they make you think “actually, we could make better use of that site that we appear on”.
  4. If using Google, don’t just use the main search results – go for the Blogs, Updates, and Discussions options from the ‘More’ button because you’ll get a different set of results.

Although basic and not making the best use of technologies available, it costs nothing more than a bit of effort diarised in at the time intervals you choose.   Then, IF anything negative appears about your company, you’ll be well prepared to act on that.  And then we’re into a totally different subject of how to react to negative publicity online.