Search Engine Optimization

Reputation management is fickle thing. Sometimes it’s a simple process of identifying where a brand went wrong, backtracking and fixing the situation, then carrying on in the right direction. Depending on how well a company had been handling the situation, it’s a relatively straightforward campaign. Other times, a company has been in denial of their situation for so long that they can no longer tell up from down. Those reputation management cases require a lot more work to make headway.

Here are a few of my thoughts about reputation management:

What’s wrong with your organization?
Why are you getting so much negative feedback from your customers? One or two angry customers are normal (and to be expected). You can’t be 100% perfect 100% of the time. But if your brand is constantly under attack by your past and present consumers (like having someone create a yourbrandsucks.com website) it’s time to get honest with yourself. Is there something wrong with your product? Is it not living up to your consumers’ expectations? Or is it more of an internal problem, like bad customer service.

In order to find out what is wrong with your business, you need to start paying attention to your customers! Send out surveys to past customers asking them to rate your products/services and their overall experience with your company. Read online reviews of your brand and look for reoccurring complaints. Actually talk to your customers!

Before you start worrying about hiring a reputation management firm, you need to fix whatever problems exist in your business. It doesn’t matter how much money or time you pour into reputation management, if you just put a Band-Aid on a gushing wound you’re not solving anything.

How much money are you really losing?
Believe it or not, some companies can stare down a lot of bad press and it has minimal impact on their bottom line. Before you start throwing money at a reputation management firm, do a little number crunching and figure out how bad that bad press is really hurting your company. If it seems to be having a minimal effect, you might be able to combine proactive reputation management in with the rest of your SEO.

Are you prepared for the long haul?
I had a potential reputation management client approach me once; wanting to know how much work and time it would take to salvage their brand. A quick Google search revealed they were in some serious hot water. Searching for their brand name pulled their website and 9 negative links below that, including 100+ consumer rip-off reports and a theirbrandsucks.com in the number two spot. The person I was speaking with told me they had been having reputation management issues since 2002, but that management was only know just realizing what a problem it was. I was floored! 2002?! That’s nearly ten years of a lot of angry customers to work against. I told her flat out it would take at least two years of heavy link building, launching several microsites with their own link building and branding campaigns, developing a social presence (they had zero), a full-throttle content marketing campaign and a barrage of online PR. Then maybe they would see some positive results. They did not become a client.

Depending how much damage has been inflicted on your brand and how much work it might take to salvage it, sometimes the best course of action is to completely rebuild your brand. For the amount of effort, time and money it would take to pick up the pieces of your current company, you might as well start fresh.

One of the most important assets a company has is its online reputation. Your online reputation effects how customers view your company and brand, how much search engines “trust” your website and whether or not your company will be able to survive any negative attention. Monitoring what people are saying about your company online is a crucial component is maintaining your online reputation. Social networking sites offer a bevy of information and online chatter about your brand. If you aren’t actively checking online conversation that center around your company, you could be in the middle of a firestorm and not even know it.

Twitter is a great place to keep an eye on your brand. The micro-blogging social networking site allows users to post 140 characters at a time. These 140 can either praise or rant about your company. Once a Tweet is posted, it is shared with all of that user’s connections. It can be reTweeted by any of those connections, so now the Tweet is being passed on to another group of users. A popular Tweet can spread around the world in a matter of moments. Tools like HootSuite and and TweetDeck allow you to see when your company name is being used in a Tweet.

Twitter is also a great tool for your customer service representatives to monitor. Many consumers Tweet complaints or ask for help, so being able to quickly respond to a user is a great way to maintain a good relationship with that user, as well as protect your online reputation. An angry Twitter using can quickly become a satisfied customer.

Google Realtime will show you how much social networking activity has been going on around your search. This can include your company name, products, brand name, employees, etc. It should be noted that most of the Realtime results are pulled from Twitter, as Google does not have access to Facebook information. Bing, however, does incorporate Facebook into their search results.

You can stay also stay up-to-date by setting email alerts that note every time your desired phrase is used online. This includes social networks, articles, press releases, blog and more. It’s a good way to get a snapshot of where your company name is being used and it what context. Set up several alerts using different keywords (company name, brand name, well-known employees, etc) so you don’t accidentally miss something.

Most businesses would be wise to also keep their business profiles and local search profiles under heavy scrutiny. Sites like Yelp are a breeding ground for customer reviews, the good, the bad and they ugly. As more and more customers are looking to these sites for peer recommendations, a steady string of average or bad reviews could keep potential customers away. Encourage satisfied customers to write reviews as a way to counteract any negative ones.

Online, your personal brand reputation may be your most valuable asset. The search engines are the first places people turn to when looking for information. Someone might be checking up on the weather in their area, someone might be looking for the cheapest airfare to Cancun and someone might be looking for information about you! We’re all guilty of Google-ing ourselves at one point in time, but when was the last time you actually scoured the Internet to see just where you name pops up and in what context?

Online reputation management is more critical than ever, especially since the advent of social networking. Anything we post online is there for good; nothing can ever truly be deleted, just buried. This means that a picture of your doing a key stand back in college could show up 10 years down the road when a potential employer or client is checking up on you. While we all do dumb things at various points in our lives, you never know what will come back to haunt you. Some clients/employers may not care about your college shenanigans; others may not be so pleased.

It may be because I have a relatively uncommon name, or it may be because I have worked incredibly hard at building my own personal online brand (probably number 2), but if you type “Nick Stamoulis” into Google, it’s not until page 8 that you find a result that isn’t about me as an Internet marketing professional and SEO expert. I have worked very hard (and continue to do so) to make that happen.

Your name is your personal brand and you need to be aware of how it is being portrayed in the search engines.

Have you ever thought about this before: you could be negatively affected by the online reputation of someone else with the same name! Someone looking for information about a John Smith, for instance, is going to get a lot of results. How do they know which one is the John Smith they are looking for? You might be John Smith, the Vermont-based custom wood carver. But some other John Smith, say an L.A. mechanic, was recently arrested for illegal gun possession. The LA John Smith’s bad reputation might get incorrectly inferred with your own online brand!

Try typing your name into the search engines and adding different keywords to filter the search. Maybe your name alone doesn’t produce a lot of results, but your name plus where you went to college or the company you work for does. Don’t assume that just because you don’t see anything on the first pass you don’t have anything to worry about.

One way to better manage your online reputation management is to set up Google alerts. While not an exhaustive search, Google will find and email daily results of where your name is mentioned online. The best defense is a good offense! It’s your brand; you have to stay in control!

Yesterday, former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum announced his decision to run for the Republican presidential nomination. Seeing as I am not from Pennsylvania, I wasn’t familiar with Santorum as a politician, so I decided to do what the vast majority of the world does every day when they are looking for information; I turned to Google.

This is what I saw:

If the section outlined in yellow is too small for you to read, this is what it says, “Santorum: 1. The frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex. 2. Senator Rick Santorum.”

Not exactly what a hopeful presidential nominee would want to see when someone Google’s them.

The not-so-pleasant definition of Santorum was coined by columnist Dan Savage in 2003, in response to Rick Santorum’s comments about homosexuality and right to privacy. What was one giant Internet prank became the number one search result for “Santorum” in 2003 and pushed Rick Santorum’s official site’s down the SERP in Google, Yahoo and Bing. 8 years later, it is still a top ranking result. It should be noted that the second listing from Wikipedia is a page totally devoted to the incident.

That brings me to today’s post: the importance of online reputation management.

In the online world, your reputation is one of your most valuable assets, for both personal and corporate brands. Whether you are a politician, businessman, consultant, corporation or job seeker, your online reputation can make or break you.

Building a strong online reputation is no easy task and it cannot happen overnight. That is why it is important to take a proactive approach to online reputation management. Companies should strive to build an online reputation that is capable of withstanding any bad press long before they go into crisis-management mode.

Businesses and politicians no longer have the luxury of sticking their heads in the sand and waiting for the storm to pass. In the age of WikiLeaks, no secret is safe for long and problems can’t be swept under the rug. The increased use of social media allows news to travel around the world in a matter of seconds. There is no more hoping that a scandal will disappear quietly.

Seeing as how spreadingsantorum.com is still a top ranking site, Rick Santorum and his staff did a poor job of repairing his online reputation. Once something gets published online, there really is no way to remove it entirely. Even if they original page is deleted, you don’t know how many thousands of other pages have referenced the original. Rick Santorum has had 8 years to fix the damage done to his online reputation, yet spreadingsantorum.com remains at the top of the SERP. That doesn’t do much to lend aid to his presidential bid.

A strong SEO campaign can help with your online reputation management. One of the ways this is done is by producing a steady stream of quality, positive content around your brand. The more positive associations there are with your brand, the less power the negative ones have. While you can’t destroy bad press, you can push it out of the top spot so it isn’t the first thing someone sees when they search for your brand.

Your business’s online reputation may be one of the most important things affecting your long term success. The more trust consumers and search engines have in your brand and your company, the better you are going to rank, the more traffic you should see and the higher your conversion rate will be. Building a strong online reputation is no easy task, and it doesn’t happen overnight. Everything you do for your SEO; link building, article marketing, blog commenting, social networking and more, all affect your online reputation. One misstep could send your carefully managed reputation crashing down.

One of the main components of building a strong online reputation is gaining the loyalty and trust of the online public. Any company who has created a business blog knows that earning a steady stream of loyal readers doesn’t happen right away. It only comes after you spend the time publishing quality, relevant content on a constant basis. Your readers need to learn that your blog is a good place for information and that your blog is worth coming back to. This only happens over time.

But for as long as it takes to build up an online reputation and subsequent base of loyal readers/fans/follows, it can just as quickly be destroyed. One of the quickest ways to damage your online reputation is to stray from your core beliefs. If you diverge from what you’ve traditionally practiced, you could lose a lot of credibility.

For instance, I am a white hat SEO professional all the way. That is the model I’ve built my business on and it is something I don’t waiver on when I handle clients’ SEO. But let’s say I started to dip my toe in the grey hat sandbox by engaging in link exchanges. I create a “links” page on my site that links to a multitude of unrelated sites in exchange for a link back, or even some sort of payment for any traffic I send over. If you look back through the SEO Journal, you’ll see plenty of blog posts where I talk about black hat SEO and what a bad practice it is. All the sudden I’m doing it? What does that say about me and my business practices? If I am willing to do that with my own company, what other grey hat tactics might I be employing on behalf of my clients?

The advent of social media means that news, good and bad, travels around the world and back in a matter of moments. One complaint or pieces of negative press can snowball and turn into a disastrous, reputation destroying avalanche. Don’t give online trolls any ammunition to bring down your brand! Practice what you preach and build a strong reputation that can withstand negative attacks.