If you have a business, you have to be online. And if you are online, you have to engage in reputation management. Yet, for all your best efforts, it is possible that someone is unhappy, for whatever reason, and decides to attack you online. This is when you need to get reactive and engage in reputation repair. Let’s take a look at what this entails.
What Is the Source?
First of all, you need to know where negative reviews have been posted about you. A quick Google search should reveal it, but do also check Facebook and Twitter, particularly using hashtags. Social Mention is another very cool tool in which you can find out who is saying what and where about you.
Once you know the source, you need to figure out your options to mitigate the damage.
Reputation Repair Options
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The DIY option
In 70% of cases, someone will trust only your business if they can see at least six positive reviews about you. The first thing you have to do, therefore, is get rid of negative reviews. If you can control them, such as your blog or social media pages, you can simply take them off. Do this soon, so Google hasn’t crawled your page yet and found it. However, this is only a good option with real defamation or libel, not with a genuine complaint. Delete a genuine complaint, and you will release the fury of the complainer. If you don’t have control over the location, you can ask the website of that page to remove it for you. They are unlikely to grant your wish, but it doesn’t hurt to ask.
If you can’t remove the information, or it seems unwise to do that, you need to respond to them instead. In fact, this is a fantastic technique to build your positive reputation, because it shows others that you take them seriously and that you care about their opinion.
Next, you need to make sure that you control some of the narrative. You have to post lots of positive things about you. Write articles and blogs, engage people on social media, and share positive reviews everywhere. If you receive a positive review, turn it into a YouTube video and write a press release about it, then share both these things on your website and social media accounts. Again, respond to them as well. People love recognition.
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Hire the Professionals
The better option, however, is to hire a professional reputation management company, as they can do all of this for you. They will be alerted when anything gets said about you – good or bad – and take the appropriate action to respond to it. Yes, as you can see above, you can do this all yourself, but do you really have the time? If you are running a business, can you also crawl the internet, write responses, create videos, write articles, and more? Or is it better to pay someone else to do it for you, particularly when this gives you a fantastic return on investment? The choice is yours.
