Online Reputation Management – Problems and Solutions

Did you ever had an opportunity to Google your name/product/service/company name and come up with a negative result? An abuse or some comments on a sleazy site? Cases of damaged/torn online reputation have been reported more than any other time these days.

With lot of UGC (User Generated Content) thrown up these days, the possibilities of your online reputation getting damaged is high. Online Reputation Management is important for companies and brands these days. Here’s how I would depict it in a flow chart.

Googler looking for information associated with your brand/name ===> Uses search engines
Scans top results on Google ===> Finds information regarding you/product/brand
If positive review ===> Buys/commits to you.
If negative feedback ===> Ditches you.

In the process flow, the crucial point is when he makes a decision. And precisely at that point, if you don’t have the vital information, then you lose out.

So how do companies or brands make sure that they preserve their online identity?

Well, it’s not possible to completely create a positive environment for every online identity, be it a person or a company or a brand. And with products and services, it’s a different story altogether. With everyone writing their reviews (and then re-writing it again) on all services and products online, it’s come out that unless you have a fair amount of both negative and positive results, you are not seen as a genuine guy. So the idea is to minimize the negative results and keep control of the online identities.

What if you had negative reviews about you on the SERPs?

Well, before dealing with the problem, let’s understand that there may be more than two situations to this.
One – Where you’d have genuine negative reviews, like for example if you have a product or service, that’s been honestly reviewed by bloggers. If it’s a not so good product, then of course people will write/report about it honestly. There might occur both good and bad reviews.

In such cases, a healthy approach using SEO and effective SMM strategies, can get you out of the situation. However, if the product/service is a failure product, then we might have to fight a but hard to clear all the negative results. Honestly, that’s an utopia. What really can be done is to minimize the number of negative results.

Second -The case of wrong identities
This happens with names and individuals more than companies and brands. Like for instance if someone else is sharing your name, you’ll have a tough time sharing resources online for each other.
Last day I had come across two cases where the person was suffering from negative reputation, because of wrong online channels. His name was associated with a negative story on one of the authority sites, while the only thing he had in similar was only the name, He wasn’t the guy in the story. But, when others search for his name online, they might come across the negative story causing him trouble.

In such cases, a clever mix of SEO, SMM and online branding can solve the problem.

Essentially, Reputation Management is very important in todays scenario when people use the online space heavily to find information about things.

Brands, Companies and Individuals have to harness the power of social media to build their reputation online, or else it’s going to be too late.

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