Reputation Management - Complete Guide, Tips and Valuable Resources
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What Is Reputation Management?
All the brands some time or the other in their life cycle will suffer reputation crisis. With the internet making it so easy to publish one’s views and opinions, just about anyone could go online and post defamatory remarks online. When such remarks and negative feedbacks are featured in the search results, your business will suffer a great loss because such reviews, remarks or feedbacks can deter even a prospective customer from choosing your brand as the negative feedback indicates risk for the customers. It is therefore important to get rid of these negative reviews and feedbacks from the search results so that your brand’s online image and reputation are restored to normalcy. Reputation management is the process of restoring a brand’s online reputation through the use of multiple strategies. Every brand needs to have reliable reputation management backing.
How It Works - Important Aspects Of Reputation Management
There are two important aspects of reputation management namely,
a) Positive image building
b) Responding to emergency reputation crisis
Many people seek for reputation management services only in times of emergency reputation crisis. Yes, this is of course important to respond to such scenarios but it is also equally important to build a positive image around your brand. Building positive brand image has lots of benefits. It will help you increase your conversion rates and whenever there should be an attack against your brand, the positive image that you have built around your brand will give your brand a certain amount of resilience giving you reasonable time to respond without succumbing to the negative effects of the reputation attach.
This simply indicates that you should not be focusing on reputation management only when there is an emergency situation but you should have an ongoing reputation management plan to keep your brand guarded.
How To Manage Your Online Reputation – Reputation Management Strategies
We have identified that there are two important reputation management aspects. If you are in a reputation crisis first you need to address the crisis then proceed with image building or branding. If you are in no emergency reputation crisis then you should start with image building.
Handling Emergency Reputation Crisis
• When you are in a crisis, do not panic and act impulsively. Such a response to could lead to much bigger problem. You will have to analyze the issue and respond accordingly.
• While it is important not to panic or act impulsively, it is also equally important to act fast. Do not wait for too long to respond. Each day that you delay could cost your brand dearly. If you leave the issue unattended, there are chances that the negative image is growing larger day-by-day affecting your business.
• One of the best ways to push down the negative results from the search results is to publish multiple press releases. This will give you temporary but quick solace. You will need to identify the list of keywords that are bringing out the negative results and target your press releases around those keywords.
• Simultaneously, start generating strong social media signals using top social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. Target all your posts around the same keywords but if you are linking to your website from the Web 2.0 properties that you are generating, make sure to use diverse range of linking texts and that you are not linking to your website with the same linking text over and over so that you are not penalized by Google later. Your reputation management efforts should be aligned with the latest Google’s algorithm.
• Continuously track the effectiveness of the efforts that you are taking. You will need to revise your strategy depending on the effectiveness. Getting help from a highly professional and experienced reputation management company will go a long way in protecting your brand. You cannot afford to lose time; you will need to hit the target right at the first time. An experienced reputation management company will know how to target the keywords under question and produce the desired results fast without having to go through a trial and error process.
• Alongside, you should also make content marketing efforts to support your brand visibility. Pump in lot of quality content into your blog and share them aggressively in the social media sites.
• Hire professional product review experts to review your brand and publish their reviews. You should not publish this, but a third party publisher should handle it so that these reviews do not look like sponsored reviews.
• Once you have managed to push down the negative results from the search results, you need to move to the next phase, which is explaining yourself or your side of the story where the negative reviews are posted. If you are at fault, let the customer know that you are ready to make things right. This will help your prospective customers build trust in your brand; they will know that you are serious about customer satisfaction and that you mean business.
• It is also important now to reinforce your brand image by building positive image so that you are better equipped to face similar situations in future.
Building Positive Brand Image
• To build positive brand image, the best place to start is the social media sites. You will be able to get excellent mileage out of social media optimization efforts when it comes to brand building. You will need to however be cautious enough to use third party posts in the social media sites.
• Take part in blog discussions and other forum discussions pertaining to your niche market.
• Create LinkedIn groups; make regular resourceful posts that will help you build an authoritative image about your brand.
• Form Facebook groups, start mobilizing people to join your group, engage in regular interaction with your group.
• Regular press release submissions should be part of your brand building effort. This will also help you improve the traffic rate to your website.
• It is important that you make consistent branding efforts. Create quarterly plans and stick to your branding plans religiously.
