Handling an Online Reputation Crisis

What most webmasters dread as much as anything they ever encounter is the online reputation crisis. You can potentially lose a large portion of your visitors if negative feedback and reviews about your brand, products or services get listed in the search results. You have to be well prepared against all kinds of online reputation attacks as each attack is serious. Today as many webmasters have already faced the wrath of online reputation crisis, many of them are taking pre-emptive measures to fight online crisis. This is in fact the best approach to deal with reputation crisis.

Customers are also becoming very cautious when dealing with businesses and companies online. It is common practice now to check companies out by making sure that they are choosing the right brand or the right products. As a businessperson, you will not be able to take any chances when it comes to your brand reputation. Do not wait until something horrible happens to take action. Begin building your positive brand reputation. Spend time creating a positive image online so that if there is an attack against your brand, your positive image you spent time building up already will guard you.

There are several popular strategies that can be used to create a very positive brand image. You can make use of social bookmarking, blog commenting, blog review posting, press release distribution etc. There are numerous options. Whereas before with the proliferation of Web 2.0 properties, we now have a variety of ways to reach out to customers. More and more people are becoming very highly active on the internet for everything from shopping and surfing to transacting business. Seize this chance to boost your brand image. Look for high traffic networks and popular social media to build your online brand reputation.

Should your brand name come under attack, do not panic. That is the worst thing you can do. Take the right steps and implement swift action to minimize any damage that is caused by the attack against your brand. This is not the time to research on the source of the attack. You will have to concentrate now on pushing down the negative results from the search engine results. Suppression is the first step after identifying the attack.

You will have to first identify the keywords that get the negative feedbacks and negative reviews listed. Once you have identified the keywords that trigger the negative results, you need to post content that is optimized around those keywords to combat the negative usage. Multiple press release article distribution will help in this regard since search engines pick up press releases faster than any other type of content posted online. Timing is highly crucial.

In your response to the negative attacks, do not lose any time dawdling around wondering what to do. The longer the negative results stay online, the greater the damages it can and likely will cause to your brand. Upon pushing down the negative feedback and reviews to reasonably safe and manageable  levels, respond to the attack directly by giving your side of the story in the same forum or blog in which negative review has been posted. This way the internet users will be able to get the right picture of what happened.

In many cases, the negative feedbacks and reviews exaggerate the issues and they are beyond reason. Make sure you give your target audience the correct version of the story as this effort will  certainly help in the long run because you will then have a record of what has happened even if someone should stumble upon the negative feedback several months later. A professional reputation management company can help you get back on track.