A lot of people want to know how to manage their online reputation. This is for good reason, as your reputation is what will effectively make or break your business. This is why you should also look into working together with an online reputation management company, who can make sure that your reputation becomes and stays good.
Understanding Reputation Management
At heart, brick and mortar businesses and online businesses are not that different. They are both businesses, they both want to make profits, they both want to become known as a go to source for whatever product or service they deliver. However, many online businesses ignore these similarities, believing that they are somehow special because they are online. This simply isn’t true. Just as people can tell each other face to face not go to a certain shop, they can tell each other online. And they do, and the impact is massive.
A good reputation takes many years of consistent, good service to build up. Yet, to have your reputation completely destroyed only takes a few seconds. One negative review can go viral, and the whole world will know not to shop with you.
Online reputation management is essentially the process of monitoring what people are saying about you, and responding to these things. At the same time, it is about making sure that you are presented in a positive light, which is an element of search engine optimization. Finally, it is about making sure that, if something bad is said, it gets hidden as much as possible.
Understanding the size of the internet is about as complicated as understanding the size of the universe. What this means for you is that information about you can be found everywhere. This is where SEO comes in, as the goal is to make sure that what people find is the positive thing. You need to make sure that people become aware of your presence, so that they can start building an opinion of you. Next, you have to make sure that this opinion is a positive one.
A good example is McDonald’s. Everybody knows McDonald’s is bad for you and possibly even toxic. Yet they have an excellent reputation, and everybody also knows that you can get a burger for $.99 there. This is because they run excellent awareness campaigns, which are simply stronger than the campaigns against them, including the man who tried to eat nothing but McDonald’s for a month and ended up in hospital, or the woman who left a McDonald’s meal to rot, but nothing happened to it for six months. That truly is excellent reputation management, because negative attacks don’t get much worse than that.
You need to understand that reputation management is not some little thing that you have to do and that doesn’t matter as much to you as it would to a brick and mortar store. It is a vital element of your business success. Work together with a professional to have the best impact in this.