Internet Reputation Management: What Does This Mean and Why is it Vital to My Company?

"Internet reputation management" is a current buzzword that you hear tossed around, but its relevancy to your company may not be immediately clear. To understand how this issue is important to every company today, here are three situations to consider. Although these situations are composites, something like this goes on – every single day.

Three Common Online Scenarios

Company A: Company A just faced an unfortunate situation. An employee that they had trusted wholeheartedly was taking home company products and supplies for personal use and, because of this, the employee was fired. The case against this employee was so clear-cut that he didn’t even try to fight his termination – but he wasn't going to go without getting revenge. So, he began posting false and malicious comments about Company A on the Internet.

Company B: Company B had a difficult customer. She would purchase their products, use them for quite a while – and then bring them back for a refund. Company B accommodated this customer for a couple of years, but then finally needed to draw a line with her and limit her ability to return merchandise that had clearly been heavily and frequently used. The customer was furious – and began posting, all over the Internet, that Company B sold shoddy merchandise and then refused to stand behind its company return policy.

Company C: After several years of hard work, Company C was nearly on even footing with its big competitor, Company D. Company C treated its employees and customers well; they had a wonderful reputation, too – until Company D began to feel threatened by the competition and started anonymously posting vicious lies about Company C online.

How is My Company Threatened?

If you’ve ever had a disgruntled employee, ex-employee, customer or former customer – or if you've got competition from another company – then you are at risk of having malicious negative comments and reviews posted about your company online. These comments remain on the Internet, right where your customers and potential customers can read them and have second thoughts about dealing with your company.

We don't need to tell you what effect that would have on your bottom line!

The reality is that seventy-five percent (75%) of Fortune 100 companies have experienced online attacks on their reputation and it's something that companies of all sizes need to deal with in today’s online world. Strategies used to fight back against negative comments are known by several names, including:

• Internet brand management or online brand management
• Internet reputation management or online reputation management
• Search engine brand management or search engine reputation management

Dangers of Consumer Generated Content

To make matters even more challenging, there are thousands of sites online that exist to allow consumers to post negative reviews of companies, anonymously if they so choose. In fact, many of these sites actually encourage consumers to post malicious comments. These sites contain what is known as:

• Consumer generated content
• Customer generated content
• User generated content

It's reasonable to assume, too, that the number of these consumer generated content sites will continue to grow. Plus, growing numbers of defamers are learning how to optimize their negative comments so that they appear even higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs), which means that increasing numbers of people – customers and potential customers – are reading them.

Fight Back and Protect Your Company's Reputation

All is not hopeless, however. There are ways to fight back! A quality Internet brand management strategy usually contains these elements:

1. Recognizing the threat that exists to your company, its profits and its bottom line
2. Researching what information currently exists online about your company
3. Creating a policy about who should respond to these comments – and how
4. Effectively responding to these comments and those who posted them
5. Strategically creating positive content about your company
6. Strategically finding sites (in addition to your own) that will post this positive content online

Two More Key Strategies

1. Recognize that, even if negative content does not currently exist online about your company, using strategies # 5 and # 6 are excellent ways to proactively protect your company's reputation – and, by extension, your bottom line.
2. When creating this positive content online, use branded keyphrases (variations of your company name and brands) in your text. That way, when people search online for information about your company, your positive content is far more likely to appear higher in the SERPs.

For more detailed information about how to fight back against negative comments and/or to proactively protect your company's terrific reputation, including through the use of optimized positive content, you can download a free Internet brand reputation whitepaper from The Search Guru.