Ways to manage Online Reputation Crisis

One day you discover that your online reputation is being attacked. You may be a celebrity, or own a reputed company or service. You'll feel like you've been kicked in the ribs to see someone wage an attack on your good name. In this situation, it's important that you don't panic. It can happen to anyone, not only to bigger companies or celebrities.

What’s important is how you react. You need to take enough precautions and have an online crisis communication plan–that you can quickly follow when the inevitable reputation attack occurs. Or you can get the help of an online reputation crisis managing service company. Even before getting the help of a reputation management company, you need to take your own adequate measures. Some of the steps you can take as precautionary measures are:

1. Check for facts:- Gather all the facts and evaluate with appropriate response.

2. Determine the impact:- Respond, if you have found that there is a need after checking the impact. The response should be authoritative and from someone accountable within your company. Also seek advise from those around you.

3. Identify your detractor:- Whoever has acted behind the scenes to spread the malicious rumours to spread, What’s important is to identify your detractor, so that you know whom are you dealing with and what is their motivation.

4. Decide on the appropriate response:- If you discover that the report is false, then you have every right to approach the detractor and request the retraction of malignant content. What you require at this point is Sincerity, Transparency, and Consistency.

5. Host the conversation:- By publishing a post to your company blog, or broadcasting an apology, you’ll ensure the public that your sincerity, transparency, and consistency, are not lost in the noise.

7. After the problem is settled:- You need to constantly work to ensure bloggers, forums, and other social media sites are an integral part of the PR efforts. Whether you as a company or celebrity, need to continue monitor that any negative contents are still hovering over the internet.

In this age of transparency for details, your online reputation is just as important as any other component of your marketing efforts. It can be years efforts spending millions of money building your good name. Without proper care and attention, a simple blog or rumours can bring it crashing down. Make plans now and then if you can't do it your own get the help of a good Reputation Crisis Management Company, instead of hitting the panic button.

Social Media and its role in Reputation Management:

Well, it is common knowledge that the consumers of today say around 70 per cent of them, before even they set out to buy a product or service do a lot of research about it as well as the company on the web. And so, if you want your business to flourish (who wouldn’t), it is absolutely necessary that you move all the way up search engines and make yourselves visible to others. Now, it does not stop with that. You still have got a long way to go!
Just as it is important for you to make yourselves visible, it is also essential that your consumers find positive reviews about your company and product. Consumers look for chatter and conversations between previous customers and if they have nothing good (or rather something bad) to say about you, then buddy you have screwed up the whole thing!
Now, where do customers look for chatter? Yes, you know the answer – the best place where conversations are most frequent, most frank, most lively and of course most visible is the social media network like facebook, MySpace, Twitter and YouTube.
According to Marketing Sherpa’s “2009 Social Media Marketing and PR Benchmark Guide”, “At least two-thirds of consumers agree that recommendations and information from other people online are valuable, relevant, and influence their purchase decision.”
What can tweets with just 140 characters do to your product? A whole lot - remember consumers can read a 100 bad things about your product in a matter of minutes.
What can a facebook message do to your online reputation? Again a lot - remember these messages became a campaign and brought back the original Pears soap formula in recent times when the company tried to make new fragrances.
Now just imagine a case where the customer buys your product but he does not read the instructions and the experience turns out to be a bad one. The result – plenty of tweets and face book messages narrating his/her experience and with people joining the conversation, the issue snowballs. You can sense the problem right? A serious reputation management issue.
While 70-80 per cent of the people are out there doing this, 60 per cent of the companies scoff these negative reviews which can do a lot of harm. In short, if you are not monitoring these networks, you are in for trouble as regards your product. Switch to reputation and crisis management techniques and save the face of your company.

Malicious attacks on reputation – a disaster waiting to happen

All you need is a business entity online and what follows however big or small regardless of whatever area you are planning to work in is that as soon as you create a buzz online you are prime target for attacks on your reputation. Before you know it your name or your business name being followed by words like “scam” , “rip-off” or “sucks”.

Even reputation management companies are subjected to such attacks and most often from malicious elements who scour the Internet in search of up-coming companies. Quite like the hacker who scuttles a whole website the reputation attackers hit where it hurts the most. Usually on domain names the very words that prospective clients and customers use to read up about you.

These attacks are purposeful and done to hurt you and their effects can be damaging till Internet users are able to identify from reviews and comments whether the horrible words posted are malicious or not. After reading up so much on reputation management let's hope in the future people will stop depending on comments and forum remarks before giving your company their business.

However, this kind of discerning knowledge is probably years away but with companies and celebrities all investing companies like reputationmangementfor.com for effective reputation management the word is indeed getting around and soon people are going to be sceptical of review sites and forums.

Online Reputation Management- What is the need?

The recent surveys have found out that most Internet users use search engines to find information on products or services before making a buying decision. But what you get as a search result may be often disappointing or embarrassing. Because you may find your product or service ranking nowhere in the priority page. And, the embarrassing part is that you may find some negative search results, if you are a reputed company. So, knowing what others say about you is crucial for effective Online Reputation Management.

So, its time for you to search or use the services that offer services in managing your online reputation. The online reputation management agency will search the websites, blogs, and forums and see whether there's something that may affect your company reputation. Then, the agencies will estimate the possible impact on your business. A comprehensive program requires constant monitoring of the online media in checking the diverse opinions and reviews on the brand. Here the role of an expert Reputation Management Agency is to identify websites and contents that pose threat to your service and then promote positive contents. Even though, at times it is difficult to completely eliminate the harmful contents, putting positive items above them can improve the situation. As most online searchers won't go past the first search result page, pushing the harmful contents behind is an effective solution.

Another part of online reputation management is creating and posting positive contents that will show up at the top of the search engine page results. The major role of the reputation management companies is the promotion of the resources containing positive content to make them rank higher. Thus, it will help you establish a long-lasting favourable impression, not to simply conceal your problems. The success of any reputation management campaign is fully based on the PR, marketing, and search engine optimization skills. All measures should be implemented on the regular basis to produce positive results. Still, sometimes the abundance of negative publicity all over the Internet may postpone the results even of the most professionally implemented campaign and you’ll have to wait for months to regain spotless reputation.

Now, you might think you don't need all these. But, keep in mind there will be some blog posts or contents that might hover over the web pages to ruin the good name your company built up over the years. Take good care to protect your company from all the negatives with the help of Online Reputation Management.

Online Reputation Management's importance overtakes other kinds of RM

ORM or Online Reputation Management has come up as one of the most effective type of reputation management, says a recent study. The study was conducted to know the state of reputation management globally. With the need for reputation management in almost all spheres, it was noted that in recent years reputation management has become one of the major key factor in every concern.

Though the other types of reputation management including business reputation management and personal reputation management that have got acceptance, but it is online reputation management which takes the major share. The study has also revealed that, these days many social networking sites and business are opting for online reputation management. All credits to ebay, which was the first company to bring ORM in the limelight.

With so much going on in the online industry, ORM has proved to be a great help to all those companies which are finding it quite hard to cope up with raging bad press. It is learnt that ORM holds a major share in the reputation management industry and will continue to drive more and more business in coming years.

Well I think in the coming years ORM will surely be a great way to make sure you or your company would never have to face the wrath of online bashing.

Tips for reputation management

With the advent of social networking sites a lot many online tools have arrived people welcome them with open hands for the simple reason that with their tough jobs, information sharing and meeting up with new people have become all the more easy. In this light, reputation too has taken a twofold dimension – no matter whether it is Celebrity Reputation Management, Hotels Reputation Online or anything falling in the similar lines all need to be doing some reputation watch.

Be it an individual or a celebrity, he can be quite concerned about maintaining his reputation and goodwill in the real world than in the virtual one. But this is no longer true. And while the virtual world shouts out “Beware”, you can work towards guarding yours or your businesses online reputation quite cleverly by equipping yourself with a few tips.

To begin with, the best and the simplest test to keep a check on your company’s reputation is to Google yourself. You are what you are shown in the top search results for people out there. And if it is something you don’t like, you have got a plenty of work to do.

When it comes to individual reputation management be very careful of your words if you are a blogger, if you have a website or even in your social media profile. One can read stories of famous personalities landing themselves so easily into trouble, in the midst of controversies and losing out on their public image – all because they did not choose their words properly. The same goes for company’s brand protection as well.

Carry out monthly checks and keep a close eye on your online reputation. Monitor what is being said about you at regular intervals.
And if people are talking about you online, don’t let them just get away with it. You can curb this to a great extent by creating your own online official profiles and by talking more about yourself and what exactly you are.

Stay ahead of the game and act fast once you know something unwanted is being said about you.

Fighting negative comments on forums

Something that keep coming up in searches are comments in forums, so if there are a few negative comments you will find that it keeps coming up on the top of search results. Comments in forums can be kept open for a long long time. This is why getting rid of

A thread is begun about a company, product or service and in to time it can get ugly and malicious. Airline companies, hotels and food and beverages companies are always on the target list. Companies can usually have disgruntled employees and customers who can damage the reputation.

So what can you do to remove negative comments from forums?

Step 1: Find out who owns the domain: software like whois.net are available to track down the owner.
Step 2: Find out their procedures for removing negative comments, contact owner directly through e-mail.
Step 3: Make sure that the e-mail is a confidential one and inform them if the comments are deliberately malicious or libellous, you will be in touch with your lawyers.
Step 4: If this does not work the DNS provider can be contacted to force the domain owner to remove the post.

One thing that works all the time is to have daily good content being uploaded on the net. This works by burying the negative comments deep within the inner pages on Google search results. For routine reputation management it's always better to hire the services of experts.