Reputation management- the dual edged weapon that protects your repute and salvage you from crisis

Reputation management not only helps you to keep up your brand image and online presence but also forms part of your crisis management strategy. The negative posts and forum postings about your business online are warning signals that you need to get things in order to retain your position. By ignoring these facts and playing a proverbial ostrich, you will only by inviting more trouble.

As with any element of business management, the mode and time of response play a crucial role in ensuring the reputation of your business and to turn it into a positive tide. Setting alerts is the smartest way to measure the pulse of things being told about you in the online space. Never ignore creeping crises and negative rumours about your business, even if that means slander or orchestrated smearing campaigns unleashed by your business rivals. Positive comments could be used in your marketing and are great tools to gauge your popularity and to keep an aye on the competition.

Negative comments are not something that you should run away from and there are lots of ways to respond and tackle these. Do not waste time in the hope that it will go away with time as whatever posted in the internet remains there forever and these will come back to haunt and tease you unless you root these out diligently.

If the comments are on blogs that allow comments, make sure that these are not bogus and try to respond to the genuine comments. Never belittle anybody who has made comments. By engaging with the unhappy customers in this way, you will have the opportunity to clear any misunderstandings that they might have and and even to gain new customers. Market studies show that many customers who complain turn out to be the most valuable customers if you win them back in time.

So, keeping an eye on what others are doing online and comparing it what you are doing would be a great way to get started in reputation management,. It is a meticulous exercise that requires patience and time and there are many professional reputation management agencies that will relieve you of the hassles of reputation management.

How quick can Online reputation management be?

Online reputation is the buzz word in the virtual world these days. Businesses, celebrities and even ordinary mortals have been under the scathing attacks in the cyber space these days. A few defamatory remarks are all that it take to ruin their carefully built up online reputation. Professionals or businesses that have been under attack by defamatory remarks will be eager to regain their lost reputation at the shortest possible time. Online reputation damage could mean loss of revenue, a slump in sales and above all an erosion of the customer base, which could have long term adverse effects in the prospects of the organization.

To even off these negative effects, companies and individuals opt for reputation management strategies that would remove the negative publicity and portray a favorable internet reputation to the public.However, online reputation management could be a time consuming process. It will depend on the amount of negative content posted against the concerned company or individual. By systematically posting SEO articles, and blogs the negative content will be pushed back to the inner pages of the search engines that would remain out of the glances of the discerning customers thereby ensuring brand protection.

Realization of positive results may take time to materialize; so the safest option would be to monitor your online repute and brand image regularly by using tools like Google alerts that would help you to keep a tag on what is being said about you in the virtual world. As you get the wind of the adverse comments in the air, you need to get on top gear to face these comments head on. Timely trouble shooting is the golden rule in reputation management. Never ignore these bad posts and forum postings as it could snowball into a major scandal in no time. Virtual world is viral and it wont take much time to reach these bad posts into your customers as well. The mere fact that over 86% of internet user depend on online inputs and feedbacks while shopping for products and services, would drive home the significance of online reputation in present day business scenario.

Effective tips for a good reputation management

People are talking about you, your product, your company and its time you started taking care of what others say about you. It might either be good or maybe some slanderous postings that could visibly destroy your company image. So what you need to do at this juncture is truly important. Check out some of our reputation management points and make sure that you implement it for a good corporate image.

• If you need to keep your critics from not being too powerful, you need to not respond to the complaints in an exaggerated way.
• Being able to speak directly to your audience through blog post or being an active member in the Internet will increase your reputation management skills.
• SEO/SEM are the two most important tools for a great online reputation management.
• It is tough to damage a firm that has a good reputation management and has a favorable position online.
• A poor review can be responded with courtesy in an apologetic tone.
• Reputation management will be of great help for your company or industry if the right tools and languages are used in a proper way.
• Start by tracking your online reputation with the various online services like Google Alerts, Social News Sites, Social bookmarking sites, Social Networks, Blogs, Media sharing sites.
• Put your own profile photo rather than pictures that doesn't allow others to figure you out.
• Make a list of the top sites that are bringing in good results for your company.
• If you are posting any contents or posts in a public site, be sure that you do it in a professional way.