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.