The Secret World of Online Reputation Management

When it comes to online reputation, it pretty much means everything! With so much emphasis put into social media and the feedback from customers and online reviews, anyone’s reputation can quickly change for the better or worse in just seconds. No longer can companies quiet a few unhappy customers or provide bad service without the rest of the world knowing. The internet is changing the way reputation management services are needed and how companies and services are portrayed in the search engines.

The business of reputation management is growing at a rapid rate and companies now need to spend more money than ever before to deal with customer feedback, online complaints and search engine rankings. If a complaint and negative review is at the top of the search engine results, right below the actual company web site, imagine how damaging this can be for the company.

How Online Reputation Management Works

Just like getting a web site to rank high in the search engines, reputation management services also require a wide variety of content and link building methods. Reputation management can also be considered anything from ranking web sites above negative sites, pushing down negative reviews in the search results or even changing the auto suggest listings when performing a search on Google. Through the use of custom tailored web sites, social bookmarking, social media profiles, press releases and much more, reputation management companies can change the way people view different companies online.

Here’s a perfect example of how a brand might find a disaster for them waiting in the search results. Little Caesars is a well known pizza chain loved by thousands of customers — however, when you type in “little caesars reviews” it wouldn’t look that way. To any unsuspecting person who might search for this in the search results, it’s going to potentially leave a bad first impression in their minds forever.

The one thing to remember about online reputation management is that a one size fits all platform will never work. The larger and well known the company or brand, the more work it would require to rank and change the way a brand is seen in the search results.

How can Brands Approach this Issue?

No matter how big or small your brand is, no one is safe in terms of what might appear in the search results. With Google now indexing more social content, pictures and videos… the problem is just getting harder to control.

In the instance above… the content is already out there and it’s ranking on some pretty high sites that would be hard to compete with. BusinessWeek recently interviewed Todd William of reputationrhino.com to get his thoughts on how individuals and brands can protect themselves from harmful content that might already be out there.

FrancescaBW: What do you do about content—such as a news article about you—that cannot be removed and is truthful?

Todd William: At Reputation Rhino, our goal is to elevate positive content quickly and confidentially to the top of the search [results] and eliminate or diminish the impact of negative content by displacing the content from the first pages of Google and other search engines. With online reputation management, there are lots of promises and false expectations. And you are right: Some content cannot be removed, and some content should not be removed. What we really try to do is present a much fuller, more complete image for a client than one bad day or night by owning the first pages of Google.

To reiterate on what Todd said, it’s extremely important for every person, business and brand to not just have a single web site, but also to have a blog, social profile and other positive articles and content that they can rank for in the search results. Basically, the more positive content you have out there, the better your chances to control what ranks on the main page for your name or brand.

Discovering the Secret World of Reputation Management

The world of online reputation management is one that not many people are familiar with, but it’s been growing at a massive rate as more businesses and brands realize the terrors that may be lurking online. Once you start to learn how ORM actually works, it’s very interesting to see how much money and activity is really in this space. Companies are now spending more than ever to keep their brand names and reputations online intact, while also focusing on relieving and pushing any negative feedback and reviews into the dark.

To finish off this article, I must ask… what’s currently ranking for your name?