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Online Reputation Risk Management

An issue we see popping up more often these days is online reputation risk management. A client or a staff member searches for the company name and a bad review or negative web page appears in the top 10 Google search results.

According to Econsultancy.com, 7 out of 10 visitors will not click through to your website if there are negative comments appearing below you in the search engine results ranking.

The Conference Board’s study on Reputation Risk Management also states that:

  • Reputation risk is often not incorporated into risk management. Only 49 percent of executives surveyed said that the management of reputation risk was highly integrated with their enterprise risk management (ERM) function or another risk oversight program.
  • Social media are gaining influence, but most companies are ignoring them. Although consumers and investors are increasingly gathering information from blogs, online forums, and social networking sites, only 34 percent of the survey respondents said they extensively monitor such sites, and only 10 percent actively participated in them.

Here are a few of the sites that we have seen ranking for company names with horrendous reviews/news.

  • RipOffReport.com
  • Complaints.com
  • ConsumerAffairs.com
  • TheSqueakyWheel.com
  • ConsumerwWebWatch.org

What Can You Do to Protect Your Online Reputation?

  • Monitor your brand using tools like Radian6 , Trackur or Techrigy
  • Set up Goolge Alerts on variations of your company name.
  • Grab your .com, .ca domains and variations of your domain name.
  • Start an SEO campaign so that you are already ranking well for your company name with web pages, social media sites or directories or articles
  • Set up company and personal profiles on social media and business profile sites to protect yourself from :

You can use Namechk to check over 80 social media sites to see if your brand name is available.

What if Negative Content is Already Damaging Your Online Reputation?

  • Don’t ignore it. Be honest and try to resolve the issue.
  • Take it off line. Don’t put anything in an email you wouldn’t want to see online. As our social media queen Kim mentioned to me, Twitter is a great place to provide customer service. Tough to provide a lot of damaging details with only 140 characters.
  • Be polite and non–confrontational. As much as you might be tempted to drive a fork through the villain’s forehead, take a deep breath and be reasonable.

Taking Steps to Improve Your Reputation Online

  • Search for your company name and study the results carefully.
  • Look for current assets on the results page appearing below the the offending source that you can push ahead of it by linking to it from your website.
  • Build New Content:
    1. Ask friends to make blog entries about your company
    2. Syndicate new articles
    3. Send out press releases
    4. Add your site to online directories
    5. Host some fresh content on your site
    6. Create new domains and populate them with content
    7. Create profile pages
    8. Optimize your social media sites
    9. Sponsor a charitable organizations for PR
    10. Optimize your video and multimedia marketing
    11. Use sub domains with new content
    12. Link from your main site to articles, press , etc

The main theme here is to saturate the search engine results page with your own content optimized for your company name or keywords associated with the bad review/news.

Click on the image below to get an idea of what I am talking about. I searched for Wolf21 and the results show:

Wolf21 Google Search
  1. Our home page
  2. Our blog
  3. Our Twitter page
  4. A page on a friend’s site
  5. A page on Wofl21, the inspiration for our name
  6. A blog directory
  7. Our Linkedin profile

The Conference Board Recommendations on Reputation Risk Management

"Boards of directors, senior management, and operating management should demonstrate an active commitment to strong reputation management," conclude the authors. "While crises are sometimes inevitable, a company’s reputation when it is most vulnerable and how the organization responds can have an enduring impact on how it is perceived for years to come."

The Bottom Line:

Reputation risk management is not something you wake up in the morning thinking about but when a crisis arises you throw everything but the kitchen sink at it. The urgency instigates your reaction. Being prepared ahead of time can put you in control of the situation.

Resources:

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