How to Manage Your Online Reputation

Managing and influencing your online reputation can be done through a mixture of public relations and marketing. While the Internet can be a great place where your brand can flourish, it can also be a place where things can go horribly wrong. In fact, there have been times when just one blogger can have a huge negative impact on a brand. Online, your brand success or failure is amplified more that ever before.

Be proactive not just reactive

The reputation of your brand is at stake online. Now with forums, interactive websites and social media, people are able to share there experiences to the masses with a few clicks of a keyboard. You must take the time to position yourself positively to your target market. If someone searches your business name in Google, you want all the first page listings to be positive. There is nothing worse that to have customers with a poor experience being found in the search engines. Spend time on search engine optimisation so what you want shows up in the search engines first.

A negative customer experience can have a huge impact online. Even if there is no justification to what they are writing, people will take notice of what is being said and respond accordingly.

Work hard on creating fantastic customer experiences and encourage them to share their experiences online. You want the positive experiences to far outweigh the negative. In fact, if you have a loyal following of customers they may run to your defence if they read something that they don’t believe is true.

Responding to attacks

You should always respond to negative comments however you should never get caught up in a fight when someone attacks your brand. If you are being attacked on social media sites, blogs or forums, it is best if you can apologies and thank them for the feedback for whatever you can even if it’s simply to say “Sorry you feel that way”. Follow up your apology with a positive experience you wish to create as a brand. For example if someone complains a delivery was late you could say “Thanks you John for your feedback. I am sorry your delivery was late. ABC company always strive to be on time, every time. We will look into why your delivery was late and find a way for this problem to be avoided from now on. Thanks again for the feedback, it’s a great help.”