If your company is good and honest, misconduct and accusations online can very quickly damage your digital reputation and this can influence how people view your business. If there are negative comments about your company online, there are steps you can take to minimize the overall damage and help you prevent and respond accordingly when it happens. Various internet marketing and social media marketing strategies can be applied to minimize the effect of negative comments.
Never try to delete negative feedback about your business online as this can quickly turn into a snowball. The goal with a good online reputation management strategy is to push the negative statements down in the organic search engine listing and replace those unwanted listings with positive ones.
Here are a couple of tips to help you with this process.
Digital Reputation Management
Research the negative comment: Always look at the root cause of the negative comment and what can be done to bring the conversation to a stop. Your repairing process can only start when the comments has stopped.
Keywords: Which keywords do you want to use in your campaign? Try to keep your focus on one or two keywords. These keywords can include your name, business name, brand or even an event.
Identify: List all the articles, blog posts, forum topics that already exist that you want to displace on the search engines.
Link building: Launch a link building strategy for the identified articles, blog posts and forum topics that you want to be found for. Use the keywords you have selected in this campaign.
Blogging: Publish a couple of blog posts where you can control the content. Use a variety of blog aggregators related to your market niche to aggregate the content of the posts.
Flickr and YouTube: Publish and promote photos and videos. Add the keywords you have selected in the title and tags of the multimedia items.
Monitoring: Setup a couple of monitoring processes so that you will be made aware if your name is mentioned online. If these are negative, address them quickly.
Digital reputation management is not a once of process and constant monitoring is required to help you with your digital reputation.