FEBRUARY 2013 |
www.opp-connect.com WORDS | Francine Carrel
FEATURE
ONLINE REPUTATION | 51
Watch your reputation B
uilding and maintaining a good online reputation is extremely important in any business.
With information at a potential client’s fi ngertips, you need to make sure that what they come across is positive.
The Basics
As you go about building your reputation online, there are three basic keys to remember:
1. Regularly post positive content While it can be diffi cult (or impossible) to keep all negative information off the internet, you need to make sure that the information you want people to see is the most visible. To this end, regularly publishing your own content in a variety of places (not just your own website) allows people to know who you are and what your company values are.
This can include press releases and comments on social media (getting involved with positive discussions on LinkedIn, for example).
2. Keep your private information and arguments private
Prevention is better than cure. Any private information that could be used
in a negative way is to be kept off the internet at all cost. Check your privacy settings on any websites you use. In addition, it is a terrible idea to take any arguments (personal or professional) online. Anything negative you say in the heat of the moment is pretty likely to come back and haunt you, no matter whether you think you’re in the right!
Respond to criticism (see below) – but take time to think about it, stating your case calmly and in a balanced
“Publishing your content in a variety of places allows people to fi nd out who you are”
way. No insults to rival companies, no swearing, no personal slights.
3. Deal quickly with any negative information
If something inappropriate, nasty or unfl attering about you does appear on the web, you need to counteract it quickly. Don’t let a piece of negative content become entrenched in people’s minds or, worse, go viral.
Basics of Dealing with Negative Information If you don’t realize it’s there, it only takes one negative review, comment or photograph to affect you for a long time, no matter whether you’re a small business or a large corporation. Monitor your online reputation diligently and take control of its direction. Some tips: • If you believe the comment/ review to be unfounded, ask the person responsible to delete it. If it is libelous (and/or left by a disgruntled ex-employee), take the matter up with a lawyer who has experience with online disagreements. • If the post is to stay, reply online to show you are dealing with the situation. This can be turned to an opportunity to demonstrate your professionalism. • Push it down the search engine results by adding regular, optimized content that will appear higher up. By dominating search engines results with positive content, people are less likely to see that one piece of negative content.
Creating and managing your online reputation To construct a consistent brand and image, you need to make sure your values and reputation bridge both the online and offl ine world. Even if your brand is shown positively in offl ine media, any good work can be undone with a negative online image. Here are some basic steps to start with:
Assess your current reputation Begin by performing a thorough assessment of your current online reputation. Search for your full name, company name, brand and other key phrases (such as your services, current developments etc) in Google and other search engines. Focus mainly on the fi rst two or three pages in a search engine’s results. Put the information into a spreadsheet, including the URLs, position in results and your comments on what’s behind each URL. Highlight any causes for concern –
Number one | you must put in time and eff ort to keep a place at the top
even if they seem minor – and decide what needs doing, who will do it and when it must be done. Also fl ag any particularly positive
You may have a jazzy website and an enviable social media presence, but just one bit of negative information can be seen and judged by millions on the internet. It’s important to keep an eye on how others view you – and to optimise your online reputation through accentuating the good and dealing swiftly with the bad
feedback or information and mark them as items you want to move up in the rankings. Even if everything seems great
the fi rst time you perform these searches, you must keep ahead! Repeat the process regularly to make sure nothing nasty is creeping up the listings.
Determine your best arenas & niches Now take a look at what is showing up most often in your results. Are your highest ranking links from Twitter and Facebook – or perhaps a personal blog or YouTube channel? If so, these are the places to focus on when publishing more information about yourself and your company.
Create a reputation strategy Now the information is gathered and assessed, you can build a strategy for crafting the image you’re after. Focus on the what, where and how of your content and desired message. What type of content will serve you best – and what do you and your colleagues/employees excel at creating? It could be blog posts, press releases, articles or tweets.
Where will this content be published? This might include which social networks to focus on, high traffi c blogs, news sites, your own blogs and video sites.
Also decide how you will know when you have succeeded; for example, dominating page one of Google, collecting at least 15 glowing reviews, amassing 5,000 followers on a social media site.
Start building
The last step in building your online reputation is to follow through on your strategy – start creating your content and promoting it in the search engines and elsewhere with SEO techniques (keep an eye out in OPP for more on these).
As you create the content that will
infl uence your reputation, continue to monitor search results online. Track your progress and keep tabs on all mentions of your name and key phrases so that you can quickly respond to anything negative.
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