May 20, 2010 in Blog by Rep Management Firm .COM

5 Online Reputation Management tips

Online reputation management industry with its fast growing market became a new field for companies to increase their leads, profits and sales. Unfortunately as the practice shows while some reputation management companies are actually helping people to improve their online identity the other companies specialize in creating negative info online about companies or individuals and then contacting them offering their services. As defined by www.Wikipedia.org ‘Online reputation management (or monitoring) is the practice of monitoring a reputation on the Internet with a view to controlling perception of that reputation.’ So today we are going to share 5 tips for online reputation management.

1)    You need to clearly realize the importance of your online reputation. Unfortunately most of the people when reading some gossip facts, rumors, stories etc about others do not realize that same kind of ‘informational attack’ can happen to them anytime all of a sudden. Internet became a place with very long memory. If someone will post negative information about you online – it will stay there forever. Negative information will not disappear by itself so you need to make sure that if ever that happens you are ready for this and one single link or post will not ruin your future career and your personal life.

2)    Expand your online presence by posting all the news and events that are related to your personal name or brand. Of course it takes some time and most of us do not have time to spend hours in front of the screens creating Facebook connections and generating tweeter followers. But if you spend just 10-15 min a day and will do this regularly in a few months you will see how much you contribute to improve your online reputation.

3)    Generate more positive feedback from others. Advices and recommendations that were given by unknown people are truly considered to be the best advertisement. So you need to work in this direction as well and increase the amount of such positive comments. This is a continued process and this will not happen in a snap of a finger. To get appreciation and positive feedback you will need to do something good first. Share your success stories, give advices and help other people – if you follow these simple steps you will see that people will gladly thank you back.

4)    Basically there are three simple steps that you always need to keep in mind and follow to preserve your online reputation. Firstly, monitor and listen to what is being said and posted about you online. It will be much better for you if you will know about upcoming issue. In this case you will have time to prepare. Secondly, analyze the source of the issue. If you know where it comes from it will be much easier for you to maintain it and avoid this from happening once again in the future. The final step is taking action when the problem is identified. However you need to remember that you need to act with the strategy in place since if you will do this without any tactics there is a very high risk that you will make things even worse instead off improving the situation.

5)    It doesn’t matter if your brand is big or not and if it is well presented online or no – bad things can happen to it at any time and you need to realize and take this for granted. However if you did your homework and dedicated some time and resources in the past to establish positive web presence this will definitely will soften the blow and will allow you to treat this situation not from the standpoint of the emergency protection but from the standpoint of interaction with the people who are relate to your brand.

We absolutely understand that a lot of people will say that in order to secure online reputation themselves it would take them a lot of time. On the other hand a lot of people are not enough tech savvy to be able to manage this. That is why our online reputation management firm provides online reputation management and search engine optimization services for all our clients combining professional service and affordable prices.