All companies strive to create great brands. No one in their right minds will pay a lot of money for brands if its reputation is questionable. If a brand has been badmouthed to death like the Ford Pinto (1976), you cant sustain customers patronizing your products or services for long-term. You might as well just start over and instead of trying to rehabilitate it.
Your brand reputation not only guarantees respect from your market, which eventually translates to revenues. More than this, when the going gets tough and low sales leads your company being bought out by a competitor, your brand reputation can net you a windfall. That became clear when HP bought the Palm brand of cell phones for $1.2 billion, or when Tata Motors bought Jaguar and Land Rover from Ford for $2.3 billion. But can you find a buyer for a company whose brands have little or no sales? Chances are, you wont find anyone.
Nowadays, just being on the net can give you as much money or even more compared to just being a traditional brick and mortar business. While it’s easy for a global audience to contact you, your reputation online could be under constant attack by all sorts of gossip, damaging rumors, and damaging reviews.
You may choose to disregard these. Besides, they can vanish as quickly as they appeared especially if these are just a few ramblings of some unknown individual. But if you get caught in a whirlwind of slander and libel, you could be in big trouble. For one thing, do not allow it to remain out of control and unmanaged since it can cost you your company.
You could handle the situation through the legal system. File cases against the offending parties. Really think about this option, however, as it can damage your brand more than you realize. Sure, you might win the case but your brand may not be able to survive the war. You may win the little courtroom skirmish, but your profits can get absolutely obliterated while you’re doing it.
Thats why companies with brand protection high in their priority maintain professionals who are tasked to manage online reputation with the diligence and online vigilance to keep them abreast of whats being said about their brand online. There are internet tools that do this tracking well. Once the slightest upsurge in negative content start to appear, they start harnessing search engine reputation management to neutralize the threat.
Thats what it means to manage online reputation nipping the bud before it grows. SEO techniques can easily overwhelm offensive sites to bring them 5, 10 or more pages down a search engine result where nobody bothers to look, effectively dousing cold water into any defamation slander they contain, long before any damage can start eating away at your reputation.
What does online reputation management mean? It is really all about safeguarding you and your brand. The earliest time that you can detect and do something about the negative online content about your brand floating around the web, the better. Hire search engine optimization experts who are expert at manage online reputation repair services help you with reputation management.
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Posted under SEO
This post was written by Sue Little on January 7, 2011
