At some point, you will probably require some professional reputation management. However, you will then find that there are many different strategies within reputation management to consider. There are different schools of thought in terms of which ones you should use. So what is the best reputation management? Is it to focus on building reputation, to engage your audience, or to bury the negative?
The Best Reputation Management Does it All
The first technique is to build a reputation. This is an important technique because it ensures that you already have a positive starting point on the search engines, before any negative postings arrived. See this as building a fortified castle before someone attacks. Your goal should be to make sure that pages that you own, such as your website, your blog, and your social media pages, are ranked all over the first three pages of the major search engines. This helps to build your brand as well couldn’t, while at the same time developing a positive reputation.
The second is to engage. When someone talks about you, you cannot control what they say. What you can control is how you respond to that and this can, to a degree, influence how other people start to perceive you. For instance, if you thank everybody that leaves a positive review, you come across as friendly and approachable. If someone attacks you online and you respond professionally and respectfully, you will also be seen as someone who cares about the opinions of their customers. If, by contrast, you respond aggressively, you are more likely to be perceived in a negative manner.
Lastly, there is the burying technique. What this means is that you effectively ignore and negative review and engage in what is known as reverse SEO. This means that you flood the internet with so much positive information about yourself that the negative review becomes more difficult to find. If you managed to banish it to the 4th page of Google, it may as well not exist. However, you do have to understand that this is a bit of a gamble. Should the individual who left the negative posting comment on it again, it will instantly go back up in the results. Hence, whether or not this isn’t acceptable tactic will depend entirely on the specific situation. You cannot ignore every negative comment that is posted about you and just hope that you will be able to bury it.
The best reputation management strategies are those that incorporate all of the above. In fact, it incorporates them in this order. It starts by building of positive reputation and ensuring that positive information can be found on the search engines. It continues by engaging with customers in a professional manner. When all else fails, efforts should be made to bury the negative information. This also explains why it is so important to enlist the services of a professional, as reputation management is a highly complex and multifaceted field of work.