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Note from Ayat: This is a guest post by Linda Bustos. She is an Emerging Media Analyst for Elastic Path, an ecommerce software vendor. She also blogs about online retailing, social media web usability for the Get Elastic ecommerce blog.

You work hard to build an honest business, but you can’t please everyone. Someone had a negative experience with your company (an unreturned phone call, a rude salesperson, a defective product, a lawsuit) and dragged your company through the mud on a personal blog or discussion forum. You may have worked hard to resolve the issue with the customer, but the pages still remain in the search engines – ranking highly.

Or you could be the victim of brand-jacking by spammers, made-for-Adsense websites or trash-talk from competitors submitted as anonymous comments on blogs, forums and review sites. You wish these pages didn’t exist, but you don’t control search engines…what can you do?

Because of the openness and anonymity of the Web, every business is vulnerable to reputation management issues. Some appearances of negative feedback are easy to have removed. Others can never be stricken from the record but you can work on pushing these results off the first few pages of each search engine. But it takes some strategy and time.
 

Tracking Your Reputation

It’s easy to set up Google Alerts, a free service from Google which monitors new appearances of your tracked keywords in real-time, firing off an email to you as soon as it spots a new result. Other tracking services exist, but because Google pretty much has you covered, you will do fine with just this service. Because rankings bounce around and alerts only notify you of first appearances in the Google index, you’ll need to check the top rankings every so often manually to make sure pages are clear of major issues.

Problem: Spammy Results

More of an issue with MSN and Yahoo’s engines than Google, made-for-Adsense websites can appear because they’ve keyword-stuffed their page with your name enough times to fake some relevance. The good news is you can report them to the search engines as its in their own best interest to catch and remove these results. Report to Google, Yahoo and MSN. Make sure you’re only submitting spam pages, as search engines won’t remove blog or forum posts.

Problem: Bashed on a Blog

Sometimes a blogger will post about a negative experience on their personal blog. You may be able to contact them directly and try to resolve the issue, but if there is no contact information – you’re out of luck. Your options are:

1. Comment on the blog post explaining your side of the story. If it was a negative customer experience, you could openly offer the blogger a refund, gift certificate or some other incentive to contact you themselves. This way, if people researching your company read the blog post, they will also see you are a company that cares and are willing to make it up to disappointed customers.
2. Keep working on creating content that will outrank the blog post long-term (I will explain in a moment).
3. Stick it out. It’s not unusual for fresh blog content to rank highly and drop down after a couple weeks (when it slips off the blog home page), never to climb back again.

Ironically, negative comments can appear when the blogosphere is loving you most. For example, when Mashable named uShip (an eBay style marketplace connecting shipping carriers with people who need to ship stuff) the most underrated website, I blogged about it on Get Elastic.

Shortly after posting, a comment was made by “Timothy” who implied that uShip was a hub for scam artists. It turns out that Timothy was a competitor (whose website is no longer) who now tracks references to uShip that appear online and follows up with negative comments wherever he can. Thanks to tracking alerts, uShip was right on the ball responding promptly with its side of the story.

Timothy then recruited some buddies to post comments on our blog, and Timothy’s rapid addition of comments triggered our spam filter to remove all his comments. Timothy assumed I had removed them and accused me of being “on the side of the scammers” and took his rant over to the Shipping Guru forum, where he proceeded to bash Get Elastic and me personally, repeating my name several times in his post about how we are biased and removed his comments. He included my original post content (illegal) and his post was removed by the Shipping Guru administration.

So tracking is important, you want to be able to respond in a timely manner in such a situation. 

Problem: Trash Talked in Online Forums

When the opinions expressed on a forum come from community members and not the forum owner his or herself, you can request removal of the content if you can find the contact information for the administrator. Forum owners are generally careful about hosting rants, especially if the comments are inflammatory, obscene or otherwise offensive. If it’s just general commentary, you can post your response in the forum, which is sometimes the better route, as censoring a poster’s comments can just add fuel to the fire, sparking community backlash.

Creating High Ranking Content

For damage control or preventative maintenance, it’s always a good idea to work on creating content that will rank highly for your name that you can control. Here are some ways that are effective:

1. Press Releases

There are a number of free and paid press release services that can rank highly including PRWeb.com, PR Leap andPR Compass.

$200/year will get you a PR.com profile page for your company, and you can submit press releases for free from there. Search on the company names of profiles listed on PR.com and you’ll see the PR.com profile ranking very highly.

Always use your company/product name in the title of the release. This will ensure the page’s title tag, which is a key element to SEO, includes your name as a keyword. “Widget and Widget Co. Names John Widgewater to Board of Directors” is much more effective than “John Widgewater to Join 100 Year Old Widget Firm.”

2. Company Profiles

In addition to PR.com, you may find websites that will host a page about your company for a fee, a local business association, for example. You can find ideas by running search queries for your competitors. Web 2.0 sites like Squidoo, HubPages, StartupNation and AboutUs.org allow you to submit your own profiles about your company. And don’t forget Facebook Pages.

3. Article Marketing

There’s no lack of article banks that accept content for reprint on other websites. If you write 4 or 5 articles and submit them to these banks, creating an account with your company name (some only accept the author’s name), your account page can rank well, showing off a repository of knowledge.
You can also submit to topical content sites that accept articles. These are not hard to find, just type in to a search engine “relevant keyword” + “submit article” or “add article” or “suggest article.” This will be more effective if you can include your branding in the title, for example, “Widget and Widget’s Guide To XYZ.” Again, making the most out of the title tag.

You can also network with other bloggers and offer guest posts (like this one), but unless you’re writing about your company (and using the page title and title tag) it might not rank well. There are blogs that exist for the purpose of reviewing sites for a fee, but you’re better off avoiding any paid posts for several reasons. First, paid reviews can sound fake, or if they’re objective, can include negative opinions. Second, paid review blogs are quickly losing trust in search engines, and therefore are less likely to rank well. 

4. Microblogging

A relatively new phenomenon, services like Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Tumblr and Soup.io allow you to keep your friends, business contacts, affiliates or customers up-to-date with your company — so long as each post is 140 characters or less (depending on the service). These pages tend to rank highly because of the strength of the domains they’re attached to, and the more friends you add, the more internal links build up the page “strength” of your profile. Microblogging can also be useful for customer service and marketing.

5. Photo / Video Sharing

Leverage training videos, promos, demos and recruiting videos (just to name a few) with YouTube channels or other video sites like Ning, Blip.tv, Me.tv and Veoh. Likewise you can post photos on Flickr or Fotki.

6. Craigslist

Craigslist is a free and easy way to kill two birds with one stone — attract human resources and help reputation management! But you have to remember to update your job listings every 45 days. Again, use your company name in the post title of the job. There may be other job sites in your niche, a search on competitors may reveal some good opportunities.

Finally, you can help things along by linking to these pages from your website or blog to increase their relevance. A link acts as an endorsement of that content from your site, and search engines can recognize this. For example, you can link to your Flickr stream from your recruiting page, showing pictures of staff and staff functions along with a “recent job openings” section linking to Craigslist. Or you can link to your microblogs and Facebook page from your About Us page.

Reputation management is not just for damage control (or prevention), it’s also an opportunity to listen to your customers, clients, employees and stakeholders. Monitoring what is being said about you, your business, products and services can help you respond to negative and positive feedback in a timely manner, and can help you make better decisions about your products and policies.

Tags: Online-Reputation-Management, Reputation-Management
Posted in Business, Sales & Marketing