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Posted by Anant Patel
February 28, 2014
You have given your blood in the building process of your brand, and all of a sudden some unscrupulous activities compel you to imagine that your brand is falling down like a pack of cards. How badly even a bad word of mouth publicity could affect your brand. Thus, envisaging how it could affect online, where millions of people are reading the reviews, brings a very drastic picture to our mind.
If you are looking for the right time to plan an online reputation management campaign for your website, it’s just now. With 2 months past the new year, it’s already proved to be a year of negative reviews, online attacks and harassment and constant conspiracies to hurt the online image of a brand. Thus it is crucial to have the Z security implemented for the protection of your online reputation. Below are given some inevitable points that go into the implementation of any online reputation management plan and are strongly recommended for the current year.
1.) Set up a Notification for Google Alerts
By entering certain key phrases pertaining to your brand such as the company name, the products, to name a few into Google Alerts you could actually come to know how your brand is being talked about. As each time all those terms for which you have requested notification appear in any article, you will be sent a notification about that in your mailbox.
This system is absolutely free of cost and doesn’t offer more capabilities than those in the same niche. However, all the data that you will be receiving would be accurate.
2.) Be Active Across All the Social Networking Platforms
Your business is already there on Facebook and Twitter, however, are you active on it. Do you have a consistent fan following who look forward to the content posted by you? Also, are you active on other social media platforms too such as LinkedIn, Youtube, Google+, Pinterest, to name a few? In today’s age, it is very important for your brand to be visible across all these platforms as one could find all the relevant audience right over here. Being active on all these platforms means you will be posting high quality, and engaging content on a frequent basis, which will suppress all the negative reviews about your brand way down on the search results.
It is also very important to make sure that you secure the name for which you want to open the accounts across all the social networking platforms. This will also prevent clutter and potential attacks.
3.) Register Domain Names That Are Synonymous To Your Brand
If someone is hell-bound on attacking your brand and would cross any limits to disrupt your image, they will do it easily by registering a domain name that contains your brand name and add offensive words to it to give your image a very bad light.
The price of a domain on a yearly basis starts from just $10 per year, and if these negative domains aren’t secured by you, you could end up paying thousands of dollars in the lost reputation and the legal fees.
4.) Leave Your PR Agency
We’ve heard a lot of stories of how some PR company ditches their clients as they have a lot of confidential information in their hand. Many companies have experienced this by having someone else manage their PR firsthand. Once the PR agency is given the task to manage your company’s communication with the masses, you’re giving up the entire rights of your precious image in their hands.
5.) Collect User Reviews Content On Your Own
There are review sites that are well known and are dependable according to a number of customers to look out for reviews on various businesses, but they are actually drastic for any of the businesses that are listed on their site. Reports have to show that some sites are not posting some positive reviews that they receive on their site and also 24% of the reviews are fake. Thus, it is very important to collect reviews and owning the content. It is vital to have total control over the online reputation by keeping real reviews on the site.
Be Prepared for a Brand Attack Anywhere and Anytime
It is crucial to have a backup plan and an ongoing plan both in order to protect your reputation. You never know what the customer may or may not like, thus there could be any time an article that has just gone live by an irritated customer and is going viral, with videos being posted and complaints being made on social networking sites. All these factors bring the negative aspects of your business (according to the customer) to the first page of the search engine.
