There are plenty of articles out there providing advice on how to go about reputation management. A lot of these have some sound advice which should be followed. When it comes to reputation management, however, what you don’t do can be just as important as what you do.
Reputation management seems easy from the outside. Even when you decide to be proactive about staking your claim as a reputable business, the internet has a wealth of options. These options are full of pitfalls for the unwary. Even giant corporations who should know better have been lulled into a false sense of security by the richness of the landscape. Their exploitative moves have got them into deep trouble which takes years to recover from.
The sort of exploitation we’re talking about here is using social media and other handy publicity points to give your reputation a false boost. Proactive reputation management relies on a company gaining control of the top spots for its brand keywords and other important areas. Done well, a proactive reputation management campaign can be a real boost to your site’s search engine optimisation, and you can discuss this with us at SEO Consult Australia. Reputation management can require a fair amount of hard work if you go about it the natural way, and most companies aren’t willing to wait.
Reputation management isn’t easy. Companies that have taken the easy option often rue it later on when their schemes are uncovered. Here are a few things you should avoid when looking after your reputation:
- Using numerous accounts to boost your profile. Companies have been doing this since the beginning of the internet, with varying levels of subtlety. Unfortunately for most companies, the average internet user’s sense of authenticity is finely tuned. If you use a number of log-ins for the one business on a social media site, that site’s users aren’t going to take long to figure out who you are. When this happens, your campaign could cause more harm than any potential benefit.
- Posting your own reviews. Again, companies do this all the time. The major area for error comes in when a company cannot let go of the need to be positive all the time. It’s unheard of for a company to advertise its own faults, so posting them in a review doesn’t occur to most businesses. This is usually what gives company-sponsored reviews away.
- Mounting a big, fat, false campaign. There’s nothing more entertaining to the public than the outing of a big company for something underhanded. When Wal-Mart secretly sponsored an ‘independent’ blog, or when major businesses create their own industry review sites in order to control opinions, the masses of publicity were exactly the opposite of what was intended. This might have helped the businesses with links for their SEO, but it did nothing for their reputation. The best that can be said for these kinds of schemes is that they need to be Machiavellian to succeed. This level of deviousness probably isn’t worth the benefits you could potentially enjoy.
