Staying on Top of Your Online Reputation

By Erin Quinlan of The Silent Partner Marketing

Before someone walks into your business, they already know something –maybe many things – about your business. How?

Most likely, they searched your business online.

Ensuring that you stay on top of online chatter can be a full time job – but it’s a very important job. Reputation management allows you to monitor online activities and listings.

Not sure where to begin? Let us help. At The Silent Partner Marketing, we handle the reputation management aspect for our clients so they can concentrate on running their business.

With our reputation management services, it will ensure that you are aware of all places where people mention your business – from listings to positive or negative mentions and reviews, social updates.

We will also help you promote your business on Facebook, Twitter, and other places, and will track your followers. You will also receive automated reports to help you manage your business brand.

You should never underestimate the cost of a poor reputation. There’s one story that when potential customers searched a particular company’s name, 7 of the top 10 Google results were negative. After careful review of the rankings and prior-year revenues, it was estimated the venture was losing nearly $2 million a year in sales because of negative search engine results.

Ouch. It’s clear that online reputation management clearly has a big impact on a company’s revenue.

We know that it can be unsettling to wake up one day and see defamatory remarks appearing online, particularly when the items move beyond constructive criticism to include outrageous accusations and even slanderous or libelous remarks. 

What’s even worse is that the negative reviews are often on websites that rank high in search engines, so anyone doing a search on the company name will probably see them. Whether the comments are true or not, these negative search results jeopardize the company’s online reputation.

With this comes the chance for a loss in sales, negative press coverage, and hiring ability.

On the other side of things, you may have great reviews. You’re all set, right? Wrong. Just because the results are good today, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll be that way tomorrow. Search engine results can change at any time based on recent news, social media, algorithm changes, or many other reasons. 

For this reason, creating and keeping a positive online reputation is a continuous, ongoing process.

In today’s world, any crisis will shortly be an online reputation crisis thanks to the real-time nature of social media. Even if it doesn’t make the news, blogs, tweets, and other social media can do great damage.

The first step is to do everything you can to prevent a problem from becoming a reputational crisis. That includes planning how to best use every online platform your brand is on. It also includes constant monitoring of online brand mentions and sentiment, and strong threat detection and protection.

During a crisis, you’ll want to have someone on call who can monitor your online reputation, assess the reputational risks of various events and solutions, and suggest reputation-protection measures.

That’s where we come in.

Because social media happens in real time, customers expect fast responses. To prevent minor problems from becoming a big deal – and to maintain a good reputation during a crisis – communicate and respond quickly. 

Fast communication is especially critical if the crisis involves product or service quality and safety, or the security and privacy of customer or employee information.

Ready to protect and grow your business? 

Give The Silent Partner Marketing a call at 866-432-6456 or e-mail Kyle Reyes at kyle@thesilentpartnermarketing.com.

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Written by Erin Quinlan

Erin Quinlan is the Content Marketing Manager of The Silent Partner Marketing, a boutique marketing firm focused on helping businesses grow in an age of exploding technology. You can find The Silent Partner Marketing on Google+, Facebook, and Twitter.