Plan like you have never planned before
People have many ways to complain about your business online and all of them are public. When you hear the term brand reputation what do you think of? I think of press releases, press conferences, special appearances, and interviews. This is what’s referred to as traditional public relations. Now that the Internet is the majority of people’s first interaction with a company it is important to create an online brand reputation plan. And plan like you’ve never planned before. The main goal of online brand reputation is to ensure that only positive results about your business show up in the search engines.
Optimize your positive materials
SEO or search engine optimization for brand reputation management involves improving the keywords and tagging of your company’s published materials. This will put a focus on your positive materials by pushing them to the top of the search engine results.
Content Creation for Brand Reputation
Creating positive content such as blog posts, social media profiles and websites and pairing it with SEO should overcome any negative comments or posts. I should mention here that you want all of these tactics to be proactive and you always want to be sure to create only content that is true. The key is to be transparent and approachable.
Traditional Tactics with a Modern Twist
The third tactic is to promote the positive things your business is doing in the community by submitting online press releases. Just like submitting a press release to a traditional media outlet, you would want the press release to go to an authoritative source. This could be a credible online newspaper, television station, or a government supported website just to name a few. Of course, what is considered authoritative will depend on what your business does or the type of product it sells.
The ethics of it all
Ethical practices around online brand reputation are still being discussed and worked out. As I mentioned before, you want to make sure that any content you are putting on the World Wide Web about your company is honest. The public needs to be able to have the choice to view what they want. On top of that, your company needs to deal with these negative comments on an interactive level. This could be as simple as responding to the customer’s complaint and offering ways to resolve it. With careful planning and positive interaction with customers, your company should be able to maintain an excellent online presence.
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