Reputation Management The Google Way
One of the hardest areas for any business to deal with is reputation management. There are billions of businesses in the world that don’t even have an online presence, most of them run by owners who spend little time on the web. If their business’ reputation got sullied online, they would never know until it was too late.
Reputation management has several key aspects. The first is having an identification and alert system in place. You may not have an online presence, however, you can have an email address and that is a good starting point. Simply subscribing to Google Alerts using words or phrases unique to your business’ activities is a good start. These alerts arrive via email and include links to the site(s) that have mentioned those words or phrases.
The second aspect is to have a management plan in place for when things do go wrong. This is where most business’ do get it all wrong. They receive an alert, visit the site and either abuse the person making an allegation, or panic and don’t know how to act.
Abusing the person who has published harmful information does nothing apart from telling everyone you’re an abusive person as well. This is where a plan of attack should be formulated as soon as possible. This could involve contacting the person to resolve issues, or visiting social sites where the story is blossoming and interacting in a positive way.
Of course, not every situation is negative – or should be viewed as negative. Chris Crum published a post reporting on the fake Chrome OS screen shots fiasco from a few days ago. The report highlighted how quickly the information was spread around the net and how many people linked to the page of fake screen shots (most people assuming they were real and not fake).
Going beyond the actual news story – I was rather amused at Google’s actions – or rather, inaction. Google could have jumped up and down claiming they were fakes and for people to ignore the whole story. Instead, they were quite noticeable in the lack of reaction – which in a way fueled the speculation even more.
In this case, their reputation management strategy was to do nothing, to keep a poker face, and let everyone run with it. When you think about it, what a great free publicity stunt – and not one attributed to them (and I am not suggesting they were involved either). For a full day, the net was rife with Google talk. Not Bing and not Facebook and their search gains. No, Google was the center of attention once more – and quietly loving every moment.
Is your business geared and ready to handle a reputation management situation – even if it is positive? Do you have a reputation management plan? Just as importantly, if, instead of a huge negative campaign, you receive a huge positive campaign – are you ready to capitalize? Reputation management involves both the negative and the positive – you should have a plan that can address both.
Recent Entries
- Why A Search Engine Googopoly Is Bad For The Internet
- Blogging For The Sake Of Blogging Is Not Blogging
- How To Create An Effective Social Marketing Tweet
- Internal Linking – Don’t Be Afraid Of The Long Tail
- Adding Your Scotland Based Local Business To AOL
- Don’t Be Too Quick To Dismiss Google Buzz
- Are Guest Posts A Bad Link Building Strategy?
- Can You Overdo SEO?
- Review Sites And SEO For Scotland Local Businesses
- What Effect Will HTML5 Have On Web Design And SEO