Reputation management has to deal with threats from many different angles. Take the running of a small business as an example. There are thousands (perhaps millions) of small businesses starting up each day around the world. The sad truth is that 90% of them will be closed again within 18 months. Of those that don’t close, a good proportion will not have the same ownership structure as when they started.

Couples will split (often because of the business), partnerships will flounder, and others will simply be bought out. What happens when a partnership (or couple) split and go their separate ways and it’s all acrimonious? More importantly, what happens when they set up in business as rivals? Partners have one distinct advantage – they have an inside knowledge of your business.

What about reputation management? Former partners also have inside knowledge of things that have gone wrong. They are in a position to share this knowledge with others either on their own sites or through online social media outlets. It can be difficult to stop, especially if the information they are divulging is true. You could try a court injunction but that could take months or years to finalize, and prove to be expensive.

Ranking well for any keywords related to your business is the first step. This is where a web site and a blog, along with business and personal profiles in a range of sites like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, to name a few, could be important (you would be surprised how many people have one of these profiles ranked number one instead of their website). This spread will help you cover the front page of any search results.

If this sort of information is made public you have a number of tactics. If possible, be honest. Don’t play the blame game. Try to get positive reviews from customers that you can point others too. Most importantly, don’t turn it into a war of words – it will just drag the issue out and make your task of reputation management that much harder.

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

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 at 4:02 pm and is filed under Reputation Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.