Rank911 Blog

Reputation Risk Management is always going to be an important factor for small businesses, because there’s not a shortage of jerks who will continue to post disparaging comments about people or companies because these are the type of people who never think before they act. Reputation management includes tracking a companies activity and online presence as well as taking into account the views that other people have about this company. I guess you could think about it like a type of informational feedback loop, where people post their opinions and a reputation management company will come around counter their opinion with a positive opinion or make their opinion invisible so other Internet users can see it anymore. When I talked about entities this doesn’t just refer to people. This also refers to business locations, business names, materials and even animals.

People in all the entities I described above need Reputation Risk Management at certain times. I can track any particular company just by creating an alert on it and I will know anytime someone has something less than good to say about this company. Reputation management has been around a long time, however social media seems to be putting this on steroids. If you offer a product or service that has been getting negative ratings this could be because of unthoughtful postings, bad feedback, false Accusations, negative product reviews or even negative testimonials. Unfortunately all of these bad reviews are usually posted by disgruntled customers or employees. Jealous competitors or employees that have been fired have been known to wreak havoc on the company they hate so much.

When you think of Reputation Risk Management think of somebody who decided to watch a movie and then at the end of the movie couldn’t stand it, at least this is an example anyway. Tomorrow comes around, and he speaks to his buddies about how much time and money he spent on this movie. After his friends hear this from them, they might actually take his advice and not go watch the movie themselves. These are negative opinions spreading by word of mouth and this is the old-school method of hurting the reputation of a product. On the Internet, someone might visit yelp or another customer review site and talk about how much they hated this movie. The problem with this, is that tons of other people will see this review online and might decide themselves not to go watch this movie or even go rent it and watch it at home.

What people say about you and your company brand on the Internet can hurt your profits which is why Reputation Risk Management needs to be considered by any small business, medium business and even large enterprises. Large businesses can get away with a little bit more, because people online actually expect to hear some negative things about them due to the large volume of customers that they have. However a small or medium-size business, when talked badly about on the Internet is taken much more seriously by website visitors. For example if I wanted to hire an attorney the first thing I would do is search the consumer review sites and the search listings for this company and see if I could find any negative comments posted. I might search for the company name then the word scam or fraud or ripoff just to see what comes up.

If I saw one or two negative comments, the first thing I would look for is to see if there are any rebuttals to these comments. If there were some rebuttals, I would take these negative comments in stride and probably still use this companies services. However, if I saw negative comments with no rebuttals I would assume that the owner was guilty of this because he didn’t take the time to respond. Now here’s what you need to understand that as an attorney, dentist or accountant or whatever your professional occupation is. You don’t have the time to respond to all these complaints because you are a very highly paid professional working on their business. The key is to hire other people to do your Reputation Risk Management and make sure that these people are successful at removing complaints.

There is a bona fide method to employing Reputation Risk Management which is good news and the demand for the services all you get bigger as social media progresses and as more businesses come online. As a small business operating on the Internet your goal should be to improve public relations to the extent possible. With everybody on the Internet using computers reputation management is going to get much bigger much faster because companies will need to protect the reputation. The best way to deal with protecting the reputation of the company on social media is to respond to negative comments in a positive light. You can control it people say about your company, but if somebody buys your product and says that it caused him a rash, you can say that you bought the product as a repetition manager of course and say that the product left your skin completely smooth.

Another words Reputation Risk Management is all about protecting the Small Business you are hired to protect in this case your company. When you hire a company to perform this task for you, their job is to keep you in your brand in a positive light. Personally we don’t work with all companies, because some companies have given themselves such a bad reputation that all the online reputation management techniques in the world won’t do anything to save them. But luckily for us, this is just a small percentage of businesses that operate these days and most companies do their best to be honest. However it doesn’t matter how honest you are these days, there’s always that one percent of bad apples that are out to harm other people because chances are they’re very miserable themselves.

The reason Reputation Management Services are so important for a company to implement is because there personal beliefs and negative commentary can be posted about them to the public. Many businesses do not understand that you have to take a proactive approach to make sure that negative comments are posted about your company by angry people. There was one case in 2008 were business owner looked on the Internet to find that some of his core beliefs which were not complementary to his business beliefs were posted on the Internet and ranking on the top 10 of the Google search engine results pages. Because of this ranking unfortunately his business profits started taking a drastic dive. Another situation just year later, someone realized that a major news network posted a negative article about the company.

Within just a couple of hours this article was ranking at the top of the search engines with this company’s name. Unfortunately the contents of this article were not true, but it didn’t stop clients from calling the company and asking about the report. Even though the report wasn’t completely true the companies reputation suffered just because this information was published online. Both of these situations have a common thread in that is that both of these business owners were not proactive in sourcing reputable Reputation Management Services to help protect their brand on the Internet. These days it’s not hard to rank for most companies when someone that is disgruntled decides to post negative information about your company. In fact as in a Seo expert myself, if I wanted to I could write anything bad I wanted to about your company tomorrow morning, and by tomorrow night I would be ranking in the top 10.

I’m not saying I would actually do this, but unfortunately there are other people out there that would and because of this you need to look at sourcing Reputation Management Services that will help you get rid of these comments. Most commonly these type of comments are posted on company review sites like yelp and the online Yellow Pages. More of these sites seem to be popping up every single month which gives disgruntled people more and more opportunities to post negative comments about any business. The good news is that reputation management services and online reputation management companies that have a good understanding of search engine optimization principles can push these bad comments so far down the search engine results pages that hardly anybody will ever find them.

You don’t have to necessarily be a company to use Reputation Management Services. For example if you’re just looking for a job, and someone that had a beef with you six years ago decided to post some garbage about you online reputation management company can push that way down on the search engine result pages. Online reputation management services can also be employed for people that are looking for investors that it had some kook post some negative information about you or if you’re selling a product and want to protect your product brand from someone that had a bad experience with it or your company. 99% of customers are happy customers especially if you are a decent business with a good product. But like the old saying goes it only takes one rotten apple to make the whole bunch look bad.

Chances are that people are going to turn to the search engines to learn about you before they do business with you which is why search Reputation Management Services are so important. One of the goals of these services are to protect your image and your company. Their main job is to counter negative search results and to reflect them in a much more positive light. The search engines use very hard to understand algorithms which decide how a website will be ranked and what position it will be ranked. The job of reputation management services are to make sure that they are on top of these changes so they can find and deal with negative comments as soon as they’re posted. They do this by trying to get the negative posting deleted or to rebut it with positive comments and references to more positive websites about your company.

There is a whole swarm of Reputation Management Services coming online right now and their purpose is to help defend their clients from negative comments people post about them all over the Internet. These types of services started popping up about 7-8 years ago when individual started researching companies on the Internet. How the process works, is a service like ours would track your company in be advised of every single thing written about your company positive or negative by anybody else. Obviously there’s no need to mess with the positive comments because they are not going to hurt you. However the negative comments need to be dealt with swiftly and aggressively so they don’t spread or cause even more havoc. These types of services used to be very expensive, but over the years have grown to be more reasonably priced and affordable by the average small business owner.

How much you spend on Reputation Management Services depends on the size your company. These types of services can start around a grand a month, and for medium to large businesses can be several thousand dollars a month. It all depends on how much bad stuff is written on the Internet about you already. If there’s only a few bad things written about you on the Internet, and you just want to make sure it stays that way these services can started just a couple hundred dollars a month. The bottom line is you pay for what you get in when it comes your company’s reputation you can really put a price on that. Reputation management services are perfectly legal and ethical, they just take information that is already out there that’s negative and push it down the listing so nobody else can see it.

The reason that businesses are employing Search Engine Reputation Management more often these days is because gossip can spread really quickly around the net and ruin a company’s reputation. If the right kind of people find out what’s going on and read this negative scuttlebutt, these negative comments content to get spread all over the Internet become viral. Just like a virus, it’s imperative to protect the company’s reputation by staying on top of all the Internet company gossip and responding to negative comments posted about your company as quick as possible. There is no reason to spoil your company image just because you didn’t have the time to respond to a quickly which is why reputation management companies exist. These types of companies will help you net negative comments in the bud.

The reason Search Engine Reputation Management companies exist is because your bottom line can be affected by just a few negative comments from unhappy customers or clients. The last thing you want to happen to your business is to have a rats nest form on the popular forums, customer complaint sites and the most popular company and service review sites like yelp, the online Yellow Pages and other similar sites. Public relations for your business need to remain positive in the comments about your business that are not positive need to be taken off the Internet or pushed so far down the search engine results pages that it won’t matter anyway because no one will find them. You need to be conscious about your selling brown, how you carry yourself in what other people are saying about you to succeed these days.

The other reason you want employ Search Engine Reputation Management is because someone that mention some disparaging information about your company that gets listed on the 140th result in Google will have a negligible effect at the very best. However if this comment is listed in the top 10 your business is in jeopardy of losing serious revenue and even potential long-term clients. The search engines these days of the preferred way for clients and customers to search for the people and businesses that they want to do business with now and in the future. Over 80% of people these days do at least some minor research on a company or business before they decide to use them. However, not only does all the great stuff about your company show up on the Internet but the bad stuff shows up as well.

So the job of a Search Engine Reputation Management company is to get rid of these disparaging comments as soon as possible. Timing is very imperative here, because everyday these comments are showing up in the top 10 results in Google, is everyday that a potential customer client will view these comments and decide to do business with a competitor instead of your company. Algorithms in search engines especially Google which uses a very complex algorithm that nobody really understands, does not differentiate between bad and good commentary regarding a business. In fact, the responsibility is yours as the company owner to keep the bad stuff about your company off the Internet. But the question is, what’s the most effective way to weed out the negative commentary?

Angry customers that have a grudge against your business or you think they got ripped off or taken advantage of might start posting negative comments on blogs, customer sites, objection sites, hate sites, customer review sites and customer complaint sites like the ripoff report. If you get a customer angry enough, they will actually go on a strategic smear campaign to try to really hurt your business and their reputation. Luckily this doesn’t happen too often, but if it does you’re going to need to employ the services of a Search Engine Reputation Management company to help combat this. There a few different things they can do to help destroy a smear campaign. The first thing they can do is contact the angry customer and try to work something out with them if they agree to remove all the negative comments. This is assuming they have the right to do this, which they don’t in all cases.

Another Search Engine Reputation Management tip is to understand the other things you can do as the owner of a company to stop a smear campaign. If these comments about your business are not true enter slanderous or libelous, you can send them a cease-and-desist letter demanding that they remove all these negative posts on the Internet about you and if they don’t you can pursue legal action against them. They do have a Second Amendment right to free speech, however in using the Second Amendment right to free speech they don’t have a right to post slanderous or libelous comments against your company. In certain instances where they post to places that they can’t retract their statements, you could make them post a retraction comment saying that they’re sorry that they post the original comment and that they settled everything with your company and that this comment takes precedence over the previous comment.

Search Engine Reputation Management is becoming more important in the social media age because these days anybody can set up a free blog at blogger in just about 10 min. and can say anything they want about any company they want. 99% of the people on the Internet thankfully are mature enough to not spend a lot of their time trying to hurt other people are businesses, however if that 1% that you need to worry about. One thing we do to help companies preserve their reputation is put all variations of your company name in Google alerts. When this company name comes up, we look at everything on the Internet that’s posted about the company we are monitoring and if it’s positive we leave it alone. However any negative comments that we find we respond to accordingly using the three different methods we described above.

There is always a lot more to your website identity and Reputation Management Online other than just a web address. Google will even tell you that it’s not just what you post that establishes your website identity but what others say about you as well. And this isn’t just talking about posts, photo tags or replies to public status updates also apply here as well is what they say on Consumer Reports sites. Depending on the type of business you run, your business might feel like it’s in the position of being falsely accused for something he didn’t do. This problem is growing rapidly and unfortunately, there is no easy solution or and in sight here. The solution is to preserve the best positive first impression for your company. In order to put this in better perspective, here are things you should be aware of:

Most people don’t go past the first page of the search engine result pages, and I’m speaking about 95% of Internet users. Most people don’t just buy on a whim, they do research on products before they buy them as well as services and I’m talking about 80% of the population that does this research. And 72% of the people who do research on products before they buy them will not buy it if they find a negative comment posted. People also use social media to post negative comments like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook which is another reason Reputation Management Online so important. People also use consumer review type sites such as Citysearch, Yellow Pages online, yelp as well as ripoff report and pissed consumer to post negative comments about your business.

People even use services like foursquare or gowalla which are geolocation broadcasting services as well as post pictures of your firm online to places like Flickr and slide share which is another reason you need Reputation Management Online. They might take a bad video and posted on YouTube video and video sharing sites. The truth is, your average person doesn’t care how much they damage you they only care about how they feel about your business. And if for whatever reason, they got a bad sensation or feeling about your business then some people will do whatever they can to get the word out that you are a bad business even if you aren’t. Sometimes people do what they think is right even though it could be dead wrong in many people don’t take a few minutes to try to get a situation ironed out with the business first before they display this kind of information.

Even if their claims are completely false, people surfing the Internet today which are your potential consumers will rely on the Internet for this information in many due to the nature and how it’s presented to them will assume its true. The best thing you could do in a situation like this it is engage the negative commentary posted about you. This way your next potential Internet client that does a background check on you might not perceive this negative review is true if you’ve already addressed this complaint. Also what people write in e-mails and send through their Instant Messenger is normally private. However the wrong person gets a hold of this information, they can posted on the Internet somewhere and now it’s public which is another reason why you need Reputation Management Online.

There are many areas that Reputation Management Online can be employed. Let me give you an example, there are hundreds of thousands of forms out there as well as blogs that allow people to comment on them across all types of different niches. Blogs have what they call authority sites which are really popular sites within a particular genre. This could be the Los Angeles times of the New York Times or the Enquirer or a website like find an attorney. If somebody is upset enough that your business, they can post all kinds of negative stuff to these blogs. Also more and more people are using their mobile phones to search for services these days on the Internet. People a smart phones can not only read but write reviews from anywhere, so it’s easy to see how negative reviews of your business can spread around faster than before.

So the next question is how do you control your Reputation Management Online? Before you answer this question, you need to find out what people are saying about your business first and whether saying it. There are a couple ways to do this. The first way is to set up a free Google alert for your business name and all variations of it in Google alert you once a day or even as it happens when anything is indexed with Google regarding your company or company name. The other way to do this, it’s just to do a simple Google search for your business and to start plowing through the first 30 to 50 results. If you see anything show up, you can take the appropriate steps to defend yourself. So the question now is how you defend yourself against idiots who have nothing better to do but harm your good name?

One great Reputation Management Online technique would be to find out who posted this garbage about your company and send them a cease-and-desist letter or an e-mail demanding that they pull their comment down or face legal consequences. Now you can only do this if they slandered your business. If they wrote a comment that wasn’t slander and is either true or can be proved to slander then they have a Second Amendment right to post what they want. But relax, there’s still a way to get their comments for all intense purposes wiped off the Internet. The way to do this is to simply push them down in the search results so no one can find them. If you’re able to do this, then you gotten rid of their comments were no one will find them since less than 1% of the people searching for a particular company or search term go beyond the first page of the search results anyway. The key is to get them to position 11 or lower in the search engine results pages.

It’s standard practice these days to make a business available online to consumers. You might as well just consider this part of the current Internet revolution and if you’re not involved in this game, I hate to say this but you might as well be flushing money down the toilet. There many different methods available that people use to increase their branding awareness as well as their general noticeability for enterprises on the Internet. Integrating a corporate reputation management plan is essential not only for your off-line public image but online as well. When you do this, you ensure that you hit a vast array of customers that you normally would never reach.

The reason corporate reputation management is important is because any business can be sure that people that view their online content get a positive image of the company. Data on the Internet travels very fast these days and just one mistake is all it takes in your company can automatically have a negative image. Whether you do customer reviews, blogs or articles or even social media this will all help with your corporate reputation management campaign. However doing all these things at once can prove to be way too much work for the average small business and will need to be outsourced.

When it comes to customers searching out the services information and products that they need they always consider the Internet is the best place to start searching and this is another principle of corporate reputation management. There’s not too many people these days that don’t use the search engines to find what they need and to educate themselves by learning everything they want to about a company, and this means all the good aspects and all the bad aspects. If you’re looking for various customer opinions and possibly product reviews twitter is a great place to start. Customers formulate their opinions based on social media and search results alike.

I wish I could tell you that there was a way to control negative comments people post about your business or there was some magic solution to get rid of them but there isn’t. This is the aspect of corporate reputation management that any when you hire really needs to focus on. Although there is no magic pill to get rid of these comments, there are bona fide steps you can take to drastically reduce them or to get them out of sight so to speak so no one will really be able to see them. If you’re implementing effective reputation management you can actually use their negative feedback against them so you can improve your Internet presence.

So like I hinted before, corporate reputation management has to do with either getting rid of negative feedback about a company or drastically reducing it to the point to where it’s really no big deal to where it won’t affect your business or if it does affect it it will affect it very minimally. If your business is hit with negative reviews, caustic comments and bad listings your business can take a dive in its potential earnings in can also hurt the brand of your company. If somebody writes a negative letter or mouse off a comment to you in person it won’t do anything to really hurt your company long-term. However if the end of doing this online this bad feedback and spread really fast if it’s not handled expeditiously.

Unfortunately these comments that people post aren’t always true but nevertheless people don’t know whether to believe them or not and it still hurt your business regardless. Whether these comments are two or not, there’s a good chance they’re showing up in the search engine results pages along with all the good things that are being said about your company so people visiting looking for information about your company are getting mixed messages and this is not good. What you need to do when performing corporate reputation management, is to put some more can to push these negative listings down the search engine results pages at least 20 positions so people can’t see them.

One of the final things you can do is write them a letter explaining that their slanderous comments can potentially put them in court. Also a cease-and-desist letter is another option if the comments that are being told online or false, then they are legally responsible for what they say. But I am not a lawyer nor my the source of advice on these types of comments. My specialty is removing these from the search engines and making them nonvisible to the majority of Internet surfers looking for information on your product. If you’re running a scam, I nor anyone else will be able to help you fix your internet reputation online. But if you’re running a legitimate internet business, and you have some comments he removed her toned down I could certainly help with that.

Companies out there that offer online reputation management services usually use a couple of different methods to employ a positive online presence and reputation for an enterprise they are working for. In many cases ORM consist of two different types which are reactive and proactive. By doing this ORM managers make the necessary moves to make sure that the virtual landscape they are working in is a peaceful environment rather than an unknown or even a negative one. The word reactive is really not the best word when used in a business context. If you think about this it’s really common sense since business owners don’t want to ever be behind the competition but rather I ahead of it.

However reactive online reputation management services is not just a necessary part of the process it’s also positive. There are several duties that reactive orm’s perform in one of them is keeping track of online conversations regarding your brand. You can actually do this yourself it’s really easy just go to Google alerts and type in the name of your company in quotes and you will get an alert from Google via e-mail each time a page that has your company name on it is indexed in the Google search engine. This way you’ll know everything that’s happening with your company name at least on Google. Another job that a reactive online reputation management services professional will do is they will respond to positive and negative comments on the Internet that customers have to say about you.

This is a relatively easy part of the job but some complaints are pretty obnoxious and they require a little savvy patience to reply to these kind of people. You also have to be in touch with the current trends in what other people are saying about your competition as well, not just good the bad. The reason this is so important is because it can help you gauge tweaks you can do to your business to improve it to minimize the chance of people saying bad things about your business. Once conversations about your business start on the Internet, it’s the job of repetition manager to make sure they are actively involved in these conversations so they can keep a lid on things before they get bad.

On the flipside of that the other reason they want to keep involved in these conversations is to also keep the positive conversation flowing even stronger than it already is because momentum is a very important thing to have. This is what they call positive online reputation management services and what this consists of is taking proactive steps to ensure that a company’s brand or image is represented only positively online. The reason this is so important is because of the problem happens later, the company is in a great position because they were positioned securely at a time.

Some pro active online reputation management services include the creation of social media profiles which some call social media squatting. Blogging is another great way to increase your positive online reputation because you can write post around longtail keywords in literally dominate your entire local market if you do it right. The reason µ creation is so important is because it can have your business rank strongly on many different sites so someone write some bad stuff about your company nobody can see it because all your sites are dominating the top 10 search engine results.

Article marketing is great and is one of the very strong online reputation management services because it has the same effect as blogging. It can get your brand circulating all over the Internet because if you submit an article to an article directory for example, there’s a good chance other sites will pick it up and publish your articles well. In fact most of our articles are published at least eight or nine different times by different places once we write them. And search engine optimization is also important because getting links back to your different pages will make you harder to get bumped out of those positions. These are just a few things your online repetition manager can help you with.

It can take your business years to establish a solid reputation online, so it’s important that you do whatever you need to to maintain this reputation. And that’s the job of a reputation manager and this person is very important to your business. There is a lot of common threads between an Internet business and brick-and-mortar business. One of these common threads is that many brick-and-mortar businesses know that they have a chance to drastically increase profits if they come online and do business because it just adds to what they already make. If you’re the owner of a small business online you might find it easy to gaff off the elements of a brick-and-mortar business and in many cases this would be a mistake.

Although it could take years to build a great reputation for your business on the Internet, one angry customer or ex-employee could ruin it in a matter of minutes by posting negative comments or even slanderous comments on sites such as scam, ripoff report and a few other sites that allow angry people to voice their grievances. The job of a reputation manager is to simply monitor what people are saying about your business online in to reply to grievances saying positive things about your business. Their goal is to present your business in a favorable light so people won’t take these few rotten apples too seriously.

Doing this is an ongoing process and is something that you just can’t do once. Especially if you are a business that has lots of business is always more of a chance of having a few angry customers that go off the deep end and start badmouthing your business all over the Internet. These people will review things like the star ratings, various customer reviews and who appears in the search engines when your company is being searched for. These are vulnerable positions for your business as far as people talking trash they aren’t supposed to be talking. If they start doing this, a reputation manager has several different techniques they can employ to put this type of negative commenting to an end relatively quickly.

One of the first things a reputation manager might do if he finds a bad common on the Internet is contact this person try to work it out with them. They also could serve as a liaison and try to negotiate a deal between the person who made this comment and the owner of the business. I remember one case when the problem was solved like this just by giving the person $1.50 which he said the business owed him but never paid. The cashier wouldn’t pay him so he got angry and started slandering the business all over the Internet and agreed that he would pull all the bad comments down if he just got the money he felt he was entitled to.

My point is, sometimes it doesn’t take a lot to spark off something like this and just talking with a person can solve it. However talking doesn’t always do the trick and some people are even hired by competitive businesses to go out and do this and this can get nasty. A reputation manager in the situation might politely ask them the first time to pull down their negative comment but if they don’t get a response they might try sending them a cease-and-desist letter which could scare them into removing the comment.

If none of these methods work, a reputation manager might decide to just push that page down about 15 to 20 listings in the search engines so nobody will see it or at least most people. This is the most expensive process because in order to do this, you will have to create different types of pages that will all outrank this page and subsequently push it down in the search engine results pages. This can also be done by setting up lots of different social media profiles which is more commonly known as social media squatting. These are just some of the primary duties of a reputation manager, however a good reputation manager can actually build your business because they can go out all over the Internet and start saying great things about it.

There are a lot of positive things that can come from doing business on the Internet. Not only can you make a lot more money because it’s an entirely different venue for you to make money with, but it also allows you to make more connections and foster relationships all over the world in these type of peeps can do a lot to make your business thrive in the long term. However with good there is always bad, and one of the things we need to talk about is how to remove a rip off report if someone posts one about your business. To be honest I believe that the ripoff report has a place on the Internet because there are real scammy businesses out there and people that deserve to be on this website, and believe me I speak from experience.

However what if the situation exists where you is a company owner are very legitimate but unfortunately had one disgruntled idiot customer or client decide to go on the ripoff report and file a complaint with them against your business. One of the problems with how to remove a rip off report is that they are ranked very high in the search engines. Pretty much any time someone registers a complaint with the site against your company anyone searching for the name of your company will see this report because it will be listed in the top 10 of the search engines. Obviously that’s not something that we want to entertain is it?

A good search engine professional can remove a rip off report by pushing it down the search engine listings by posting lots of other positive content about your business, getting back links to this content and ranking it higher than the ripoff report. When somebody files a report like this against her business, unless you do something about it it’s obviously been a sufferer into you do and can also cause you financial loss. Please do not take this as legal advice you’ll need to turn to an attorney for this, but if anybody files report against you that’s false or slanderous you can make them take it down and even sue them for any financial losses that you incurred plus attorney fees for the slanderous comments that they made against her business.

There are actually companies out there that will help you remove a rip off report about your company from the ripoff report.com website. It might be a few hundred dollars, because it does take some time to write a bunch of positive content that’ll out rank this report because like I mentioned a bit earlier, these negative reports rank pretty high in the search engines. Another method that will remove a rip off report is to set up profiles and all the popular social media sites and actively promote them a little bit. By actively promoting them, I’m talking about getting back links to each of these social media sites. The reason this is so important, is because you are piggybacking on the major authority that these social media sites have already.

Another name for the method I just described above is called social media squatting and it’s a perfectly legal and legitimate method to increase brand awareness for your company and to push down negative comments in the search engine results pages. There are social media experts out there as well as people who specialize in online reputation management a.k.a. ORM that will help you set all of this up for a reasonable fee. I mean to spend just $1000 or so to get this type of garbage that if you disoriented people like to write out of the search engines were people can see what they have to say is a lot cheaper than losing thousands of dollars per month of business.

One of the cool things that happens once you remove a rip off report is you’ll never have to do it again. I bet right now you want to know why right? Because once you set up the sites and build authority to the sites there to stay there forever and provide I guess you could say a shelter of page rank and authority around your main website and your brand in the search engines. This means that once you build up this shelter of content it will become more valuable to the search engines longer it sits there because time is actually part of the Google algorithm. And while there are no guarantees, any search engine marketing company worth its weight in salt can get a rip off report moved within 2 to 3 weeks.

The purpose of digital marketing and Hotel Reputation Management is to advertise and reach the widest net of people as you can. I cannot sit here and say that print media is as effective because it is, but I can also tell you that it’s not anywhere near as effective and fast as advertising on the Internet. Hotel reputation management has come about because they are starting to understand this. Since the customer is the business it’s only fair to say that the customer is the King and this relates to promotional methods specifically geared toward the end consumer. Customers these days are very smart and savvy, and what they want is information relayed to them in real time and they want to find the hotel that they want to do business with on the Internet.

They do this because they wanna read reviews on this hotel, and want to learn all the good and bad about it before they decide if they want actually stay there. So Hotel Reputation Management basically deals with the important job of providing important updates regarding negative things people might say about the hotel and dealing with these negative messages on a case-by-case basis. This is also commonly known as ORM or online reputation management services which are becoming more popular in a myriad of different industries, the hotel industry being the most common because they deal with people everyday and many travelers as well.

A lot of people think that Hotel Reputation Management just has to do with pushing down back comments people make about the hotel in the search engines. However there is more to it than that as Hotel reputation management is also a promotional method because you can hire a company to say all kinds of great things about the hotel and post them all over the Internet. Everything is based on proportions so the higher proportion of good comments out there on the Internet about the hotel the more chances that a bad comment or two will be ignored. But there is also other ways to take care these negative comments.

One of the ways to take care these negative comments is to simply push them back in the search engines by ranking higher on positive comments. This is an SEO technique that is specifically used for any type of business including the hospitality industry. You can hire a company to consult and train your employees to do all the Hotel Reputation Management for your company or you can just hire a company and outsource all the work to them which is probably your best bet since they are not new to this game and have done it before. Hotel reputation management fees are not really expensive considering the customer loyalty and brand protection they could bring your business.

If you hire a Hotel Reputation Management company you’re really just hiring a reputation management company. I mean the same procedure is used to perform hotel reputation management as it is to perform any type of ORM or online reputation management services. So while you can hire your own team of people I don’t recommend it because there is somewhat of a learning curve behind this and it is a time-consuming process. And if you’re in the hotel business you should be spending all your time marketing drawing new business and your hotel and not wasting it dealing with a few disgruntled customers or employees don’t want to post bad things about your business.

The Hotel Reputation Management service might also get you on Facebook and the other social websites like LinkedIn and Twitter as well. The more you’re out there the less a negative comment will affect your business. The key is to promote your name brand is much as possible and to stay out there on the social networks and keep publishing positive content about your business to the world. Think about it logically, if you have 200 pieces of positive content that you had someone publish about your company and then one jerk comes by and writes a negative post about your business as an Internet researcher, who would you tend to believe?

In my humble opinion, I think it would be logical to believe the 200 positive comments rather than the focus on the one negative comment because most people do have common sense and realize that one negative comment can’t really affect the business too much as long as there’s a lot of positive comments about business and most people focus on these positive comments. This is good Hotel Reputation Management in my opinion. I mean 99% of the people know that there’s always good to be at least one angry customer in any business no matter how good the businesses are how much could serve as a provider how successful it is, unfortunately that’s just life in the big city and in the hotel industry.

Protecting the Internet Reputation Management of your company is very important these days. One example I can think of is when the pizza company everybody knows about had an angry employee creative video showing everyone how they made pizza with the worst types of ingredients. This video got spread all over the Internet, in not only this people started talking about it. It this point the pizza company started doing some damage control, but unfortunately it was a little bit a little too late and their sales vomited fiercely.

It doesn’t matter if it’s the public your competitors are your customers that say the wrong stuff about your business, you could be losing a lot of it since over 81% of the people out there are using the Internet to find what they want to stay. If your reputation on the Internet is tarnished, a lot of business opportunities that would’ve normally came your way will now bypass you and possibly fall into the hands of your competitors not to mention the respect you lose as well. Internet Reputation Management services can solve these problems.

Internet Reputation Management includes several different types of proactive marketing steps that actually push negative feedback that since your company off the first page of the search engine result pages and brings more enlightened content to dominate the first page of Google. So why in the heck with this matter? Since everybody’s getting Google your services and products before they buy them anyway, it’s important that what they find is positive and not negative. Yes there is a common sense factor here, and if people can read 50 good things about your business and just one bad thing you’ll probably be okay and only lose an occasional customer.

But if someone searching for your business products and services and they find that all the listings on the front page of Google are filled with bad stuff, then you could lose 40% your business are more since 80% of the people looking to do business at a particular location search online for first city could lose half of these people at least. In fact a lot of people are referring to Google, Yahoo and Bing as the new Internet Reputation Management engines these days. In fact people are even researched on Google before companies decide to hire them these days.

So any person or business on the Internet that has any kind of damaging content written about them has the potential to not be hired or the potential of people going to that businesses competition to do business instead of them. Sometimes these remarks about people and businesses on the Internet are true, and sometimes they’re just straight up lies but people don’t really know what to believe and a lot of people just believe the first thing they hear or read about. Even a business that has an ex-employee who is ticked off might end up being a vindictive fruitcake and start saying bad things about the business all over the Internet.

But regardless of the reason this bad content was put out, there are ways to get it pushed way back in the search engine result pages so few people if anybody will actually end up seeing these pages. Doing this will drastically increase your Internet reputation management. You could say reputation management is different from SEO, however many SEO principals are employed when conducting Internet reputation management. Not all businesses in my opinion need it, however I think about 90% of the business out there might need Internet Reputation Management maintenance to some extent.

My Internet Reputation Management objective here is to find the bad things people are saying about your company and find ways to remove move that content or push it down the search engine listing so far that it’s hardly noticed by anybody. This way you can keep a positive buzz around your company image and name brand. Ultimately at the end of the day it’s your brand that can get you your business reputation as well as brand and it is imperative that both of these are kept intact. And the best way to do this is to inundate the search engine results pages with nothing but positive comments about your business, your brand and your image.

For those of you who are not aware, Online Reputation Management is the process of a company protecting their reputation and brand on the Internet. Example of this would be Bank of America who ended up buying some domains that have their CEOs name incited them and contain words like blow, scam, fraud and suck. Bank of America didn’t buy these domains just for the fun of buying them, they were purchased because they had no choice. I love you guys have heard of Julian Assange but he happens to be the founder of wikileaks. In December of 2010, he mentioned that he had some information that could take down a bank or two to put in his own words. Nobody was sure exactly which bank or banks he was speaking about, but a lot of speculation out there pointed to the fact that it was Bank of America.

Nobody at this point was sure whether Bank of America are Brian Moynihan did something they weren’t supposed to, or whether it was just Julian Assange trying to stir up a storm in a teacup. Whichever way you might argue, Bank of America and every other business from a small mom-and-pop pizza shop in a small town in Georgia need to take steps to protect their image in their brand online. Although it’s a different process, protecting your brand online is very similar to protecting in the real world. One of the things he could do to improve your Online Reputation Management is purchase the domains for every negative keywords running your company, let’s say the name your company is a hypothetical example was Mike’s shoes. So you would own the domain Mikesshoes dot com. This means you’d also want to get the domains Mikesshoesscam.com and Mikesshoessuck.com.

The reason you want these domains is because you don’t want anyone else to own them that might have a grudge against you or your business. Not 99% of the people out there wouldn’t do anything like this, but as we all know the Internet has a very small percentage of real rotten apples out there that seem to have nothing better to do than to cause harm to other businesses more than likely because they don’t have a successful business themselves and doing this to other people is the only way they can get any satisfaction. However getting these domains is just the first step you can take in maximizing your Online Reputation Management, as there are quite a few other things you should do.

The next step in Online Reputation Management or ORM is to visit Google alerts and putting alert in for the name of your business. This way you will receive a Google alert for any page that is cached in the Google search engine but the naming your company, just make sure you put the name your company in quotes so you’ll only be notified by Google when people are writing about your company on the Internet. Once you find out what people are saying you have a chance to defend yourself but if you’ll put in a Google alert how are you going to know who’s saying what about your company on the Internet? In some cases some is talking bad about your company you can politely confront them and ask them what beef they have with your company. Sometimes it’s easier to catch a fly with honey rather than with vinegar.

You can politely ask them to remove the negative listing about your business and see if they’ll just do it. Sometimes these complaints are filed by honest customers who feel they’ve been wronged. You can find these on a forum, or a complaint site such as scam dotcom or ripoffreport dot com. Both of these sites give you a chance to reply back to these complaints and defend yourself as the owner of the company. Sometimes a good rebuttal will make sense to a lot of people visiting that page so your business will not be damaged as much. You have to understand that you cannot control the negative things that people say about you because everybody has a right to their opinion. But luckily, there are some great Online Reputation Management or ORM techniques you can employ that will kind of push their complaints on the back burner so to speak so very few people see them and they won’t do much to hurt your business.

One of the things he could do to increase your Online Reputation Management, is to simply outrank everybody that’s saying bad things about you. In order to do this though, you’ll have to understand the process of ranking on longtail keywords and you have to get more back links to your pages and their pages. However your average small business owner doesn’t understand this process so it only makes more sense to hire a company that can do this for you. The more your company is in the media limelight and the more media attention it receives, the more chances it has of having people say bad things about it. But the good news is if your company’s very popular like this, there should be even more people saying good things and everybody understands that popular companies are to have haters no matter what so really it’s all a wash.

The key to is to approach every single person has something bad to say and see if you can make it right with them and see if they’ll voluntarily pulled down the back comments are confident they said about you. In some cases its actual slander, you can make them pull it off in most cases by simply sending out a cease-and-desist letter threatening them with a lawsuit if your content isn’t pulled down immediately. And you have to understand is a company owner that it can be hard for any SEO company to run an Online Reputation Management campaign for your business if you’re not running a clean operation in the first place.

Online Reputation Management is only for fixing and polishing up a small percentage of haters that post garbage everywhere they go. But if your operation is sloppy in the first place, and you have a bunch angry customers then nobody can really help you you have to clean your business up first. But if you just got a few bad apples or vindictive fruitcakes out there posting that stuff about your business, reputation management company can definitely help push these types of sites way back in the search listings so very few people if any will ever see them.