Revamp Your Brand Reputation In Seven Easy Steps
“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently” these quotes from Warren Buffett, the American business magnate, investor and philanthropist serves us a reminder or too. This is particularly true about the internet domain, where things can go amiss with a just click of a button. That’s why your Online reputation management must start early before something can bring your house down. Listed below are some great online practices that you can do well to follow to protect your online brand reputation.
1) Use Google Alerts To Monitor
You will do well to harness the potential of some of the Google’s Apps & Tools. Google Alerts helps you monitor your online presence. To get started, subscribe to a Google account. Just sign up with Google’s free e-mail service, today.
2) Do Some Crisis Management
Like you plan ahead for success similarly have backup plan for a crisis like situation, too. You will do well if you can prepare for some challenging situations, often the results of some negative stories doing round that may possibly harm your online brand reputation. To do that, you will need to device a communication plan as a part of your strategy to counter the same. But if you are unable to find a way, then there is nothing wrong in accepting your involvement and then coming out with the truth in a possible online strategy gone wrong.
3) Spread The Word Around
Spread the word around in all the possible media sections which includes the public relations activity. Having a PR strategy can be more than handy option in a possible crisis like situation. Prepare some great PR content in the form of newsletters to tell your part of the story. Social media and sites like HARO can be leveraged to communicate with journalists to clear any air of confusion about your brand.
4) Feature On Page 1 Searches
It’s not by some hook or crook but purely on merit. Try to device a strategy for your brand to get it featured on page 1 of the search results in Google. This can be achieved by disbursing positive stories with regards to your brand in the form of some PR activity, supporting some social cause etc. which can possibly replace the negative stories trending on the Google’s SERP’s.
5) Set Up Your Online Brand Presence
Leverage your social media presence to further clear the air of confusion about your brand. This can be achieved by getting your social media profiles ranked on page 1 for organic searches. This can be your best line of counter attack against any controversial stories doing rounds. Create and update your stories of defense on social networking sites such as Facebook (create both Personal and Business profile), Google+; LinkedIn (create both Personal and Business profile), Twitter; YouTube to name a few.
At the same time, there are some other sites, where you can build your personal and business profile to further clarify your part of the story.
6) Be Meticulous
Google sees to it that any duplicate content doing rounds never go unpunished. In that sense, it recognizes as each profile as unique loaded with some genuine copyrighted content. So avoid creating any copious content to cover your profile since this may get negatively notified with Google’s Panda algorithm update. Ensure that you include relatable optimized images (personal as well as official), on your online presence. You can also use other ways to clearly describe your brand (such as using your brand name and embed your web link) on the web images. Don’t create all your social profiles at once. You can start with Facebook, twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn and then gradually widen your social presence in other networking solutions. Link it to the positive stories doing round about you in the search results.
7) Make Use Of Government Run Sites
For instance as an American Company leverage sba.gov that allows Businesses to publish their business profiles on the government run Small Business Administration website.
When you are done with the profile then form a forum for conversation to get started. Remember one thing that this is government run domain, which commands the highest degree of credibility. Thus, ensure that you come up with some genuine topic of discussion so that it gets the involvement of everyone.
At the end of the day
You will do well to remember this axiom by Jeff Bezos on the brand reputation, “A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well”. So if you are done with all the hard things with your social media presence but still feel the going tough then do get in touch with us at sales@agencyplatform.com or Call (888) 736-0541 for assistance.
