How would you feel if you have painstakingly brought your business ideas to life only to find your reputation mangled by competitors or spammers online? It is devastating, isn’t it? But because you don’t really control what is put up on the internet, you can’t really strip those bad comments down.
This is the part where reputation management comes in. Every company, especially the old ones, have their fair share of complaints and bad reviews. You can’t please everyone, especially not the fault-finders. In addition to that, there are also those anonymous people hired by competing companies to trash talk your company. They might not have proofs to back their claims up but they do plant a seed of doubt in the minds of the people reading their reviews or articles.
The first problem that you might encounter in reputation management for your business ideas is tracking your reputation down. The information superhighway is vast and you can’t keep track of the sites that might say something bad about you one by one. This problem can actually be solved with the help of free alert services like Google Alerts. You just indicate the keywords you want tracked and as soon as someone posts something related to that keyword, an email on the links of those sites will be sent to your mail.
Another problem you might encounter is negative reviews posted in personal blogs. Because it is a blog, the owners use the excuse of freedom of expression to trash talk any company that they might have a problem with. To solve this, you should directly contact the blogger and resolve the issue. To allay the blogger, you might want to offer a refund or a freebie. This is actually a good way of solving the issue and sending a message to the blogger’s readers that you are willing to resolve disputes and that you are not running away from your responsibilities. On the other hand, the issue is probably not worth addressing if the blog’s page rank is not very high.
It is actually easier to solve reputation management problems for your business ideas if your site has a higher page rank. Make sure you take advantage of web 2.0 marketing or making press releases to promote your products and to have more visitors.