Your online reputation really does go before you

How you or your Company is perceived online will of course massively impact your success or failure in business. The two most powerful forms of online endorsement are socially generated recommendations and reviews. When asked in a 2010 Harris Interactive poll what sources “influence your decision to use or not use a particular company, brand or product”, 71% of those polled claimed that reviews from family members or friends exerted a “great deal” or “fair amount” of influence, whilst in a 2008 survey conducted by Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates, 70% of Americans said that they consulted product reviews or consumer ratings before making a purchase.

So, it really does only take a few negative comments on a forum, the odd bad review, or a stray blog comment, to create a seriously detrimental atmosphere around your business. Should any of these comments or reviews find their way onto the front page of Google, then the effect will be dramatically amplified.

The ways in which your online reputation can be attacked

Your reputation can actually come under a variety of forms of attack. Here are a few scenarios:

•    Your Facebook page leaves a slightly tainted trail of personal information that a potential employer might have cause to frown upon
•    Someone hacks your Facebook account and consequently destroys your reputation
•    You have a competitor who starts spreading malicious rumours online and negative reviews about you to discredit you
•    A competitor starts spamming your site with extremely low quality backlinks, and then reports you to Google
•    A customer feels that they have been cheated by you, and embarks on a crusade against your brand
•    A disgruntled ex-employee creates a few aliases and goes on forums bad mouthing you, as well as putting up bad reviews to discredit you
•    A competitor employs a professional marketer to engage in anti-marketing; namely to set about discrediting you
•    Your brand is so successful that you spawn a host of slipstream “brand leeches”, who piggy back your success to sell fake goods. (The FTC have just shut down 600 odd brand leech sites which have been targeting Chanel, read HERE)

Whatever the form of attack, it is usually debilitating, can often wreak havoc, and, if left unchecked, can destroy your business.

So what is the solution?

There are various forms of redress available. Obviously legal redress is one, but in the majority of cases, the most effective solution is an online counter-attack. (Even should you decide legal action is necessary, you will most likely want to rescue the immediate fortunes of your business).

Orange Whale can mitigate the effects of the kinds of bad publicity we have mentioned with a variety of strategies. Through expert search engine optimization we can:

Help people form a positive impression of you online

Determine what kind of results cover the first page of Google for your business

Help you to promote good quality content around the web

Our expert seo services allow us to displace existing top ten rankings with our own. In these instances, it is not only a matter of removing the existing carbuncles, but it has to be done quickly. We can engineer a campaign that will focus on displacing the negative stuff coming up in Google with positive material, and we can normally effect change quite quickly. In most instances the number 1 priority for a reputation management campaign will be to eradicate the poisonous stuff from the first page of Google where it is so damaging. In the majority of instances, this will be by far the most expedient form of defensive action you can take.

There are however many other strategies to eliminate and counteract unwarranted forms of defamatory comment, all of which we would consider if relevant to your particular case. Of course in some instances, the damage to your reputation may have come from a different kind of event, (E.G. a video of an assistant being obnoxious to a customer goes viral on Youtube), in which case we would need to consider the best course of remedial action.

Finally, by way of a caveat, we are not solicitors, and we do reserve the right not to work with clients whose reputation we feel has been deservedly besmirched.