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Crisis Averted: The Power of Reputation Management in the Social Media Era

There are lots of reasons why your company might suddenly need a reputation management company. Rather than dwell on what might go wrong to cause a crisis, let’s look at how the best reputation management companies solve problems when they crop up.

Solution #1: Build
The first priority of any rep firm is going to be building your presence online before any major catastrophes before. The more solidly built your online presence, the more easily you’ll survive a few negative comments here and there. Reputation management firms, unlike SEO groups, don’t care as much about the number one spot in the rankings — they’re more concerned with how many of the rankings in the first few pages give your business a negative slant. As long as there are only a couple of negative comments in the first few pages, the likelihood that a surfer will come across something that drives them away from your company is slim.

Solution #2: Engage
Anywhere that people are talking about your business, the rep firms want at least one person there so that they can engage the chatter. Particularly if the tone turns negative, you want someone on the front lines who can turn criticism into advice for your company and simultaneously put your company’s side of the story out there, working it into the conversation, accepting accountability for actual problems and laying malicious suppositions to rest.

Solution #3 – Bury
The Internet is forever, and the last thing you need is an unscrupulous competitor or vengeful ex-employee saying untrue things about your company without anyone dealing with the problem. In a case where a ‘lone gunman’ is sniping at you, the most obvious way of minimizing his impact is to simply bury the story — create so many other high-SERP entries about your company that the negative links disappear under the pile of positive ones.

Of course, these are all clearly ‘easier said than done’ kind of tasks — but that’s why reputation management companies exist in the first place: because they provide a service that few of us could provide ourselves.