Online Reputation Management POV

Online Reputation Management POV
Defending a Brand’s Reputation Online 1/29/13

Background
Anyone can say anything about anyone on the Internet, and if enough
people of like mind agree, that information can be found in search results
for brand and vanity terms. As in reality, it sometimes doesn’t matter if the
information that is shared is accurate or true. If it’s popular enough, it can
appear alongside official listings for businesses and individuals, and has
the potential to sway opinions of searchers previously unaware of the
negative press.

For businesses, this can be analogous to having someone with a bullhorn
and sandwich board outside your physical business locations, alerting
potential customers to their negative experience and probably scaring
them away.

There’s no way to remove this content from the search engines (unless it is
a copyright violation), but businesses can work to restore their good name
by making positive content more visible and addressing negative press.
If you’re concerned that your business might have a reputation
management problem and you’re looking for a solution, here are three
important things to remember:

Resolution POV:

Online Reputation Management (ORM) Can Level the Playing Field

Nestle, Domino’s Pizza, American Airlines, United Airlines, Comcast and
most recently, Subway: all are examples of large corporations that have
had their reputations damaged online by rogue employees, activists or
angry customers. In the age of social media negative content about a
brand can be easily shared and sometimes goes viral online, leaving a
brand with a real-life PR crisis.

225 N. Michigan Ave., 8th Floor, Chicago, IL 60601 | www.ResolutionMedia.com | (P) 312.980.1600

Given that freshness is one of the biggest ranking factors for Google News
search, bad news that uses a brand name in a title can easily make it to
the first page in Web search results, allowing it to quickly spread online.
Many brands also have detractors online who will build websites making
more visible the issues they disagree with the brand about, and these sites
can appear in search results as well. Major news sources that pick up the
discontent can also be found for years for the brand term, given the high
authority that search engines typically give their domain.

With all of these sources filling up search engines with negative
information about a brand, it can help if brands have a strategy for
addressing the information, making it less visible, and creating content to
displace it in search results.

This is not necessarily manipulation of search results. Google itself has
advocated creating useful, positive content to counteract negative
content on both their blog and in their webmaster help center. They even
launched a tool in 2011 called Me on the Web aimed at helping
individuals control their reputation in Google. There are reputation
management techniques that are against Google’s terms of service that
could lead to banning from search results, and some individuals and
businesses are not comfortable adding to the search results for their
brand, but there’s nothing inherently manipulative about online
reputation management. At its core, it’s really just a way for individuals
and businesses to participate in the conversation about their brand
online.

More Than Technology is Needed

A number of services and tools have been introduced in recent years to
help individuals and businesses manage their reputations online. While
tools can be helpful for reporting purposes, true online reputation
management requires more than just technology to do right.

The core technology used in online reputation management software on
sites like BrandYourself.com and Reputation.com is simply a dashboard
that gives a score based on the number of positive, negative and neutral
listings that appear for your brand or vanity term. Most dashboards only


measure the first twenty search results, as multiple studies show that most
Google searchers don’t go beyond page two.

Figure 1 Reporting dashboard for BrandYourself.com free service


Figure 2 Reporting dashboard for Reputation.com free service

The person managing the brand’s online reputation can then promote
the positive links in the search results, and create new content that’s
positive in nature, and monitor the results as the negative listings get
pushed out in favor of more positive ones.

How this is done goes beyond the technology, and if it’s done correctly it
shouldn’t just involve a vendor creating content on your behalf.

In all of the reputation management campaigns we have run for
Resolution Media, clients we always consider the following:
1. Can we address the root of the criticism that’s causing the
reputation problem?


Depending on how sensitive the topic is, this may not be an option.
However, if it is an option we encourage the client to address the topic
directly, using keywords that are related to the crisis so that the client’s
voice can be heard in search results when interested searchers are
expressing their intent. These issues must be discussed with the client, and
some strategy for both messaging and tone must be established before
any content is created.

2. Which channels are most appropriate for gaining visibility?
The client may be sensitive about which domains their information
appears on, and this must be vetted before any content creation
happens. There may also be niche communities online that the client is
knowledgeable about that they can share.

3. Can we work with internal teams to create positive content on
owned and earned media?
Ideally the client owns related domains that we can leverage for
messaging purposes, and we work with the client to delegate work to the
appropriate stakeholders within their organization. If the organization is
larger, this may take some time to navigate.

While most reputation management solutions are either technology-only
or rely on vendors to create content on the client’s behalf, we have seen
the most successful online reputation management projects combine
technology with a solid working relationship between vendor and client,
answering questions like these that technology or outsourcing alone can’t
account for.

Some ORM Services are against Google’s Terms of Service
Though Google accepts the promotion of positive content as a legitimate
strategy for improving reputation, certain techniques that online
reputation management services provide can cause more harm than
good.

In researching various online reputation management solutions on Google
we came across more than a few that promote changing search suggest
as a service. This is typically done by gaming the autosuggest system by
sending many automated queries to the engines. This is expressly against


Google’s terms of service and can get you banned from the search
engines’ indices.

One of the first vendors for ORM that comes up for the term “reputation
management” in Google actually offers this service, so it may be difficult
for uninitiated searchers looking for reputation management services to
find a reliable partner. We recommend finding a partner that you trust,
and asking them specifically if they crowd source searches, or perform
any of these ORM tasks that are against Google’s terms of service:

• Creating fake blogs pretending to be a different person that shares
the same name in order to push down negative search results on
the actual person or brand.

• Using spam bots and denial-of-service attacks to force sites with
damaging content off the Web entirely.

• Astroturfing third-party websites by creating anonymous accounts
that create positive reviews or lash out against negative ones.

Summary
Online reputation management can be a boon to businesses if done in a
way that doesn’t violate Google’s terms of service, and is done
authentically and as a team effort. It can be difficult to completely
automate or outsource this process due to its sensitive nature and the fact
that the most successful online reputation management projects are the
result of positive communication between the reputation manager and
all of the brand’s content owners. However, if the right partner is found,
online reputation management is recommended for brands looking to
positive influence the search results.

For more information, visit the resources below:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=16
4133

For information about Resolution, visit our website:
www.resolutionmedia.com.


Online Reputation Management POV

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