I’m in love with reputation management. I think it’s of utmost importance to know what people are saying about you, your employer, your clients, and the places you send your business.

Growing up around a father who works in socially responsible investing, I’ve learned to think about environmentally friendly practices, fair labor and workplace practices, human rights, and community involvement. But for all of the good things being done by people in these areas, including by you and your businesses, vocal minorities can gain critical mass quickly, particularly when embracing social media. The sooner businesses embrace social media, the easier it becomes to manage the message, and mitigate damage already created by negative consumer reactions. Just make sure to check out how to avoid PR mistakes before you start engaging social media.

The viral possibilities of social media are not the only reasons to create content for placement on other’s websites. With Ask3d and Google’s Universal Search, and other search engines likely to quickly follow suit, spreading your corporate footprint through search results is quickly becoming a necessity. Videos, images, podcasts, blogs, news releases, maps, and stock quotes already pepper the SERPs in addition to your text-based pages. If Blendtec can have nearly 4 million views of a video at Youtube about a blender, and Southwest can fill SERPs with a Wikipedia result, news results, and a blog, so can your business or organization embrace video, wikis, news releases, and blogging, amongst the other aspects of universal results.

Reputation management is not search engine sabotage. It is about conducting your own positive campaign. Positive campaigns can include optimized press releases facing the issue head on, complete with apologies, if necessary.

Admitting you were wrong in a positive campaign may initially result in some highlighting of the negative information in search results, as seen in a search for JetBlue resulting in an article titled JetBlue’s C.E.O. Is ‘Mortified’ After Fliers Are Stranded. But there is no balance in search engine reputation management. In reputation management, one shouldn’t be balancing whether or not to address negative results. Creating positive campaigns to fill the SERPs will make it more difficult for future negative information to break into the top results and there is no easy fix to removing already high ranking negative information. You may end up highlighting the negative with a positive or apologetic aspect in the short term, but your long term efforts will sew up the results.

Filed under: Reputation Management on Thursday, July 12th, 2007 by Jacob Wolfsheimer |
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