Imagine that you’ve put a lot of effort into landing a new customer, only to have them decide at the last minute not to go with you. You can’t understand why. Your prices were competitive, you provided some great references, and your products / services match your competition, in fact they’re better than the competition. So what happened to change their mind? You call them up and ask, to see if there’s a way to salvage the deal. Your contact tells you “quite frankly that they did a Google search on your company, and didn’t like what they saw…”.

Nervously you go to Google and type in your company name, and there it is… a site dedicated to bringing down your company written by an irate former customer, or maybe a disgruntled former employee, or maybe by some person who, for one reason or another, just doesn’t like the way you run your business. You could see a listing from the state sexual offender list showing up for your company name (if you have an employee that’s on it) it could be a critical news item, or just a blog or forum posting where someone talks down about your organization, products / services, or someone that works for you.

Now that you see this, what can you do? If the content is patently false, you can take legal measures to have it removed, but if it’s subjective, then you’ve got fewer options. You can ask the site owner to remove the questionable content, which they may do if it’s something along the lines of an anonymous comment, or one that they don’t feel comfortable supporting. If you feel that the source and issue are credible, then you can engage the commenter/site owner in discussion, addressing the issues (of course, without being combative, as that will not help the issue). In fact, this is probably one of the best ways of heading off criticisms, if you can identify the real issues up front, and address them, then your customer service image can be heartily increased.

But, what if the listing on the results page is one that you have no ability to change, how can you remove it? Well, you can’t. However you can de-optimize it. This is done by optimizing other listings to appear above the rogue listing. If you can ’sweep it under the rug’, by moving it down from 3rd to 23rd, then less people are going to see it. This can be a challenge if the offending listing comes from a popular blog, or has ‘gone viral’, but since it’s your only option, you’re going to have to buckle down and work at it. Of course, it’s much better to be proactive than reactive, so work on getting those listings, videos, images, podcasts, blogs, etc optimized now, and the naysayers will have a much harder time breaking into your search space in the first place.

Filed under: Reputation Management on Friday, July 27th, 2007 by Simon Heseltine |
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