A Disorderly Employee?
Suppose you are a CEO of a small or medium-sized business. You have worked really hard and put in very long hours to build up your company’s brand. One day you hire the wrong employee and it turns out to be a great mistake. They are late on a regular basis and do not seem to be understanding the work material or work tasks to be accomplished. Though they seem to be academically qualified they do not seem to be competent within the specific role that they have undertaken. You try to cope with them for some time and you find new and innovative methods to keep them engaged with the material in question. You create training upon training sessions just for them and have had to hand out several written warnings due to their tardiness but still, the condition does not see to be improving. You are finally left with no other option but to dismiss them from the company as they have become a burden to the company and are weighing the other employees down. The other employees must constantly pick up after them and correct mistakes that were made. You realize that as the CEO of your company if you do not take action quickly you will start to lose clients and eventually, potentially lose your customers. Before letting them go from the company you give them a final warning and advise them that the following offense will, unfortunately, result in a dismissal. When the same offense occurs only a month after the warning you have no other choice but to let them go but explain to the employee that they can work on bettering themselves and try applying again to the company; the door will not always be closed. The disgruntled employee takes to the internet in order to smear your online reputation. They leave negative and destructive reviews about the company on social media and on high DA websites. The stories are definitely fabricated but unfortunately, the audience would not be aware of that and would thus believe them.
How would you manage this situation? What would you do as the CEO of the company?
How To Deal With Difficult Situations
It does not necessarily even have to be a disgruntled employee. It could simply be a competing company that wants to get ahead of you in ratings so they post negative content on social media and high DA websites. It could be a customer that did not personally have a bad encounter with your company but dealt with a friend or family member that had that bad experience with your company and has decided to continue posting negative reviews online. Whatever the situation is, you must take action in order to ensure that the content is removed. There are certain pitfalls that one should avoid at all cost, and the big question would be how to avoid these pitfalls so as not to ruin your online reputation? This article on industry publication will identify some of the important takeaways that one must consider within the online reputation management process in order to remain ahead. It speaks to CEOs and managers specifically as you would be the ones in the position to make such decisions towards your company. Only you know how much work and effort has actually gone into your company and only you can truly have that true understanding and compassion for your company to be able to lead it in the right direction.
The Importance Of Your Online Presence
As a reputation management CEO, I understand the importance of your online reputation and I always say that the importance and care placed on your online reputation can never be overemphasized. Great measures must be placed when it comes to protecting your online reputation. We have a few steps that you can take in order to ensure that you always maintain a positive online presence.
Suppression Timelines Must Be Realistic
There are really two issues to be covered in this section: response time and result time. Most clients hire an online reputation management agency for suppression work. The meaning of suppression work is, to push a negative search engine result down in favor of positive ones. There is a key notion here that everyone considering hiring an ORM firm should know: it takes time and resources to achieve this result. The implication of this is that after a bad PR event or negative message, there will be some links on social media or on certain websites that will give reference to those situations. An example of this in a situation involving bad reviews is that they may only appear on a single site for the time being. However, with time these negative messages will spread to other sites “metastasizing” like cancer. This exponential dispersion of the negative message needs to be matched by an exponential labor force working to promote positive content to replace the aforementioned negative message. This must be done in a very efficient and rapid order in order to avoid continuous dispersing of the negative links which will in turn further tarnish your online presence. Online reputation management firms will turn you away if the bad PR event happened six months ago, it is simply not a feasible mandate for them to accomplish therefore it is very important to act fast.
The second issue is that you need to continuously tackle the negative message for a certain period of time in order to get the desired result. It is not good enough to work on the negative review and leave it for a few months. Not only must your outreach be frequent but it must also be consistent on a regular basis in order to follow a habit and a particular trend. This is why it is important to manage your expectations when it comes to the timeline of an internet reputation management campaign. In the event that you know that you will not be able to combat the negative reviews on a daily or weekly basis, do not start such a campaign on a weekly or daily basis as the system will get used to those updates on a weekly or daily basis and thus be expecting such changes to be made. It is preferable to tackle the negative reviews on a Monthly basis after knowing for yourself that it is all the time that you can give that project. Once you are able to make adjustments to your update frequency you can then do so.