You are not the only one that is adding to your digital footprint. This article offers ways to shield anyone who would threaten your online profile.
What Is Online Profile Defense?
- Your business and its executives’ online profiles are vulnerable to attacks from various threats.
- Since online reputation has such a significant effect on your company’s value, you must fiercely protect it.
- By fortifying search results with optimistic, high-quality content, you will reduce the impact of harmful content.
- Potential for reputational harm may come from angry consumers, poor ads, rivals, dissatisfied or former employees, and unmanaged corporate social responsibility.
If you are aware of the significant importance of your organization’s reputation, you should wonder if you can take some proactive steps to avoid reputation harm.
You can take many steps to minimize the risk of a reputation crisis, but there is no assurance that you will not experience some form of harm at some stage. Whether from an unhappy customer, a dissatisfied employee, an associate, or anything related to your operations and policies, there is always a potential for your name to be dragged through the mud.
Reputation management companies offer an online shield that can mitigate the harm and the time it takes to recover from an incident.
What Is Reputation Protection?
The search engine results (SERPs) that appear on the first page will affect people’s decision to interact with your company or not. The SERPs will also assess what data they’re ‘walking’ away with and what they’re sharing with other users.
Reputation defense is one way of reducing the effect of negative information by strengthening positive, high-quality content from search results, such as:
- Articles
- Your website
- Images
- Profiles
- Videos
- Social media
Many of the articles will be self-published. Some of them will come from related publications that your reputation management firm will pitch against the involvement of similar companies in the same sector after conducting a gap analysis of the online presence of your company.
Why Do You Need to Protect Your Online Reputation?
The reputation of your brand accounts for about 75% of the valuation of your company. This adds heavily to the conversion rates and revenues.
Damage to your reputation can result in:
• Loss of profits
• Decrease in share value
- Many side effects that reduce the overall value of your business
• Decline in market share
By reducing such events’ frequency and success, reputation management will reduce risks to your reputation caused by threats such as shareholder or social advocacy, journalism, workers, corporate social responsibility concerns, and more.
Google is armed with bots, rivals, bloggers, journalists, clients, and staff, so companies must protect their online profiles more than ever. Online reputation management (ORM) techniques are essential in this new environment for developing constructive protection of the search engine profile.
How Do I Protect My Online Reputation?
If you already know the value of an excellent reputation, you may have already Googled your company name and started to address issues you found in the SERP.
Go a step further and Google the publicly linked individuals to your business to be diligent in maintaining your image. This includes staff, leadership, affiliates, investors, suppliers, relatives, and everyone you can think of whose relationship if they were to experience a reputation crisis could impact your company.
Promptly handle any negative results, whether it involves any internal conversations about internet etiquette or disassociating the business from a partner or employee publicly. Since, as described, your corporate reputation can represent 75 percent of your company’s value, each relationship is associated with significant risk.
Clean Up and Monitor Social Media
Social networking is one of the types of search results you can come across in your study. Social networking sites are a place where workers and even corporate leaders often forget that they represent a company when they post and respond. The good news about social media is that in nature, conflicts appear to be short-term. But the trade-off is that bad news can travel far and very quickly or that hostile social media messaging can transition to longer-lasting search results.
Get as detailed as time allows and correct offensive conduct on social media. If some significant wrongdoing is detected, consider resolving the problem publicly before anyone else does.
Address Customer Concerns on Review Sites
One of the leading causes of reputation attacks is angry clients. Addressing consumer questions and concerns when they are submitted directly to you or a company representative is relatively easy. However, many damaging complaints are released into the wild of the Internet, so it’s worth the extra effort to pursue complaints on online forums to resolve openly expressed issues and complaints.
If you do not have the resources and stamina to carry out ongoing tracking of your business’s online mentions, consider hiring a reputation management firm to do so. Set a focus on delivering exemplary service and lobbying for ratings to reduce the number of negative experiences associated with your company.
Campaigning raises the number of constructive evaluations you receive. Here’s how to proceed:
• Check every website that your business has a profile on
• Check on social media sites for your business name to identify posts and comments
• Check for product, service, and business reviews on Google and other review platforms
• Verify your listing for the BBB
• Check the Wikipedia article of your executives or organization, if appropriate.
• Respond to your business, staff, and leaders’ posts, comments, and reviews (this includes comments on your posts)
• Offer disgruntled clients legitimate remedies such as discounts, replacements, and outstanding support. Once the problem has been solved, ask them to revise their rating or review.
Be Ethical and Trustworthy
People will make decisions in the heat of the moment when running a company that, in retrospect, are seen as mistakes. The culture of today is hyperconnected and tribalized. When it comes to workers’ treatment, environmental footprints, and social responsibility, people will scrutinize companies. They also judge your company by how your associates and suppliers treat those categories because you have decided to do business with those businesses. Consider the influence and how the impact would be viewed by the public when making even the smallest decisions.
In your interactions with partners, vendors, and clients, you must also be ethical and trustworthy. Information may and will end up online about soured relationships. Honestly, represent your goods and services, be polite in all interactions, and obey your agreements. If negotiation or agreement is tentative before you can commit, make it undeniably clear.
Conclusion
The key to protecting your online profiles to do everything you can to be truthful with yourself and others. Take responsibility for your actions and always interact with your customer base.