Managing your Online Reputation to Conquer Bad Reviews

When approaching search engine reputation management, it’s vital to remember that you are not the omnipresent ruler. The internet is the all mighty ruler of cyberspace and you are a little blimp. As soon as you try to control the internet, you will encounter problems.

Li Evans from Search Marketing Gurus says that you can’t manage your reputation, you can only manage relationships. So, what you have to focus on is building relationships. What relationships with reputable bloggers and consumers will give you in a time of crisis are support and positive reviews if you’re ever in the situation where your reputation is headed for a black hole of bad press.

When you learn that you can’t control the internet, you’ll soon learn that you can’t control people’s opinions either. Even if you offer the best prices, unrivalled services and high quality products, someone, somewhere will probably think or say something negative about you and, more likely than not, that opinion will find its way into cyberspace. Keeping your nose clean is one thing, but keeping yourself entirely free of negative criticism is a completely different ball game because, despite aggressive advertising campaigns, thought control is the stuff of fantasy fiction.

The positive spin on this, of course, is that people will also say great things and give entirely new and fresh opinions on your company, CEO or even logo design. The trick is to let what happens, happen and then respond appropriately. Manage bad reviews without legal action unless absolutely necessary and encourage and enhance good reviews.

Of course, in order to respond to reviews, you are going to have to be aware of all mentions made of your company, staff members or products. Evans suggests that you ‘monitor, monitor, monitor’. There are many free tools available on the web that allows you to find all mentions made of anything related to your company on the web. The most well-known is Google Alerts, although there are many similar monitoring tools available, which can monitor anything from forums to social media sites.

David Ingram suggests that you respond to reviews directly online (in a respectful manner) when appropriate, but if this may damage your reputation, rather try to contact the customer in an offline capacity and see if you can resolve the situation in that way and ask him or her to update the review when they are satisfied.

In a nutshell, be present, be involved and be interested but don’t be a bully. Nothing will destroy your reputation as quickly as being rude to a customer or client who is giving you an unfavorable review.