In today’s world of push button publishing, any company can become the victim of an online attack from any disgruntled customer or competitor with a computer and an internet connection. Because of the nature of online search, negative blog posts, comments, and press can quickly tarnish a company’s reputation when potential customers find harsh criticisms when conducting a search for your company’s name.

These types of attacks can be extremely damaging to your reputation and profitability - especially when they appear on the first page of search results. However, there are ways to counter them using the same techniques applied by top Internet reputation management experts.

#1 Monitor Your Online Presence

A key component in any Internet reputation management campaign is to continuously monitor what others are saying about you online. When and if negative information is published about your company, you’ll want to be aware of it quickly in order to take action. The simplest way to do this is to set up a Google Alert for your name and your company name, as well as any other key terms associated with your line of business.

#2 Think Carefully Before You Retort

Unlike a conversation you may have with someone in person, a dialog carried out in the comments section of a blog or online forum will be recorded and leave a footprint online for years to come. If you learn that someone has posted a negative comment about you or your business, your first instinct may be to type out a heated retort. Instead of replying immediately, give yourself time to calm down and clearly think through your message before you reply.

Once you calm down, you will likely regret what you may have said in the heat of the moment and worse, possibly enabled the negative publicity to rise in search results.

#3 Ask Content Publishers to Remove Vicious Attacks

Internet reputation management experts will tell you that you can remove some blatantly slanderous results by contacting the content publishers where the comments are posted. This is usually only the case when the comments are overtly slanderous and unfounded. However, many content publishers will not remove material once it has been published. Once you’ve attempted to remove as much of the negative commentary as possible, your next plan of action should be to push the negative dialog as far back in the search engine results as possible. While quite time-consuming, it is a key component.

#4 Continuously Grow Your Presence on Search Engines

More relevant positive information, properly created, in the search engines related to you or your company will dilute the negative information and push it further back in the search engine results. The most effective way to accomplish this is by publishing more valuable content online through user-generated content sites or by building optimized profiles on various social media sites. Remember, the vast majority of people only search the first page of search results.

Companies and individuals may need to rely on Internet reputation management experts to push negative queries back from the first or second page of search results to a distant place where they will seldom if ever be seen. Professional internet reputation management experts use techniques that include building entire sites, massive article publication and distribution, press release generation and distribution, worldwide blogging and more. In addition, Internet reputation management experts are skilled in search engine optimization techniques and understand how and why search engines rank pages, thus making their efforts even more effective.

Every single moment, someone or the other is talking about you, your product, your services, your business, your competitors or your industry. They may be complimenting about a particular aspect of your business, appreciating certain things or generating hype for your business. There are also people who do not think too high about your service. They are cribbing, complaining or criticizing about your service or your product.

Let us say a much-hyped movie is on the verge of release. A lot of money, time and efforts have been spent in creating the magnum opus, and an equal amount of money has been spent on publicity. Can you imagine how much it can hurt both the distributors and creative team when the pre-release hype is countered by negative posts and scathing amount of criticism. A lot of people who read negative posts and information are bound to stay away from the movie affecting its business.

Not just a movie, but every conceivable product or service has its online reputation at stake thanks to the open platform offered by the web 2.O tradition. A blog post or a couple of comments posted online can either be a windfall for your business or topple it down like a pack of cards. There is also a term for this phenomenon-it is called customer generated media or CGM. To tackle the negativity generated by the consumer generated media, you need to take resort of online reputation management.

Online reputation management involves the method of tracking or monitoring every hour. Make sure you track everything that involves your product or service, right from product lines and employees to marketing strategies and competitors. You can go to morever.com; a website gives information on your industry and the latest developments and news in your industry.

You can collate all possible keywords that a user usually searches on in terms of your product or service. You can then set up ‘alerts’ (Google Alerts or Yahoo Alerts) for all of these keywords so that you are alerted when something about your company is posted online with the listed keywords in the ‘alerts’. You can also go to monitorthis.com which helps you keep track of a single keyword across different search engine feeds simultaneously.

Based on your keyword searches, you can make custom RSS fees from places like Technorati.com, Topblogging, Google News, Yahoo News and such others sites. It is even better to maintain all feeds into one RSS Reader like Google Reader, My Yahoo, Netvibes, Pageflakes, Bloglines, Newsgator etc. Find out some of the different forum sites or message boards that talk about your product or service and then closely track whatever is being written about. Similarly you can also track message groups like Yahoo Groups, Google Groups, MSN groups, AOL groups etc.

For online reputation management, you can also keep a track on some of the web pages through tools like watchthat.com and websitewatcher.com. You have to make sure you monitor every keyword and every page of the website that has anything even remote written about you. Monitoring and keeping a close watch of anything associated with your business is the one of the most important steps in online reputation management.

The Internet provides numerous opportunities, both good and bad.  In a strange way, the Internet is extremely democratic in that it allows anyone with access the chance to use or abuse the Web however they see fit.  As such, reputation management has become a major area of interest and concern for millions, if not tens of millions, of Americans.

Reputation management is the process of tracking an entity’s actions and other entity’s opinions about those actions, meaning the search for what people are doing and what others think about what people are doing.  It’s a bit like online gossip, but reputation management goes further than just People magazine.  Entire Internet related responsibilities, such as search engine image protection (SEIP), were created for the sole purpose of protecting a person’s name and reputation from undesired public information.  Reputation management is important to individuals, businesses, non-profits, politicians and more, because it affects so many areas of life.  

There are many ways to execute reputation management on the Internet; one way is to overwhelm and eliminate negative listings that show up when people search a name or term in Google.  However, things have changed and online reputation management is evolving and new services such as online image consulting and litigant image enhancement is growing.

Growth

More so than ever before, it’s easy for an individual to post slanderous, untrue, injurious and hurtful information based on nothing more than the wind.  In the past, a person would have to use a print medium, newsletter, newspaper, to produce a wide spread negative message, but those days are over.  Now, anyone with Internet access can make wild comments.  

Another reason why reputation management is important is that companies are producing as much hurtful information as individuals, if not more.  Comments regarding a person’s credit rating or debt could be posted online, individuals can use the forums on various company Websites to bash the company, the employees, stockholders or whomever they like.  Websites such as eBay, Wikipedia and Slashdot are often abused in such a way.

Solution?

There are a number of ways to combat the type of information that is slanderous or flat out inaccurate.  For example, you can use Search Engine Reputation Management (SERM) to shield your brand or reputation from damaging content.  In the end though, two challenges persist, the nature of Internet search engines and the ability of certain individuals to spread information no matter how much time it takes.

One of the best ways to combat negative information is to produce positive information.  So, reputation management can be performed with SEO/SEM, putting quality information of a positive nature online about the person or entity being attacked.  The goal is to produce enough positive information that it drowns out the negative being produced.  It’s a difficult battle overall, but one that is winnable.  

Moving Forward

To enhance your online reputation management, find a reputable individual or company who can protect your brand and your name.  Odds are you don’t have enough time to deal with the rumors flying around about you, or the time to learn how.  Find professionals who specialize in reputation management and let them handle the mess.

The Internet provides numerous opportunities, both good and bad.  In a strange way, the Internet is extremely democratic in that it allows anyone with access the chance to use or abuse the Web however they see fit.  As such, reputation management has become a major area of interest and concern for millions, if not tens of millions, of Americans.

Reputation management is the process of tracking an entity’s actions and other entity’s opinions about those actions, meaning the search for what people are doing and what others think about what people are doing.  It’s a bit like online gossip, but reputation management goes further than just People magazine.  Entire Internet related responsibilities, such as search engine image protection (SEIP), were created for the sole purpose of protecting a person’s name and reputation from undesired public information.  Reputation management is important to individuals, businesses, non-profits, politicians and more, because it affects so many areas of life.  

There are many ways to execute reputation management on the Internet; one way is to overwhelm and eliminate negative listings that show up when people search a name or term in Google.  However, things have changed and online reputation management is evolving and new services such as online image consulting and litigant image enhancement is growing.

Growth

More so than ever before, it’s easy for an individual to post slanderous, untrue, injurious and hurtful information based on nothing more than the wind.  In the past, a person would have to use a print medium, newsletter, newspaper, to produce a wide spread negative message, but those days are over.  Now, anyone with Internet access can make wild comments.  

Another reason why online reputation management is important is that companies are producing as much hurtful information as individuals, if not more.  Comments regarding a person’s credit rating or debt could be posted online, individuals can use the forums on various company Websites to bash the company, the employees, stockholders or whomever they like.  Websites such as eBay, Wikipedia and Slashdot are often abused in such a way.



Solution?

There are a number of ways to combat the type of information that is slanderous or flat out inaccurate.  For example, you can use Search Engine Reputation Management (SERM) to shield your brand or reputation from damaging content.  In the end though, two challenges persist, the nature of Internet search engines and the ability of certain individuals to spread information no matter how much time it takes.

One of the best ways to combat negative information is to produce positive information.  So, reputation management can be performed with SEO/SEM, putting quality information of a positive nature online about the person or entity being attacked.  The goal is to produce enough positive information that it drowns out the negative being produced.  It’s a difficult battle overall, but one that is winnable.  

Moving Forward

To enhance your online reputation management, find a reputable individual or company who can protect your brand and your name.  Odds are you don’t have enough time to deal with the rumors flying around about you, or the time to learn how.  Find professionals who specialize in reputation management and let them handle the mess.

Managing your reputation involves using tools and language to improve and/or control how the public views you, your company and those who work for your company.  Reputation management can’t simply be approached from a technology standpoint, or a communications standpoint.  This means that you can’t simply rely on blogs and/or the Internet for reputation management, and you can’t simply rely on press releases or well-planned events.

Tools

Reputation management and online reputation management require the use of certain tools to help repair, create or manage public perception.  Those tools include blogs, social networking, SEO/SEM and more.

Blogs

Having a quality blog works in a couple of ways.  It offers you a medium with which to talk directly to the public, without having to go through the newspapers, magazines, radio or television where your message can be distorted.  You can link your blog to your Website, have as a link on your Website or have it as a completely separate Website.  If you post regularly, not only will that benefit your search engine optimization (SEO), but it will communicate with your public without any outside interference.Being able to talk directly to your audience will greatly enhance your reputation management capabilities, because you can affect opinion with minimal effort.

Social Networking

Websites such as Myspace, Facebook, Twitter and others offer a way to create a community based around or involving your company.  As another form of communication with your audience, social networking sites (also known as Web 2.0) can help you create positive public opinion based around open communication and shared experience.  Quality reputation management doesn’t just focus on force feeding messages, in a perfect world it involves encouraging other people to basically market your business for you.  Social networking can be a tool that accomplishes just that, because it’s based around shared experiences, shared opinions and so forth.  It also doesn’t require the resources that a national publicity campaign would.

SEO/SEM

Search engine optimization and search engine marketing are possibly the two most important tools for online reputation management.  SEO and  SEM utilize pay-per-click technology, keyword usage and even HTML coding to successfully keep your company’s name and services in the top Google search lists.  Keywords should target words related to your company.

Communications

Using your language properly is vitally important.  Whether it’s properly seeding your Web content with keywords or writing a persuasive and eye catching press release, writing your content effectively can mean the difference between molding public opinion and being ignored.  It’s important that you highlight exactly where you’d like your reputation management to go in terms of how you want to influence opinion.  You can write a great press release, or have a Website with great content, but if you aren’t making strong statements and giving positive information, you’ll be wasting your time.  

Outline your goals and try to see what your competition is doing. This may help to give you some ideas as to where you want your messaging to go.  Reputation management can be a huge asset to your company and/or business, if the tools and language involved are used properly.