Hit Refresh on You Reputation

What is your on-line reputation worth to you? What is the on-line reputation of your company worth to you? Do you even know what sort of an on-line presence you have? 

Right Now Someone is Googling You

This mighty beast we call the Internet allows anyone to slander you or your business in a public forum. What does a Google search reveal about you? Often times people who have never met you, nor have ever done business with you will post bad reviews or lodge complaints against you on-line. Is this fair? No, but it’s a true assessment of the social environment and just one of many reasons why social media is so important to understand and embrace.

“The beauty of social media is that it will point out your company’s flaws; the key questions is how quickly you address these flaws.” ~ Erik Qualmann, Socialnomics

Technology has come a long way and although amazing, it came with n aftertaste. One unquestionable downside to such open technology is how it allows anyone anywhere to say anything they want about you or your business at any time. Whether they know you or not, whether the information they are sharing is true or not does not matter they will share it. They will even share your personal information, private images, and confidential business plans.

What may be even more damaging is simply their opinions, which can be shared liberally. It sucks, so what can you do about it and how damaging can having a bad on-line rep be?

Book Reviews

Let’s look at review sites like Angie’s List or Yelp. About 27 million user-generated reviews were posted on the Yelp site between January and March of 2012, up 59% from the same period a year earlier, according to their most recent quarterly report. How many of those were bad reviews? How many of those are remarks left by disgruntled employees, ex-wives, and on-line hackers? Get the picture?

Some review sites allow you to remove negative or slanderous posts. On Yelp however, reviews can only be removed by Yelp’s own user-support team. If you have a bad one, you are stuck with it, but you can take measures to counter it. 

“Privacy is dead, and social media holds the smoking gun.”~ Pete Cashmore, Mashable

You’re not in control of the conversation, but you can (and should) monitor it and adjust your strategy accordingly.

Clean Up on Aisle Mine

Wouldn’t it be great if there was really a “refresh” button you could tap and have all of the bad reviews, snaky web posts, and or bad press mentions just go away with a click? It’s not quite that easy, but there are things you can do and companies like Reputation.com that can help.

“89% of US internet users search online before they make a purchase, even when the purchase is made at a local business.”~ Hubspot

Make a list and look for ways you can address individual situates or sites. Create and maintain fresh content on your website(s). The fresher you keep your relative content, the further you are able to push away the negative. 

Instead of letting potentially harmful things lie around waiting to be seen and cause unnecessary damage, why not be pro-active and do a little spring cleaning to get rid of the grime? 

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