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Jordan Glogau has been involved with marketing and sales on the Internet since 1995. He has worked for a number of computer and Internet company like DEC, Sharp and IDT and presently at Haiku-Marketing.com. Jordan is involved in Search Engine and Internet Marketing for ecommerce, healthcare, real estate, financing, consumer products and reputation management . He can be contacted at jglogau atphr400.com .

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Helping Clients With Online Reputation Problems

Written on
January 29th 2008
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by Jordan Glogau  |
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In the customer service obsessed world we live in today; establishing and keeping a good online reputation is becoming more and more important to all companies. Let’s assume you’re running an interactive agency and a client comes to you with a reputation management problem.  To organize your efforts and be as valuable as possible to your client we’ve categorize the kinds of reputation problems your clients are likely to encounter online.

Single Incident
Client experienced a negative event, many years ago that continues to be displayed prominently on the search engines. Examples, conviction of a civil or criminal act, accusation of a crime that was publicized or an association with others convicted of a crime. These kinds of problems are usually easily solved by a combination of content development and ethical SEO strategies. Given the worst case scenario, these negative notices can usually be moved off the first page in 4-7 months.

Clusters of Negative Publicity
Most situations fall into this category. These are essentially honest, ethical business people but they have been negligent with the way they deal with customer demands and they receive bad reviews or bad Internet publicity as a result. The problem here is that that even though the negative pages are a small fraction of their customer base, the publicity is extremely harmful and needs to be neutralized. These kinds of problems are usually easily solved by a combination of content development and ethical SEO strategies. Given the worst case scenario, these negative notices can usually be moved off the first page in 6-9 months.

Reformed companies or individuals
These are companies that have done something wrong but are attempting to make things right. (Martha Stewart, Mattel Toy). Because of the depth and breadth of their bad publicity, these are difficult clients to help and require many resources. If such companies truly want to change their behavior the significant investment in their online reputation represents a justifiable expense. Because this problem exists only for larger, well-known companies, an orchestrated solution involving significant content development and extensive SEO efforts is usually indicated.

Chronic Purposeful Offenders
These are firms or individuals whose method of doing business results in ongoing abundant negative publicity. They should NOT be helped because their bad acts are purposeful. Example: a slumlord whose tenants have banded together to publish a website for all tenants, companies that chronically mistreat customers.  The real problem with Chronic Offenders is that once counter-measures are taken they will themselves be countered. Irate customers will double their efforts to get their “version” of the story out.  They will point to the counter efforts made by your agency as additional “proof” that the company is only out to cheat even more people. Your agency’s reputation may be damaged as the mudslinging spreads.

Companies or Individuals who have become active targets
These are clients who are in somebody’s crosshairs and are quite simply the target of constant, organized attempts to defame. Sometimes these attempts may be justified by the perpetrators negative experiences/ sometimes these attempts can represent the efforts of a deranged or misguided individual. Most of the time these attacks are highly emotional and highly motivated. The truth of the matter is that there is little that can be done to protect your client from a motivated skilled attacker. In some cases it may make sense for you to advise your client to directly address the attacker with appeasement or legal action.

Refer to Defamation Lawyer
For some companies or individuals who can legally prove they have been wronged and know who wronged them, legal action can be effective. These prospects should be referred to an attorney who specializes in areas like defamation, online reputation management and rights of publicity who may be able to have the negative publicity removed by legal persuasion or court order.

Self Defeating Self-Help
There’s another factor that can affect an agency’s effort to help a client manage their reputation. Many firms discover they are the target of an attack.  Many times, companies that discover they are the target of attacks — especially technology companies–, will take matters into their own hands.  They will attempt to counter these negative post and links.  They will start by setting up additional sites with their company name and trademarks.  Most of the sites look and feel likes what they are–low quality sponsored links.  Even if they do get ranked well they can still do almost as much damage as a bad link because they look like the company is trying to manipulate the rankings.  Sometimes these sites take the format of “top ten” for their industry.  However, if the person browsing that site quickly realizes that there isn’t a “real” advocacy group behind the site even more damage is done.  Only use real third party sponsors like BBB Online, Trustee, or Hacker Safe.

Sometimes companies can make things worse by engaging outside legal counsel. We aren’t against legal assistance, we even recommend it above.  However, legal solutions need the hand of an attorney experienced in internet defamation. Otherwise the online situation could be compounded simply because all legal proceedings get online these days and they tend to rank high on the search engines.  Remember these are government sites (with a .gov domain) and Google in particular gives great weight to these type of sites. 

Additional Resources
If you’re interest in reading more about online reputation management you find  this site has a list of current articles and resources.  You can also query your favorite search engine to find firms that specialize in Internet reputation management.



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Reader Comments.

Great post, definitely covered most of the angles

Cheers,
Glen

Posted by Glen Allsopp | 6:31 pm on February 1, 2008.

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