What’s Reputation Management?

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Reputation management is the continuous monitoring of public discussions about a company, brand or individual with the aim of controlling presentation to the public. A number of companies offer reputation management services, sometimes at very high prices for full packages. Individuals and businesses can also do their own reputation management if they are computer savvy and have the time to do the legwork.

Companies and individuals have always been concerned with protecting their reputations, but the problem has become particularly acute with the advent of the Internet. The permanent storage of material and a large volume of information means that people can find outdated and sometimes suspicious information that could damage one’s reputation. Reputation management companies and individuals use a variety of tactics to keep their public presentation positive.

Basically, reputation management involves monitoring the internet for any new mentions of a person, company, brand, product or service. Each time a mention appears, it is checked to determine whether it is positive, neutral or negative. Negative discussions are addressed in a variety of ways, ranging from trying to remove negative content to promoting positive content so that negative content drops in search rankings. The goal is to ensure that positive content comes to light before negative content, and that positive content appears to have more credibility.

Some removal tools are simple. An angry and disgruntled blogger with customer service could be placated with a personal apology letter. Clearly false content may be removed by an Internet Service Provider in response to a legal request letter or court order. Some reputation managers use other techniques, such as offering payments to sites that will agree to take down negative content or countering a bad reputation on a social networking site with an awareness campaign to drown out some negative comments and posts with positive feedback.

This is part of online identity management, the process of checking your identity and presenting yourself online. Reputation management is an extremely useful and very powerful tool for people who want to promote themselves and their businesses online. The inability to keep up with internet gossip can result in being slow to realize a customer relationship problem. Being proactive allows companies to identify consumers, network with them, and reach quick solutions to problems as they arise. Businesses that take the time to reach out to dissatisfied customers personally may actually enjoy a reputation boost, as consumers write about the satisfactory resolution of their problem.

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