5 Ways to Manage (and Repair) Your Business’ Online Reputation

Image Source

Making waves in the online world isn’t easy, but when you add conflicting customer opinions into the mix, you end up with a dangerous tangle of circumstances. Negative reviews, negative comments – even negative clients – all bring your business down if they are left to fester, both online and offline.

Our advice? Hire a New Orleans online reputation management firm that specializes   if you can’t solve the problem on your own. Otherwise, try these tips to prevent harm to your business’ reputation to begin with.

The 5 Best Ways to Manage/Repair a Broken Business Reputation

Your online reputation is visible to the 1.8 billion people who frequently buy from the global marketplace. Upset just one of them and you risk losing business. Here’s how to keep those clients happy and prosper in your online domain.

1 – Tackling News Articles

Negative news articles are a sure-fire way to damage a businesses’ reputation. Unfortunately for us, our competitors will be looking closely at any holes they can pick in your process. If you have one bad customer experience, and that consumer attracts a news agency, they could very well have a long-lasting effect on your firm.

Customers decide how and what to buy via examining past reviews. If they type ‘bad reviews of XXX’ into Google in relation to your firm, you bet your bottom dollar that a negative article will come up. This is why it is so important to address complaints in person, in writing, and in a format that can be screenshotted.

2 – Content Reparation

If you can’t fight the complaint or negativity with facts and evidence, then you can try this… Write to the people who posted the negative comments and ask how it can be resolved in a less public way. This method is repeatedly used by eBay sellers who want to avoid negative reviews which will ultimately directly impact their business. The key to this is to catch those negative comments early on, before it reaches a large audience.

3 – Legal Action

So you haven’t dealt with each customer’s complaint in turn and it has led to a negative article being posted in a local news page. You have written to the writer and asked them to remove it, or offered to resolve it, but they haven’t agreed. Now it is time to bring out the big guns, as it were. You can threaten them with legal action for defamation and/or slander depending on the laws in your country. This will require you to prove that what they say is not true. You can even go as far as to draft a ‘Cease and Desist’ letter with a lawyer.

4 – DMCA Takedown

This works for those that are using your brand name, trademark, or other graphics, to defame you. If those marks are under copyright protection, then the content they posted can be removed via DMCA appeal to the host server. This is often employed on sites where streaming is available for more recent TV shows, where the host server has not obtained a license to show said programs.

5 – Minimising the Damage

Of course, you won’t be able to find those bad comments or negative reviews unless you search for them. Keep a close eye on Google search results for complaints about your business. Work with your social media management firm to ensure your accounts have a clear policy of dealing with complaints as they occur, in a fully transparent way.

Last but not Least

The amount of work involved in monitoring and repairing online comments about your brand and business is why we recommend you go with an expert company. Only a tech genius can balance running a business with constant brand monitoring. The time needed isn’t usually conducive to good productivity.