Reputation Management – Prevention is Better Than Cure

Reputation management is one of the areas that is getting pretty hot in the online community management space. As the competition is getting higher there are chances that you / your company would fall in the danger of negative reputation. Even Whitehouse website has fallen in this trick so called “Miserable Failure”. We must have spends years together to create the positive and the good reputation / online visibility and with single bad review everything will go in vain.

Negative reputation will never stand within search engine result pages. This continues with blogs, forums, social media, videos (You Tube) etc. We need to keep monitoring to avoid situation running out of hand. We can monitor company / product / key persons (Individuals) with tools like Google Alert, Yahoo Alert, RSS Subscription for search results in Technorati, Google News, Yahoo News etc.

If you suppose to find any negative mention for your company / product / yourself, here are a few basic steps to deal with it:

• Research the situation – is there any attribute or merit?
• If not, provide the original facts and ask for explanations
• If yes, then offer to discuss with open mind
• Be ready to respond with your own blog / forum
• Be honest and be ready to listen to the comments

When I think about all these, I just remember one idioms, “Prevention is Better than Cure”. Implementing a proactive monitoring campaign always helps rather than answering or researching the situation. Have you ever encountered such brand / reputation problem? I will be eager to listen what tactics you have implemented to come out of that. Do share!