Charlotte Reputation Defense

What is reputation defense?

Reputation defense is the monitoring, control, and improvement of a person, professional, brand, or company’s name on the internet through the eyes of their prospective customers.

Reputation defense involves monitoring social media accounts for the company. It also means monitoring the search terms that are often referring customers to the company on social media and search engines.

A large part of the modern local search involves monitoring review sites on your behalf. Sites like Yelp, Google, Yellowpages.com, YP, Superpages.com, and Yahoo all provide reviews with very little protection for the business owner.

A bad review on here will be highly visible and can damage your business without you knowing it exists. Business owners are at risk of bad press without a chance to respond in many cases. This is why we watch all avenues and make sure a response and a resolution or removal happens fast every time.

Examples of Reputation Defense:

For a local restaurant we would monitor the review sites, monitor sites like city-data, city based search sites, food review blogs and websites, tripadvisor.com, and mentions of the restaurant by name in newspapers and blog searches. We would monitor social media for customers commenting on the quality, cleanliness, or service, as well as anything with your name or market mentioned.

In the case of bad reviews, comments about staff or service, or other issues, we would reply to the comments, report the bad press to the site owners and put higher positioned good comments and reviews above them to drown them out for a quick fix.

We could also use the company’s loyal customers on Facebook and twitter as a tool by encouraging them with social posts to go to that page and share their good experiences to drown out the bad.

If your company has a newsletter, we could call on that to drive traffic to the review website and provide dozens of great reviews in a matter of days.

Reputation defense has become a mainstream industry, and in professional fields it is even more prominent, where bad publicity can hurt for years if someone is spiteful or has a billing issue and decides to rant about it online. Doctors, lawyers, and high-end professionals cannot risk the professional reputation they spent years achieving.

A public page can last for years; it is important to address it quickly and either get it resolved or get it removed.

Negative posts on a lot of social or public sites can go to page one very fast on sites like yahoo answers, review sites, BBB, complaint report sites, and other sites that rank very well and update very quickly. This is the reason having constant monitoring is important.

A business owner can go months without seeing the bad publicity and in that time could lose hundreds of customers due to the angry comments of one bad experience online.

One other way we lessen this bad news, if or when it happens, is through defensive search marketing.

by: Todd Kron