With the world’s information only a fingertip away, your online profile has never been so important to protect and preserve. Online attacks can come from nowhere, often without any provocation. Inadvertently upset someone in a Forum post? Legitimately fired someone? Won a contract over a competitor? Got a new job and moved on? Congratulations, you’ve potentially got an online enemy and one who could very easily be prepared to spend numerous hours daily online ruining your reputation unfairly.
As UK reputation management specialists, we’ve seen versions of this story for ourselves many times over. So now we advise all individuals, and companies, concerned with protecting their online reputation for the future to act pre-emptively, before there’s even a problem.
Planning ahead for the future is something we all do in any case, so let’s just add planning for managing your online reputation to the mix. What does a Proactive Reputation Management plan even look like?
A good reputation management company should be able to answer that question for you fairly easily: it looks like an ongoing monthly campaign to constantly create new positive content, constantly create backlinks pointing to chosen content, constantly maintain active and positive social media publications, and review and collate information by analysing the major search engines on a daily basis to ensure no negatives have appeared.
That same good reputation management company should also be explaining to you that it’s not all about them; you also have a part to play in protecting your online profile. Tips such as: withdraw from and refrain from making comments on online forums and blogs, ensure you have all major social media accounts activated, provide initial photographs and information to allow for the creation of a website and the aforementioned social media accounts, and above all flag up immediately if you suspect there may be a problem incoming. Even if your suspicions prove to be unfounded, the company working with you would rather know and plan for the worse than be taken by surprise and suddenly find an influx of negatives that they then have to deal with.
Monthly ongoing costs for this type of service should be fairly low; we look at the following when determining a monthly cost:
- Your social status (owner of a company vs employee of a company)
- Your job status (politician vs teacher)
- How many times your name is searched per month over the last 12 months
- How many (if any) negative links on the first 3 pages of Google
- Which versions of Google you want us to target (uk, fr, de, au etc)
- How many search terms you want us to protect (adding location, middle name, wifes name etc)
Using all this information will allow us to paint a picture of how long it should take us to get a foothold of pages 1 and 2. We then make you an ongoing offer (no contract) for monthly reputation management. If at any time you know there is likely to be something negative comping up about you, we have options availbe that allow us to post multiple press releases which syndicate and can help stop those negative links ever appearing. Such as a mention from Entrepreneur.com
If you’d like to talk to us about any of the information within this article, don’t hesitate to get in touch.