Imagine after all the work you have put in to your business, one day you do a search on google and find a damaging piece of content explaining why no one should do business with you, ranking right next to your website in the search engines.

Over the years we have all seen businesses and personalities fall from fame and fortune very quickly, costing thousands and sometimes even millions of dollars in lost revenue just because one person gave them a bad wrap.

Speaking about reputation, Warren Buffet once said, ”It takes 20 years to build a reputation and 5 minutes to ruin it.”

Apparently just one bad review could impact your annual sales by as mush as 20%.  We don’t, imagine your business would cope losing 20% in sales like most others.

No business or person is protected from this and it can happen to the best of us at any time. Negative press could come from:

• Competitors trying to smear your brand name
• Ex Employees that want to get back at you
• Ex Bosses that want to destroy your career
• Co-workers that don’t want to see you succeed
• Customers that are not happy with your product or service
• Reporters that have picked up misinformation

The hardest part is, usually the bad press you get is unfounded and you may have done everything right, but the truth is some people just like to complain and don’t really care that it will damage someones reputation.

Sometimes it can be your competitors trying to smear your reputation with lies, distortion and rumours to undo all the brand equity that you have worked hard and invested a lot of money to build up.

Building any great brand, reputation management is crucial to your success otherwise you could find yourself fighting an uphill battle against those few disgruntled customers that just like to complain for the sake of it.

If you have a great SEO Campaign, highly targeted Pay Per Click Campaign and a good Social Media presence, if there is any damaging news out there your whole online strategy could be in vain.  Even all the hard work that has been done offline to build your reputation can be gone in a flash, because around 80% of people will search for your business name before paying anything just to check your credibility.

Research shows that the way society is set up, it is more likely for people to believe in negative reports than it is to believe in positive praise, especially online where it is so easy for bad news to spread very quickly and become common knowledge even if it isn’t true.

News stations, magazines and news papers know this and leverage it to their advantage when selling their wares, because they know that people are naturally attracted to bad news and believe it.

Online is no different, if you have a majority of good stories, reports and feedback about your personal profile or business and a few negative ones showing in search engines or forums then this will negate all the praise that is out there. One bad apple spoils the bunch, so to say.

With social media moving so quickly and users having more power to voice their opinion than ever before it is becoming increasingly hard for personalities and companies to keep track of what is being said about them in the online community.

The worst part is (and we have all seen it), once someone starts bad mouthing you or your brand other people that would not normally say anything, start to chime in and add their negative comments as well until it escalates out of control.  As you can imagine it becomes a nightmare to try and clean up after it gets to this point and some times isn’t possible to remove it all.

Reputation Management Solution
In cleaning the Internet of potentially harming material we may use some, all and other means like:

• Removing negative content in co-operation with webmasters
• Collaborate with our lawyers to remove the content via legal means
• Search Engine Optimise the positive content online
• Post positive content and optimise it
• Create new content and distribute it and then optimise it
• You get reporting on all activities carried out each month

The solution starts with staying on top of everything that is being said about your brand as it happens, this way we can effectively stop anything that could potentially hurt your image or brand.

We use a number of techniques and software to keep track of everything that is being said about you online in real time, then depending on the degree of the material we will either respond to it directly or work with you to rectify the communication in a swift fashion.

Our service runs 7 days a week and just about 24 hours a day so that we can make manage your reputation in real time.

In the event of existing material being shown in search engines we will use our multi-point strategy to ensure that all negative references to your image are either removed or pushed far from the first page of search results.

In some cases we will work with you and create press releases that can shift the medias attention to other positive aspects of the business.

We also work in conjunction with some of the best lawyers in Australia to manage issues in relation to defamation, providing you with strong backing no mater how serious the case.

We appreciate that you may want confidentiality and respect for sensitive matters dealt with in a professional manner.  We communicate everything to you and have the expectation that you will do the same so that we can best manage your reputation.