In this day and age whether a potential customer is looking for a service or a business is looking for a new supplier more often than not the person or business looking will look to verify the company, its product or service online by doing a simple search via one of the leading search engines.
This is fine but what happens if a disgruntled employee or a disatisifed customer or indeed more sinisterly a competitor decide to voice their negative opinions of you and your company online. For example, you've just left a potential client after giving a pretty impressive presentation and you feel that the closing of the deal is imminent. However, when you call back to speak with the potential client the tone has changed and gone from hot to decidely cold overnight. Did you ever consider that the potential client may have done a search for you online and received negative if not damming information about you or your company?
In its most basic form just do a search now for McDonalds in Google to see an example of this happening. The 11th return at the time of writing this is McSPOTLIGHT which is a site dedicated to highlighting negative issues surrounding the McDonalds corporation. McDonalds spend millions of pounds each year on their PR and reputation management and yet this negative site has slipped through the net.
This kind of negative PR can occur through numerous avenues but will predominantly happen in forums, blogs, social networking sites, chatrooms or within online media. The good news is that although you cannot often remove negative postings, comments or articles about you they can be managed and through organic SEO techniques pushed so far down the search engines that they become oblivious.
When was the last time you did a thorough review of your reputation online? Do you regularly monitor your online reputation? Probably not as you're too busy running your business!
At Hatch we offer a comprehensive online reputation management service included as part of our Corporate & E-commerce Organic SEO packages
- Scan all major search engines for negative information
- Scan market or industry specific forums, blogs, review sites and chatrooms
- Scan social networking media i.e. Facebook, Bebo, Linked In, Zoominfo etc.
- Scan market or industry specific online media i.e. online magazines and news source
For additional information on our Online Reputation Management service please contact us for further information.