Bad online reputation

1. How to Overcome the Threat of a Bad Online Reputation
Negating the effects of a Bad Online Reputation can be a tricky process. Any negative
content associated with your name or company can have serious repercussions on your
career or business prospects. Among the key threats facing companies or individuals
online are negative press articles, customer complaints, and negative reviews of your
products and services. Allied to this is the fact that leaks of confidential information (or
private materials) are growing increasingly prevalent on the internet. Disgruntled
employees and former associates can post content that could be derogatory or
embarrassing to you.
A growing practice among employers is to check the online reputation of potential
employees by evaluating their profiles on social media platforms such as MySpace,
Twitter and Facebook. Any harmful or embarrassing content could have a detrimental
effect on your career path. Similarly, an overwhelming majority of people tend to look up
customer reviews before they decide to use/purchase a particular product or service.
Difficulties of Dealing with a Bad Online Reputation
Unfortunately, gaining a Bad Online Reputation is far easier than you can imagine.
There are a number of sites that allow users to submit anonymous reviews about
products and services. In most cases, these reviews require just a few hours before they
are indexed by a search engine and become available to the general public.
Removing these negative comments can be extremely difficult and time consuming.
Unless you have the requisite level of expertise it is not advisable to try and deal with
these issues yourself. Quite often, you might end up making the situation worse by
adding credibility to these comments. Using the wrong methods could, in fact, end up
increasing the search engine rankings and accessibility of such content.
Legal options can be severely limited and the costs associated with hiring a lawyer
experienced in dealing with these types of problems could prove to be prohibitive.
Finding Solutions to Deal With a Bad Online Reputation
It is probably best to take a proactive approach when dealing with a Bad Online
Reputation. You cannot censor bad reviews or make them disappear, but you can
suppress them by publishing positive articles about yourself or your organization. With
the right Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques you can make sure that when
someone enters a search term they are directed to content that contains positive
information. This involves identifying search terms that point to any negative content,
and developing positive content that is built around these keywords.
Do not make the mistake of overcompensating while publishing positive articles. Rather
than making them all out to be glowing recommendations of your products/services,
ensure that they provide some form of useful information.

2. Make use of social media channels to publish positive comments about your company.
Social media content (particularly on Facebook and Twitter) tend to have high search
engine rankings and can help mask out any negative content.
In most cases it might be advisable to hire the services of a professional Reputation
Management Company to alleviate the problems associated with a Bad Online
Reputation.