One of your biggest assets as a business is your reputation. If you find this has been tarnished, you may find that you start to lose customers and, in a surprisingly short period of time, you could even end up going bust. New start up companies are particularly at risk of this because they have not yet had the opportunity to prove themselves worthy. With many new companies also being online companies, this risk is even greater since there is so little control over what is set online. Thankfully, reputation management firms are there to help.
The Need for Reputation Management Firms
One of the greatest strengths of the internet is also its greatest weakness. This is that anybody who wishes to have a voice can have one. As humans, we want things to go right, particularly if we have paid money for it. Because we expect things to go right, we usually don’t tell the world about it when it does happen. But when things go wrong, we feel hard done by and will share this with everybody if we can. Unfortunately, on the online world, but people will therefore see is the negative reviews since far fewer positive ones will be left.
A good reputation management firm cannot stop negative reviews from appearing. That is all down to you as a business and the product and service that you offer. What they can do, however, is make it more likely that people only find the positive reviews comma teach you how to address negative reviews, and essentially restore and maintain your positive image.
A reputation management company uses a number of tools and techniques, including search engine optimisation, social media marketing, and search engine management. Their goal is usually to make sure that anything positive about your company has a higher page rank than anything negative. This means that when somebody searches for your company online, they will only see the positive as the negative is buried away on the second page of Google or beyond.
It cannot be stressed enough how important it is to take your reputation seriously. The reality is that when there are just one or two negative opinions or reviews about a company, customers will start to question whether it is a business this can be trusted or not. Hence, it is absolutely essential that you do all that you can to keep your Image squeaky clean. Having thousands of happy customers should not be ruined by just a few negative reviews, but unfortunately, this is exactly what can happen.
At the same time, people also have an inherent distrust of something that looks too good. If you have thousands upon thousands of 5 star reviews and not a single negative one, people will become quite suspicious and wonder whether either the positive reviews are fake or whether you have actively removed anything negative out there. Hence, you should also welcome at least some negative reviews, so long as you know how to handle them. That is also something that a good reputation management firm can teach you.
Leave a Reply