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If someone wanted to say something negative about your company online for the world to see, there is really no way you can stop them (short of a lawsuit). What you can do, though, is try to maintain and promote a positive online reputation through persistent monitoring and responding to negative comments.

Generally, when individuals leave negative comments and appear to be seeking a response, it is usually best to respond appropriately rather than try to remove the comments. Even when comment removal is ideal, it is not always possible. But you make those comments less prominent through the following tactics.

1. Monitor Your Brand Buzz.

Many business owners don’t think about online reputation management until they have an issue. The truth is that online reputation management is as much about being proactive as it is being reactive.

Get into the habit of searching Google and other search engines to check for any results that may be harmful to your reputation. At minimum, you should setup Google Alerts for your company name, brands and key employees. Google Alerts will notify you via email every time Google finds a new result for the desired search query. The goal is to make sure that the mentions are favorable, and if some are negative you have these alerts assisting you to contain any potential issues before they get blown out of proportion.

2. Build Positive Results in Search.

Most people trust Google enough to be confident about the results on the first page or two, without exploring further. According to a recent study, 89 percent of click-throughs on Google are from the first page. For the few individuals that look beyond the first few pages, at least the search results ahead of the negative results will seem more credible. This means that online reputation management requires knowledge in SEO to reflect a company in the most positive light. The decrease in views on a bad article when it goes from page one to two or from two to three is easily enough for a business to see a large increase in leads.

You can do this by examining what may be causing any negative content to rank highly, and promoting quality content to outrank the bad results. There are many different methods and practices for SEO, but it almost always involves getting links on other websites that direct to the site you are optimizing. The amount of links and the quality of the linking websites influences the rankings. This is where tools like Yahoo Site Explorer and OpenSiteExplorer.com come in handy. These tools can be used to help determine what sites are linking to the bad content and what factors are influencing their ranking.

There is a great deal to learn when it comes to SEO and a little can go a long way. If you plan on practicing SEO and do not have prior knowledge, you should read Google‘s SEO Starter Guide at the very least.

3. Learn About Social Media.

For most companies, social media knowledge is a necessity for good online reputation management. This involves keeping up on your own profiles such as a blog, owning a domain name that is your full name and using tools such as knowem.com to claim profiles for your name. Social profiles such as Facebook and Twitter can be used to build a fan base and encourage positive interactions. These profiles should be monitored, maintained and updated daily.

You can ask followers for feedback, share news, give coupons and hold contests through social media platforms. In time, you can have a loyal fan base that may even defend you when people leave negative comments. Which social profiles you choose to use depends on the company and what it has to offer. For example, Last.fm is a website for bands and musicians to share music and promote upcoming albums and concerts. Just make sure to read the terms of service for the social media websites you use.

4. Create Quality Content.

Sure, you hear the same advice everywhere. But guess what? It’s true. Quality content that will help you go far in keeping your presence pristine. And optimizing good quality content is far more likely to having a lasting effect than if you hurry to create content and promote any articles you come across. If you optimize content that has no potential to generate interest from viewers, you will likely only see the immediate results of your SEO, and there will be no long term results. Long-term results come when people find the article you have optimized, and then share it on social media sites, blogs, websites, forums or elsewhere online. This process will continue to naturally optimize search results, meaning that even after any intentional SEO efforts, the public is still optimizing with the natural occurrences in which search engines are intended to base their results. If it sparks enough interest, this can have a viral effect, which will spread links to a variety of places on the Web.

You can do all the SEO you want to make pages rank higher, but natural, unplanned occurrences, such as 100 people tweeting an article because they actually liked it, will have a much more powerful influence than anything you could do on your own in the same amount of time.

5. Maintain a Clean Reputation Offline.

If you practice good ethics, you will likely be rewarded. It may even lead to more positive content showing up online from third-party sources. However, if people have a reason to bash you, many of them will. Online reputation management is not going to work out very well if you are trying to appear as something you are not. If there is something you need to own up to, do not try to hide it away. When a company runs into a crisis it is their responsibility to determine when it is appropriate to confront it by apologizing to the public, responding to the crises, taking preventative action and moving on.

It is also advisable to have employees set their privacy settings on their personal social profiles so that only people they approve can see what they post. People often associate employees within a company directly with the image of that company. You don’t want to be the next company with a bad buzz in the media because your CEO posted something on Twitter that unexpectedly raised concern among the public.

For more about online reputation management, check out this article: How to Engage for Online Reputation Management.

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