Both organisations and individuals approached me to help them with managing their reputation online.
Most of the time, the first line of action we look at taking is how to tackle the negative reputation that occupies the first page of search results.
There are no shortcuts to online reputation management, and there’s certainly no one who can help you ‘scrub the internet’. Unless you have tons of money and plenty of valid legal reasons to convince someone to take down the negative information about you, no one is able to get rid of those links or torrents of negative comments on social media.
What can you do then? The answer lies in owned media, earned media and paid media.
For your owned media, you should RELENTLESSLY produce quality content that you work through great SEO, so that your own platforms rise up the rankings. Some people think having their own website or their own social media channels is enough. If you do not feed regular, good content into these media, there is no way one can fight negative reputation.
At the same time, your media relations and your real life activities should help generate positive information about you. All your actions should focus on getting positive reports and positive news generated about your organisations – this is earned media. That’s because there are only so many platforms to your owned media. To fill the first page of results, you need media with much more traffic to help produce quality content about you.
Last but not least, paid media is one of the ways to drive traffic to your owned media. It could be promoted tweets or paid Linkedin posts. It could also be a paid ad in a partner site or affiliate blog. This works especially for new sites, as new sites have limited content and traffic.
Great online reputation comes from content production and great content strategy
As you can see, online reputation management has a lot to do with quality content production and great content strategy. Of course, this has to tie in with a good crisis alert system and an acute sense of opportunities and pitfalls.
Eureka Moments are not so much moments of sudden realisation or enlightenment like Archimedes. They are moments while I am in my commute when I get to reflect on things that someone mentioned to me, things that I am confronted with, things that I or others have sought a solution for. They are more ‘oh I get it’ rather than ‘I have discovered it’.