mercredi 24 octobre 2012

Clean your Online Reputation

By Abby Schildt


Reputation Management Strategies: Control Your Online Image

When the reputation of a business becomes damaged, because there are employees lives and livelihoods at stake, the situation can often be more serious. No matter how useful the internet has been for a business to interact with customers and get their feedback, it has also been useful in allowing unhappy customers and jealous competitors to publicly smear that business's name, along with the products it either produces or sells. All they have to do is be very creative with their criticisms, possibly to the point of viciousness, to make such negativity go viral, quickly spreading to many different social circles and platforms around the world. Again, before they start losing customers and money, it is essential for businesses to utilize an effective reputation management strategy, which, really, should have already been in place.

Driven largely by the expansion of internet technologies, our societies have entered into a new information age over the course of the last decade. So many aspects of our lives are now being conducted through the internet these days, from our business transactions to our social interactions. While this has made many of our lives more efficient and productive, this has also meant that more of our personal and professional lives can be accessed and manipulated by anyone with a motive to do so. This is one of the primary reasons why it is so vital for you or your business to implement a thorough reputation management strategy of some sort.

Unless you were a famous person or some other widely known figure, any damage to your reputation used to basically be locally contained within the area you live in or people you associate with. Now, with so many people around the world engaging in social networks, pretty much anyone from anywhere can take your personal images and reputation and do any kind of damage to your reputation, with lasting effect. As you share more of your thoughts, opinions, and various activities, it becomes easier for others to create a negative image of you by intentionally misrepresenting you to others. However, with various reputation management tactics, not only can you repair your tarnished reputation, you can actually prevent such offenses from even taking place.

Reputation management tactics and strategies should be built into a business's online marketing and SEO plans. There must be effective ways of monitoring the various search engines and social networking sites, in addition to mechanisms to quickly counter any measure of negative information that happens to surface on the internet. Though SEO concerns are less important for individuals, it is still vital for them to regularly monitor their digital presence, controlling as much information concerning their image as possible. For both businesses and individuals, it is always best to take a more proactive approach in controlling their public information and images, rather than constantly responding and reacting to others' maliciousness.

More than ever, our lives are being guided by bits of information and their functions in various networks, especially the internet. Thus, someone that is concerned about their reputation must have a firm grasp of how information can be obtained and used. If you can effectively combine this understanding with a solid reputation management strategy, you will have made it very difficult for anyone else to do considerable damage to your public reputation.




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