Online Reputation Repair

Reputation is important for businesses, for individuals, for content creators and for anyone that creates or manages content online and offline and, it is important because it impacts how people relate to your products and to your services or content. Therefore reputation management, control and repair is very important if you want to keep being successful online and not let your image or brand be associated with something negative.

So how do you manage people’s perception of you/or your product or platform online? Well, when you first start out an online business/platform activity, you can think of your reputation as being the confluence of the amount of users that know about you and that judge you or your service/product. Therefore, reputation repair is taking control of how you’re perceived, at any given time, and also factor in the amount of people that share that image of you.

So here’s how reputation can be repaired/managed online in a step by step manner:

Engagement

The first step in managing and repairing your reputation is acknowledging that it exists. This can be harder for some to get around, since it can be quite immaterial; however, understanding how actions, yours or others affect the public perception of you/your product is a great place to start.

Check how “the internet” sees you as

Google your products or service, and use other services to find out what people think of you. Check how an action is perceived by the public so as to have a good idea of where you stand in regard to your image and brand.

Make yourself the most important element in reputation management

Set up accounts on the major social networks, from where you can more easily communicate with people directly, so that you can garner an interested following, and also get to showcase your point of view whenever needed.

Set alerts

Whenever you, your products, etc, are trending you should be aware of it, so set up alerts, Google or otherwise in order to be aware of spikes in exchanges of information about you, so you can react more immediately.

There is no statute of limitation online!

Which can be a bad thing, but if you learn to use it to your advantage it can be a great tool. The fact is that sometimes being a good person/entity, standing for widely regarded values will not always reflect back online as it does offline, so make sure you communicate with as much precision as possible online and offline.

Be aware that privacy is very hard to attain

Social media privacy is a great tool, but it’s not perfect, so make sure you keep in mind, manage your settings optimally, and also, try and avoid engaging with topics/content that could paint you in a bad light if exposed. It’s better to stay away from all the issues rather than cover them in online privacy. Basically, behave as if there is no privacy online.

Always make your point of view heard

Always engage with your public and state your point of view as clearly and as unambiguously as possible to avoid getting misrepresentation. Also, when you’re attacked, know that online or offline defamation can be addressed by specialized attorneys so that you will be able to safeguard your image.