You are only as good as your reputation
I have a friend who owns two local coffee shops in a small college town. Recently, he found himself in an unscrupulous online smear campaign launched against his company by a new competitor. As fate would have it, a couple of his customers told him about the negative information sprouting up on Twitter and a so-called food blog.
After a little digging, one of Bob’s customers discovered that the Twitter posts and blog posts were coming from the new competitor. Bob was lucky, he found out about the bogus information being posted about his business early enough so no damage was done to his reputation. But, what if his loyal customers had not mentioned the bogus posts to him?
For small buness owners, the need to protect your reputation is even more true and harder to maintain with the vastness of online social networks. While small business owners can’t afford to ignore social networks, they don’t have to fall prey to identity theft that damages their reputation and business. A host of software and services look to help protect a business’ reputation on the Web; check out which one is best for you business.
ReputationDefender’s MyReputation
ReputationDefender’s agents will search for every online reference of you and your business on and report back with a comprehensive monthly report on where your name and business are popping up. According to the company, agents search more than 40 of the biggest social networks as well as all over the Internet. The service costs $14.95 a month, $12.95 a month for a one-year plan and $9.95 a month for a two-year plan. If you want to optimize searches for your name or business you can use the company’s MyEdge service. For $599 a year you get an improved Web presence, search engine optimization, professionally-written biographies and promotion of existing Web content.
This Internet service lets you check for the use of your name, brand or product on more than 400 social media Web sites. While identifying where your name is being used online is important, it’s even better to be able to contact each site to have the name released and returned to you—this is where KnowEm comes in handy. According to the company, it has helped to reserve more than 350,000 profiles and reported back to clients instances of more than 25,000 issues of squatting and misrepresentation of a brand. For small businesses the service costs $249 and covers 100 social networks.
If your reputation has already been slammed on the Internet and you are looking to do some damage control you might want to check out Online Reputation Managers. The service starts with an analysis of when, where and how the negative postings were generated. The service identifies who owns or manages the sites or pages hosting the negative content, determines the extent of the damage and figures out what keyword or search phrases bring up the information. The company will create a plan to combat the negative information, which could include deploying a legal team to handle any copy right infringements, pushing positive content up higher in search listings and creating new positive content to counter any negative content. Since the plan is customized for each business you’ll have to contact the company to get a quote.
Reputation Management Partners
Ripoffreport.com lets consumers report incidents when they were scammed or cheated by a company. If your small business lands on the Web site, whether or not it is true, it can follow hunt your online reputation for a long time. Reputation Management Partners works with reputation management companies to get you removed from the Web site. Sure, you could try things on your own like taking legal action against Ripoffreport.com or the person that posted the claim, changing the company name or posting rebuttals, but according to Reputation Management Partners you won’t have to waste the time and money associated with that if you give them a call.
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Excerpts from FOXBusiness
