You have already heard the phrase, “Better play safe than be sorry.” Well, this stands true in the case of Internet. You should be taking care of your online brand reputation well before a crisis strikes and you are left only with the ashes.
Proactively Monitor
Google Alerts is the best tool for monitoring brand mentions. If your brand is being discussed or even if there is a small mention of the brand, you will be notified about it and gives you the chance to react on time. If you have the free Gmail account, you are ready to set up the alerts for any number of terms.
You will also need to monitor the social media mentions of your brand using tools like Social Mention. These tools help you in knowing what is being said about your brand on social media.
Have An Action Plan To Reduce The Effect Of The Crisis
The main crisis for your online brand comes in the form of negative publicity and this is what is capable enough to disrupt your brand. In such an event, you will need to plan beforehand about the way you will communicate. Remember that if your brand faces a critical situation, it is vital that you admit your role in the situation, tell the truth and tell it all.
Prompt Response
It is essential that you address each and every comment, concern, or complaint of the customers and ensure that you have not left any concern unresolved. The following processes would help:
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Make prompt, but calm apologies for complaints
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Be honest with the customers by giving the right information.
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Thank and reward the customers for positive reviews
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Generate high quality content
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Boost your interaction on Social Media
Aggressive SEO
If your brand is appearing on the 1st or 2nd page of Google, it will be worth more than having a website. The reason why your name might be appearing, is because people might have written their reviews on high authoritative review sites. There could be many high ranking web sources talking about your brand. If some false information is being displayed about you, the first thing that you could do is to optimize the best content or review that talks positively about your brand. The search engine game is too important to be ignored, and it is the first step in restoring the image.
Blog Regularly
Your company blog is the best place where you could post valuable information pertaining to the industry. If you are writing on a regular basis with a clear and consistent tone, it will help the customers get a sense of “who” you are as a company. It is also worth noting that blogging is an integral part of the SEO. When you blog at least 15 times in a month, it will bring you more traffic than what you are getting now. There is tough competition out there for every keyword, and Google and also your prospects are information-hungry. Hence, you’ll need to blog.
Optimize The Business And Social Networking Profiles
The goal is to get the social media profile ranked on page 1 for the branded searches. Thus, it helps in suppressing the negative comments and other harmful attacks. Not all the social media platforms are equal. You will need to create social media profiles on some of the powerful networks, like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and more.
The goal is to get the social media profile ranked on page 1 for the branded searches. Thus, it helps in suppressing the negative comments and other harmful attacks. Not all the social media platforms are equal. You will need to create social media profiles on some of the powerful networks, like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and more.
Minutely Pay Attention To The Details
Make sure that you are not copying and pasting the same description across all websites where you are posting some information. Your site might get penalized for duplicate content. Each profile that you create has to be unique and should gel with the theme of the website on which you are posting. Don’t just spin the profile, Panda algorithm is already on the watch out for that.
The Takeaway
Google doesn’t want to rank negative comments intentionally. What it is looking for quality sites with quality content. If some high quality, authoritative site carries negative information about your brand, I am afraid the consequences are going to be bad. It is recommended that you get your happy customers saying good things about you that could be posted on your site and external sites to suppress all the negative comments about your brand. Closely monitor your online reputation, as once it will be hit it will be extremely difficult to recover from the crisis.
