Reputation Management Strategy How-To

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Yesterday, I posted a post on reputation management. I just wanted to follow that up with a few pointers on actual delivery of a reputation management strategy:

• First, reputation management online is not for the light hearted. People can and will say nasty things about you. So what do you when it happens?
• Don’t retaliate. Seriously. Whether in a forum or a blog, think about it before you send that post and make yourself look like a wacko.
• Before going off the deep end, try asking a clarifying question to make sure you understood the post. Sometimes people say things in an innocent manner meaning no harm, but it just comes out wrong. That happens in person and it happens online too.
• If you’re sure that someone is out to destroy your reputation and you feel their allegations are out of line, especially if they are making false allegations or untrue assertions about you, then engage in a little bit of positive reputation management by starting a blog
• Don’t post negative comments about the other person on your blog
• Focus on the good things about you or your company that you want potential customers to know
• Also be sure to use the same keywords that your adversaries are using to destroy your reputation – the goal is to push their negative posts off the front page of the search engines and replace them with positive posts from you
• Your own domain name is better than a blog on a free blog host

The primary idea behind reputation management is to push negative comments about you down in the search engine rankings and push your own, or someone else’s, positive comments about you. Use all of the tools at your disposal, including social bookmarking and social networking, RSS, and other tools to disseminate positive information about you without making negative comments about the other party. If you keep your head about you then you can survive unscathed. It really isn’t too hard.