Why Reputation Management Is Important

Writing by Nick Stamoulis ShareThis

Jeff Sexton gives a pretty good defense of the negative review at Grokdotcom. I’d have to agree with his conclusion. Negative reviews do provide credibility. And I like what he says right in the middle of the blog post:

Your brand and product perception is not what you say it is anymore but what Google says it is.

Let that sink in a minute.

Why Google? Is it perhaps because they own 70% of the search market? That’s likely where most people will go to find information about you. And when they do, what will they find?

Jeff’s experience is the perfect example of why you need to manage your online reputation with fairness, accuracy, and diligence. What if the situation had gone the other way? What Jeff, in researching Lumber Liquidators before making the purchase had found 30 negative reviews citing the same problem that had experienced. But what if those those 30 negative reviews were way down on pages 15-20 of Google’s search results because Lumber Liquidators was so good at search engine optimization that they were able to get their own pages to rank above the negative reviews, no editing required?

We must first ask ourselves, would that be possible? And secondly, would it work for the company?

On the first question, yes it is possible, but not likely. When you have 30 negative reviews to overcome, that’s a reputation management hurdle. Most companies don’t have it that bad. Unless their product or service is really bad, their hurdles won’t quite be so huge. And that’s why reputation management is good, but not perfect. Still, you’ve got to make your best effort.