How to clean up your company's online reputation

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Are you struggling with a bad online reputation and don’t have enough broad community of supporters who would defend it? Correction of the situation is not easy and requires a lot of effort. Instructions how to face such a crisis solves the Social Media Today server in its article titled “Seven steps to clean-up your online reputation”.

Start with an online audit

Find out who and how is talking about your company. Look out on social networks, review sites and search engines like Google, Yahoo or Bing. Login to your search engine account will provide you information about the opinion of the company's surroundings. That is what your friends, business partners and clients see. Anonymous search will offer an overview of how the company is seen by the rest of the world.

Create a strategy

Implement final results of the audit into your tactics and make sure that they are closely tied with the identified goals. Start using one of the online monitoring tools such as Talkwalker. This will give you updated information about how others chatter about your company and products.

Make a list

Whether negative references are placed on social networks, private or review sites, write down a list of those sites or networks that need to be "cleaned”.

Determine responsibility

Build a team or assign a person for the “purification”. Give her passwords and user names, a branding manual and necessary competences for making changes.

Correct the situation

The process of "cleansing" requires, inter alia, cooperation with the customer service. Profiles on networks should be cleared, their login information reset or directly deleted. In case of review sites, it is necessary to prove the reviews' falsity often by legal means, which may take weeks. Beware of companies offering to enhance your reputation for a fee. This is impossible if you are not a website administrator. Sharing of positive responses that suppress the negative ones can help you here.

Plan next steps

After you correct your online reputation, it is necessary to implement strategic actions for its maintenance. Be transparent and honest to the audience and its criticism. Communicate and respond to all comments.

A company's reputation is only as good as it appears in the search results.

And what is the online reputation of your company?

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Article source Social Media Today - a U.S. website focused on social media
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