Tips and Guerrilla Strategies for Managing Your Online Reputation

While online marketing and SEO have seen a huge boost from social networking and social media sites, it has also opened us all to attack. Managing your online reputation is just as important as marketing your business. A couple of bad user reviews and negative comments, and your business could suffer greatly. Here we look at some ways to monitor and manage your online brand and image.

• Google. Simple Google searching of your own name or of your company’s name will give you a good indication of what others are seeing, if you know how to use Google. Search on Google will come up differently for different users. You should test this with your Gmail account logged in and out. You should also investigate by changing location. Attempting to recreate other user experiences is essential. Google Alerts is a great way to know if you name or company’s name is being put out there on the world wide web.

• Drowing Out. There is no way that any individual or company can control everything that is on the internet. In some cases, you will be able to have some information taken down. What we can do is drown out any negative comments. By creating as many profiles, and pushing positive content about ourselves, even if we do that with other profiles, we can increase the positive balance of content that can be found. This is a very effective strategy that we can have full control over. Dominate content by drowning out the negative search results. You should prepare positive content that is optimized for your personal or company name, and in the event you find negative content, you can immediately exploit your reserve content as a counter attack.

• Shut Out and Shut Down. Engaging purveyors of negative content will give them credibility. In many cases, it is better to ignore them rather than engage. Instead of confronting them directly, it is smarter to attack them from another angle. By reducing their credibility, you reduce the value of the negative information they have used on you. Using ‘other’ profiles to defend yourself and attack those who have attacked your personal or professional image is a tactic that gives you voice while retaining your integrity. The best form of defense can often be attack.

• Going in for the Kill. If you want to really destroy the profile of someone who is causing you a large amount of trouble, this tactic is for you. Although you might be breaking some laws technically, it is highly unlikely you will find yourself in trouble. Make your own profiles and email addresses based on the name of the individual or company who is giving you grief. If you have access to their personal or business profile images while you are online, you can use screen-dumping features to take copies of their images. Whether using images or not, using identical names for the profiles you create, will affect the way they appear in searches.

Destroying their credibility and online reputation to the point where they never wish they commented on you, may be your best strategy yet. By making your profiles and content identical in terms of their own search engine optimization, your profiles will come up with their own in search results. This attack on someone can be truly destroying and they may wish they never turned a computer on or connected to the internet.

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