To most users the way they are seen by other people is extremely important, as their life depends on the feedback of others. From waiters to technicians, most depend on some sort of reputation that shows they are constantly performing at an efficient manner. For most of them reputation is everything, and the fact that the internet can show their vulnerability, makes them more cautious. If you run a business or website, and you want to make sure your reputation is fair at least, you will need to know how to safely and efficiently manage your online reputation.
Have Times Changed?
In this day and age, information about a person is something a lot easier to find, than for example in the 1970s. In the 70s there weren’t hyper speed search engines that could pull these particular results in a matter of seconds, as there were difficulties in finding reviews on a singular business or company. Reputation, in modern times, is solely based on either peoples reviews, or critical standpoints coming from websites. While earlier you would have trouble finding a couple of reviews on a company, now in 2014, it would be easy to find 100s of reviews and results for any company. With that being said, it is a lot harder nowadays, when everything is linked to the internet, to secure and protect your reputation, as in earlier days. Once you grasp how much your reputation is vulnerable, you will eagerly try to take measures in protecting it, and insuring it is at an appropriate level.
Securing Your Reputation
The easiest way to protect your reputation is simply spreading positive facts of your business or your person. The easiest ways to do these things are simple in task, but they can go a long way once you are protecting your websites or businesses’ name.
First, perform a simple search engine result onto yourself!
Of course, if you are aware of the power of Google, you might decide to perform your researches relying on the Big G. It’s more efficient, and basically, is the most popular search engine people use every day. I advise you to look at the first three pages of your outcomes, focusing more on the results that talks about you.
Measuring your results
Once you have your first 30 results of your research, you should classify/define?? them in three categories: Positive, Negative or Neutral. I will briefly talk about that, but to apply all this strategies, you should both study SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) techniques or relying on experts to do the job for you.
- Positive results are the ones that you want to push in the first 10 positions. You should therefore apply some SEO techniques to try to push them at the first places of the google searches.
- Negative results are the ones that you want to delete, or push down. The easiest scenario is when you control the negative contents, you can just quickly delete them. If you don’t own the negative content, you can contact the owner and politely ask for removing it. If your attempt is negative, you can both increase positive links and push this content at the bottom of the results, or using some SEO techniques if you know how to do it! (You can always buy online services from a professional web marketer)
- If you have many neutral results, (they don’t talk about you), what you can do is only working on increase positive links’ SEO elements to increase the relevance of the page if researches about you are being made.
The more positive results you have the better your online reputation. Performing your measurement once or twice a month should be enough, unless there is something really important you are worried about. However, you can use some websites or programmes capable of sending alerts if somebody is talking about you, some of the more important are:
- Google Alerts, one of the most trusted brands in the world provides you even with email alerts in case some content is written about you.
- Social Mention, useful for catching mentions and comments about you on blogs and social networks.
- Twazzup, interesting monitoring tool for twitter.
- How sociable
- Ice Rocket
Create amazing contents
As we mentioned earlier, the only way to build a strong online reputation is by creating amazing contents. Having an aged website that contains several articles, and having a large amount of followers on each of those profiles is the only way to spread a positive image about yourself. Building, managing and maintaining a strong Web Reputation is crucial for your future, the sooner you start the better. Having only positive results about yourself is a challenge few people in the world are capable of doing. It involves a lot of effort and anything should be considered non important. That’s the reason why, the sooner you start approaching this issue, the better you can handle it.
The worst lie you can tell yourself is that you don’t need it now!
