Your online reputation isn’t just a fancy digital accessory anymore, it’s the currency of trust that will determine your business success.
These days, it’s not just customers who can tarnish your reputation; you also need to watch out for nefarious hackers, unhappy past business partners, and rival companies who want to drag down your online presence.
With a negative review being just a click away, your brand can suffer immensely if you don’t take online reputation management seriously.
But the right ORM expert can preserve and/or fix issues that arise.
Today, we’ve got three juicy examples (we have lots more, but these ones will resonate with you) that will illustrate how taking control of your online image can save your business.
We’ll also go over the foundational parts of DIY reputation management.
From dealing with employee disputes to combating negative press coverage, you’ll get all the deep details you’ll need to be successful.
So buckle up, and let’s explore the thrilling world of online reputation management (ORM).
Definition of online reputation management
Online reputation management refers to the practice of creating and maintaining a positive image of a business or personal brand on various online platforms.
This is done by monitoring, analyzing, and responding to online information, feedback, comments, and reviews.
Benefits of an online reputation management strategy
Prioritizing your online reputation can help you:
- Increase brand credibility and trust among customers
- Mitigate the impact of negative reviews or comments
- Enhance search engine results for positive content
- Improve brand visibility online
- Attract potential customers and retain existing ones
- Manage customer expectations by responding to feedback
- Minimize potential crises or damaging information online
- Outshine competitors with a positive online brand image
- Build brand authority and improve brand reputation
- Foster positive relationships and brand advocacy among customers
The positive impact is undeniable. Plus, there are so many more benefits. That’s why we’re so excited about what this can do for your business.
What is your current online reputation?
Are you curious as to what your current online reputation is?
Check out our reputation report card. It’s a simple and clear way to get immediate feedback about the reflection the internet is giving back to you and showing other people.
It’s a pretty remarkable place to start.
Social listening techniques for monitoring customer satisfaction
Monitoring customer satisfaction has become easier with social listening techniques.
By using specialized tools to track mentions of your brand on various social media platforms, you can stay on top of customer feedback and online reviews.
Once you know what’s out there, you need to respond to bad reviews and positive comments alike in a timely and personalized manner as this demonstrates your commitment to excellent customer service.
Strategies for managing your online reputation
As we said earlier, there’s a way to do reputation management on your own.
Below, you’ll find a list of ways to do that.
If you’re curious to learn more about a particular topic you can visit our resource center. Some articles go into detail about how to do each task.
For example:
- Monitoring the web for potentially harmful information
- Responding to negative reviews, and feedback quickly
- Collecting positive experiences and reviews
- Optimizing search engines to improve public perception
- Enhancing your customer’s experience with consistent communication on social media platforms
- Creating an action plan for dealing with bad experiences and reviews
- Measuring the success of your online reputation management efforts
That’s a comprehensive list. If you follow it and use our free resources, then you are well on your way to helping combat negative feedback.
You also have a chance to collect tons of positive reviews, receive more engagement from your social media posts, and begin to build higher customer loyalty.
Now that we’ve talked about how to create loyal customers, improve customer experience, and search engine optimization, let’s hop into the second half of this post and break down real-world examples of how we improved the business reputation of our clients.
Effective reputation management case studies
The one thing you’re probably thinking is, “Will reputation management work for me?”
The answer to that is… it depends on your unique circumstances. The one thing we can assure you of is this.
We have been fixing search results for over 15 years, which is longer than nearly anyone else in the industry. So, we’ve seen way more than most other ORMs and have solutions that will most likely fit your needs.
If there’s a way to help you, there’s a good chance we’ll not only know about it, but we’ll also have experience implementing it.
With that said, let’s break down how each case study review will go. Each section will have seven parts:
- The challenge
- The solution
- Reinforcing and expanding (necessary for a few clients below)
- The results
- Analytics
- Comparison to benchmarks
- Summary
Each of these online reputation management examples goes over a specific situation you might face.
Let’s get going.
Case study #1: The ex-employee
The challenge
An executive at a well-respected investment firm contacted ReputationDefender to clear the company’s name after an ex-employee’s dispute with the business went viral.
This led to industry publications and major media outlets writing stories about it.
Years after the company resolved the dispute, articles from these sources were still appearing when people googled the company or its leadership team.
This situation was giving potential stakeholders a negative first impression and leading to lost business.
The solution
After analyzing the strength of the negative results and the search volume surrounding the company name (as well as the names of two members of the executive team), our Elite team developed a comprehensive plan involving content creation, search remediation techniques, and social media activity to improve the client’s online reputation.
Reinforcing and expanding
Promotional efforts created a cycle of positive reinforcement in which more searchers were able to find and engage with positive sites we worked with, leading search engines to rank them higher.
As a result, these sites became more visible to even greater numbers of users, which made them even more valuable to search engines.
This led to the positive links displacing the negative content in the client’s search results.
To expand upon this, we reviewed the client’s pre-existing content, selected several underutilized topics, and used them as the focus to generate a wide assortment of new, high-quality content.
We then leveraged our knowledge of web design and search engine optimization (SEO) best practices to build an extensive array of websites on which to strategically publish this new content.
Lastly, we promoted the client’s new content across the internet to help it gain visibility and convince search engines to rank it above the negative comments and content in the client’s search results.
The results
Within the first 8 months, we were able to see a significant improvement, with the negative on Page 2 (Site 2) immediately dropping off the page.
Meanwhile, the negative content on Page 1 (Site 1) of Google took more time to dislodge, stubbornly holding firm near the middle of the page until Month 8, when it finally slid down to the second page.
Beginning at the 9-month mark, a new negative site (Site 3) began appearing, moving up and down in the rankings alongside the client’s original negatives.
Despite this new challenge, however, we were able to regain control of the first page by Month 14.
After Month 14
Most of our efforts after Month 14 focused on suppressing Site 3 and another new negative (Site 4). This follows a trend we occasionally see with powerful negative content:
- Slow initial improvement
- Dramatic swings in ranking as search engines figure out how the content fits with the new trends we are creating
- Eventual permanent suppression
Analytics
Take a look at the following chart of negative content ranking in the client’s search results.
Do you see the yellow trend line? Our efforts produced a steady decline in the visibility of the four negatives over the course of the engagement.
Comparison to benchmarks
Even in this highly challenging case, we were able to achieve rapid initial success on the most visible negative items, with only one result briefly reappearing twice on the bottom of the first page beyond 14 months.
Some factors that affected an even faster timeline of success were:
- Authoritativeness of negatives
- Continued publicity surrounding the lawsuit
In brief:
Case study #2: The philanthropist attacked by the press
The challenge
A respected philanthropist contacted ReputationDefender to help him suppress negative news coverage in his search results stemming from a minor altercation that happened to be captured on a television broadcast.
Taken out of context, the incident didn’t reflect well on him and immediately went viral, leading to widespread condemnation of the client’s character by major news organizations and national media outlets.
The client, who donates a significant amount of money to education, didn’t want this incident to appear when people searched for him online, as this could damage his personal brand and thereby hamper his philanthropic efforts.
The solution
After assessing the strength of the client’s negatives and other factors, we got to work.
Key components of this plan included search remediation techniques, content creation, and social media activity.
At the start of the client’s engagement, we studied the search activity around the client’s name to determine the most effective search terms to target.
We then used these keywords as the basis for creating numerous, interlocking, white-hat strategies we could implement at scale to build up a more truthful representation of the client online.
Part of this process involved identifying trustworthy and relevant websites the client could potentially control for these keywords.
Because this client was involved in many charitable activities and organizations, he already owned several positive sites we could promote via our proprietary technology, which signals to search engines that a website is an authoritative result for a searcher’s query.
These promotional efforts created a cycle of positive reinforcement, in which more searchers were able to find and engage with these positive sites, leading search engines to rank them higher.
This led to the positive links displacing the negative content in the client’s search results.
Reinforcing and expanding
Next, we reviewed the client’s pre-existing content, selected several underutilized topics, and used them as the focus to generate a wide assortment of new, high-quality content.
We then leveraged search engine optimization (SEO) best practices along with web design. This helped us to build an extensive array of websites on which to strategically publish this new content.
Lastly, we promoted the client’s new content across the internet to help it gain visibility and convince search engines to rank it above the negative content in the client’s search results.
During the engagement, we also created multiple new social media accounts and published weekly posts on these profiles, as well as on the client’s existing Twitter account.
The results
Within the first six months, we were able to see significant improvement.
Six positive links ranked on the first page and two of the client’s strong negative links left the first page.
We also cleared four links from the second page and kept them suppressed for the remainder of the client’s engagement.
During the engagement, several new, negative sites appeared, moving up and down in the rankings alongside the client’s original negatives.
Despite the new challenges, however, by the 21-month mark, we had cleared the first page of all negative search results.
After Month 7
Most of our efforts after Month 7 focused on suppressing a video carousel. This is a powerful type of result that tends to cling to the top of a client’s results and often requires extended work to suppress.
This carousel followed the same trend as in the first case study:
- Slow initial improvement
- Dramatic swings in ranking as search engines figure out how the content fits with the new trends we are creating
- Eventual permanent suppression
Analytics
As you can see in the following chart of negative content ranking on the client’s first page, this process took roughly 24 months to play out.
You can see our efforts produced a steep decline straight away. Eventually eliminating the visibility of all the negatives over the full course of 24 months.
Comparison to benchmarks
We were able to achieve rapid initial success on most negative items, with only one particularly difficult search result (a video carousel) persisting beyond Month 7.
Some factors that affected an even faster timeline of success were:
- Authoritativeness of negatives
- Presence of a video carousel
In brief:
Case study #3: Broad-based privacy risk
The challenge
A well-known company garnered negative publicity after a public figure repeatedly disparaged it in the press.
This increased attention, combined with the amount of easily accessible personally identifiable information (PII) online about the company’s workforce, made the workers vulnerable to hackers, scammers, and other bad actors, especially given the fact that many of the employees worked from home and thus lacked the robust security measures available at the business’s corporate headquarters.
As the negative attention increased, the company started receiving credible security threats against its employees.
To counteract these threats, the company hired ReputationDefender, seeking both to identify its employees’ privacy vulnerabilities inherent in their online reputations and reduce the amount of PII bad actors could use to harm them.
The solution
The company originally signed up for ReputationDefender’s basic privacy service as a free benefit for all its employees.
After seeing the type of results we were able to obtain with our lower-level product, the client purchased our premium-level Executive Privacy service to protect 40 individuals, including members of its leadership team and several executives’ family members who were also at risk.
At the start of the engagement, we scanned the deep and dark web, as well as common data-broker sites and social media platforms.
This helped us to determine which sites were exposing each individual’s data. We then began the complex and often manual removal process, which is different for each site.
Once we submitted all the removal requests, we performed monthly scans to ensure that the sites we had contacted were still in compliance.
When we found instances of employee PII reappearing, we resubmitted the necessary removal requests.
Throughout the engagement, we provided quarterly reports to the client to keep the company informed about:
We also created monthly reports for each person covered under the plan.
The results
We were able to find and remove 97% of the employees’ PII within eight weeks of starting the engagement.
Of the instances remaining online at that time, only 0.18% were not removable by our service. The remaining 2.26% were pending removal.
During the engagement, our client added and dropped covered individuals from the engagement as they joined or left the company respectively. This resulted in our finding PII for nearly 90 executives in total.
Analytics
Here are some types of personally identifiable information we were able to quickly remove:
You can see that within a two-month period, we removed well over 90% of all six types of exposed PII.
Comparison to benchmarks
We took a random sample of 70 clients over a two-year time frame and compared the results from this case study. We also added a quick summary to highlight the actual number of PII removed.
Final thoughts
When it comes to online reputation management examples, there’s fluff and there are details. We dive deep to show you proof of our results, so you can feel secure in how we handle this process.
If you choose the doing-it-yourself route, you might come across what we call “authoritativeness of negatives.” If you do, you’re going to need help.
If you haven’t already, grab your free reputation report card.
Look it over, then get some feedback from one of our helpful ORM experts about how we can help.
For your convenience, we’ve created an extensive resource center to explain everything there is to know about ORM. Check out our eBooks and guides whenever you need clarity or give us a call toll-free. We’re here to help.
This post was contributed by Rockey Simmons, founder of SaaS Marketing Growth.